VII. GOTHIC PALACES 271

sky, and every other accessory, might be taken away from them, and still they would be beautiful and strange. They are not less striking in the loneliest streets of Padua and Vicenza¹ (where many were built during the period of the Venetian authority in those cities) than in the most crowded thoroughfares of Venice itself; and if they could be transported into the midst of London, they would still not altogether lose their power over the feelings.²

§ 2. The best proof of this is in the perpetual attractiveness of all pictures, however poor in skill, which have taken for their subject the principal of these Gothic buildings, the Ducal Palace. In spite of all architectural theories and teachings, the paintings of this building are always felt to be delightful; we cannot be wearied by them, though often sorely tried; but we are not put to the same trial in the case of the palaces of the Renaissance. They are never drawn singly, or as the principal subject, nor can they be. The building which faces the Ducal Palace, on the opposite side of the Piazzetta,³ is celebrated among architects, but it is not familiar to our eyes; it is painted only incidentally, for the completion, not the subject, of a Venetian scene; and even the Renaissance arcades of St. Mark’s Place, though frequently painted, are always treated as a mere avenue to its Byzantine church and colossal tower. And the Ducal Palace itself owes the peculiar charm which we have hitherto felt, not so much to its greater size as compared with other Gothic buildings, or nobler design (for it never yet has been rightly drawn), as to its comparative isolation. The other Gothic structures are as much injured by the continual juxtaposition of the Renaissance palaces, as the latter are aided by it; they exhaust their own life by breathing it

¹ [For a notice of a beautiful house in Vicenza, see Seven Lamps, Vol. VIII. p. 228; and for another general reference to Gothic houses in Vicenza and Padua, below, § 46. For references, in a different sense, to the later Palladian architecture of Vicenza, see Vol. IX. pp. 44, 47.]

² [The experiment was presently to be tried: see above, Introduction, p. liv.]

³ [The Libreria Vecchia, designed for the senate in 1536 by Sansovino, and completed by Scamozzi in 1582. Gwilt in his Encyclopædia of Architecture (p. 148) calls it “the chef d’œuvre of the master.” It was the model for the Carlton Club: see note on preceding page.]

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