VII. GOTHIC PALACES 281

Chap. VIII. [p. 331]; the angle shafts being slightly exaggerated in thickness, together with their joints, as otherwise they would hardly have been intelligible on so small a scale.

The Ducal Palace is peculiar in these niches at the angles, which throughout the rest of the city appear on churches only; but some may perhaps have been removed by restorations, together with the parapets with which they were associated.

§ 12. Of these roof parapets of Venice, it has been already noticed that the examples which remain differ from those of all other cities of Italy in their purely ornamental character. (Chap. I. § 12.¹) They are not battlements, properly so called; still less machicolated cornices, such as crown the fortress palaces of the great mainland nobles; but merely adaptations of the light and crown-like ornaments which crest the walls of the Arabian mosque. Nor are even these generally used on the main walls of the palaces themselves. They occur on the Ducal Palace, on the Casa d’Oro, and, some years back, were still standing on the Fondaco de’ Turchi;² but the majority of the Gothic palaces have the plain dog-tooth cornice under the tiled projecting roof (Vol. I. Chap. XIV. §4); and the highly decorated parapet is employed only on the tops of walls which surround courts or gardens, and which, without such decoration, would have been utterly devoid of interest. Fig. 23 represents, at b, part of a parapet of this kind which surrounds the courtyard of a palace in the Calle del Bagatin, between San G. Grisostomo and San Canzian: the whole is of brick, and the mouldings peculiarly sharp and varied; the height of each separate pinnacle being about four feet, crowning a wall twelve or fifteen feet high: a piece of the moulding which surrounds the quatrefoil is given larger in the figure at a, together with the top of the small arch below, having the common Venetian dentil round it, and a delicate little moulding with dog-tooth ornament to carry the flanks of

¹ [Vol. i.; in this edition Vol. IX. p. 30.]

² [See above, note on p. 147.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]