VII. GOTHIC PALACES 275

building was developed: the other, in which a formed and consistent school of domestic architecture resulted from the direct imitation of the great design of the Ducal Palace. We must deal with these two periods separately; the first of them being that which has been often above alluded to, under the name of the transitional period.

We shall consider in succession the general form, the windows, doors, balconies, and parapets, of the Gothic palaces belonging to each of these periods.

§ 6. First, General Form.¹

We have seen that the wrecks of the Byzantine palaces consisted merely of upper and lower arcades surrounding

¹ [In an earlier draft of this chapter there is a detailed description of an early Gothic house in the Calle del Rimedio referred to below (§ 30), and in this description Ruskin traces more fully, and perhaps more clearly than in the text, the transition briefly noted in this § 6. The description was to have been illustrated by diagrams and sketches. Some of it, however, will be intelligible without these:-

“Fronting the bridge which crosses the Rio de Palazzo and leads into the Calle di Rimedio, is a square door, surrounded by an architrave of red marble. The moulding of this architrave, which surrounds the door without any break or interruption, ... will at once be seen to belong to the early Byzantine group of St. Mark’s. The wall in which this occurs has been restored; but passing beneath it, we enter a courtyard fenced from the Calle di Rimedio by a wall with parapets, and, on the other side, enclosed by a most picturesque mass of buildings. The ground floor has been much altered, but three shafts are still left, ... which, instead of carrying arches, as hitherto we have been accustomed to find them, sustain a massy horizontal wooden beam, on which rests the first floor of the house above....

“In the first story above these shafts is a group of four windows sustained by three shafts and two pilasters. Both shafts and pilasters stand without any base, on a low continuous plinth....

“Now, observe, in the old Byzantine work, the pilaster has no stated breadth in relation to the shaft.... The pilaster is merely a piece of the wall, with a fragment of cornice on the top of it, which cornice is continuous all along the house wall. But in the example with which we are now concerned, the pilaster has taken a definite breadth, related to that of the shaft; and though its head is still nothing but a fragment of the old cornice, that cornice is not continuous along the wall. This is one of the most important transitions in the history of Venetian architecture and must be thoroughly understood.

“The first conception of any given story of a house in the Byzantine mind is that of a space enclosed by a wall-veil crowned with a simple cornice.... The second idea is to cut this wall-veil into pieces, cornice and all; as I made the reader do himself in Vol. I. [Vol. IX. p. 102]; and head the intervals with arches; the simple cornice remaining wherever the wall-veil was left, and becoming a capital wherever the wall-veil became a shaft.... And in this stage the whole width of the house is considered as one arcade with intervals more or less wide. But in the third stage the idea of the continuous arcade is lost. The groups of its arches contract themselves only windows; the cornice, as if unable to bear the contraction, snaps and remains only in fragments at the top of the narrow pilasters. The windows as they shrink

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