272 THE STONES OF VENICE

into the Renaissance coldness: but the Ducal Palace stands comparatively alone, and fully expresses the Gothic power.

§ 3. And it is just that it should be so seen, for it is the original of nearly all the rest. It is not the elaborate and more studied development of a national style, but the great and sudden invention of one man,¹ instantly forming a national style, and becoming the model for the imitation of every architect in Venice for upwards of a century. It was the determination of this one fact which occupied me the greater part of the time I spent in Venice. It had always appeared to me most strange, that there should be in no part of the city any incipient or imperfect types of the form of the Ducal Palace; it was difficult to believe that so mighty a building had been the conception of one man, not only in disposition and detail, but in style; and yet impossible, had it been otherwise, but that some early examples of approximate Gothic form must exist. There is not one. The palaces built between the final cessation of the Byzantine style, about 1300, and the date of the Ducal Palace (1320-1350), are all completely distinct in character, so distinct that I at first intended the account of them to form a separate section of this volume;² and there is literally no transitional form between them and the perfection of the Ducal Palace. Every Gothic building in Venice which resembles the latter is a copy of it. I do not mean that there was no Gothic in Venice before the Ducal Palace, but that the mode of its application to domestic architecture had not been determined. The real root of the Ducal Palace is the apse of the Church of the Frari.³ The traceries of that apse, though earlier and ruder in workmanship, are nearly the same in mouldings, and precisely the same in treatment (especially in the placing of the lions’ heads), as those of the great Ducal Arcade; and the originality of thought in the architect of the Ducal Palace

¹ [On this subject see below, ch. viii. § 1, p. 328.]

² [See Vol. IX. p. 47n.]

³ [See Ruskin’s sketches at the Frari, Plate A in Vol. IX. For the importance he attached to the point here made, see above, Introduction, p. liii.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]