274 THE STONES OF VENICE

seen in Fig. 21 b.* The Ducal Palace builder was sternly resolute in carrying out this rule of masonry. In the traceries of the large upper windows, where the cusps are cut through as in the quatrefoil Fig. 22, the lower cusp is left partly solid, as at a, merely that the joint a b may have its right place and direction.

§ 4. The ascertaining the formation of the Ducal Palace traceries from those of the Frari, and its priority to all other buildings which resemble it in Venice, rewarded me for a great deal of very uninteresting labour in the examination of mouldings and other minor features of the Gothic palaces, in which alone the internal evidence of their date was to be discovered, there being no historical records whatever respecting them. But the accumulation of details on which the complete proof of the fact depends, could not either be brought within the compass of this volume, or be made in anywise interesting to the general reader. I shall therefore, without involving myself in any discussion, give a brief account of the development of Gothic design in Venice, as I believe it to have taken place. I shall possibly be able at some future period so to compress the evidence on which my conviction rests, as to render it intelligible to the public,¹ while, in the meantime, some of the more essential points of it are thrown together in the Appendix,² and in the history of the Ducal Palace given in the next chapter.

§5. According, then, to the statement just made, the Gothic architecture of Venice is divided into two great periods: one, in which, while various irregular Gothic tendencies are exhibited, no consistent type of domestic

* I believe the necessary upper joint is vertical, through the uppermost lobe of the quatrefoil, as in the figure; but I have lost my memorandum of this joint.

¹ [This, however, was not done. The voluminous notes described in Vol. IX. p. xxvi., are largely occupied with “the examination of mouldings,” etc., in order to establish points of chronology in the development of Venetian architecture.]

² [i.e., Appendix 10 in the next volume.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]