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For Ruskin the Ducal Palace in Venice is ‘the central building of the world’ (Works, 9.38). A footnote printed from an early draft by Ruskin at Works, 10.276 distinguishes between Gothic windows and Byzantine arcades; in the Ducal Palace in Venice both systems are ‘represented and reconciled’. Its antithesis in M is Milan Cathedral which brings together ‘every style in the world: and every style spoiled’ (Notebook M p.6). The image that comes to Ruskin’s mind in Milan Cathedral is one drawn from Dante’s description of a counterfeiter in hell (Notebook M p.5).
The Ducal Palace was central to the definition of Venetian Gothic. It ‘consummates and embodies the entire system of the Gothic architecture of Venice’ (Works, 10.327). It was central to an understanding of the development of Venetian Gothic and an understanding of the decline of Venetian Gothic. Ruskin was therefore concerned to fix as securely as he could the dates for its building and rebuilding.
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Ruskin’s woodcut of the Ducal Palace at Works, 10.331 is described in outline there and in the following two pages.
To the front is the water of the Bacino San Marco, called by Ruskin ‘the sea’. In front of the palace is the Molo San Marco, and to the right the waterway of the Rio di Palazzo (‘one of the principal thoroughfares of the city’ - Works, 10.330), crossed by the Ponte della Paglia, and behind that the ‘Bridge of Sighs’. The façade to the right (east) is called by Ruskin the lateral façade or the rio façade. To the left (west), and not shown by Ruskin - perhaps because it is later and he does not approve of its symmetries (Works, 10.335) - is the façade to the Piazzetta San Marco. The lower arcade has eighteen capitals to the front, with the angle sculptures of the Drunkenness of Noah at the right corner, and Adam and Eve at the left corner. Above are the upper arcade, the balcony (which is not set symmetrically in relation to either arcade), the windows, including two of the windows with traceries to the east, and the niches set at the corners of the roof. Behind the main façade can be seen the inner court / cortile.
See also Ruskin 1852 The Exterior of the Ducal Palace Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, showing the Ponte della Paglia, the Molo façade of the Ducal Palace, the lower arcade, the upper arcade, two of the windows with traceries, and one of the windows without traceries. The image is available here.
Compare the photograph of the façade to the Molo with a section of the Rio di Palazzo corner here and the photographs of the three facades in Quill (2000) p.124.
Among the features on which Ruskin focuses are:
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[Version 0.05: May 2008]