288 THE STONES OF VENICE

§ 20. Unfortunately, wherever a balcony or parapet is used in an inhabited house, it is, of course, the part of the structure which first suffers from dilapidation, as well as that of which the security is most anxiously cared for. The main pillars of a casement may stand for centuries unshaken under the steady weight of the superincumbent wall, but the cement and various insetting of the balconies are sure to be disturbed by the irregular pressures and impulses of the persons leaning on them; while, whatever extremity of decay may be allowed in other parts of the building, the balcony, as soon as it seems dangerous, will assuredly be removed or restored. The reader will not, if he considers this, be surprised to hear that, among all the remnants of the Venetian domestic architecture of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, there is not a single instance of the original balconies being preserved. The palace mentioned below (§ 32), in the piazza of the Rialto, has, indeed, solid slabs of stone between its shafts, but I cannot be certain that they are of the same period; if they are, this is the only existing example of the form of protection employed for casements during this transitional period, and it cannot be reasoned from as being the general one.

§ 21. It is only, therefore, in the churches of Torcello, Murano, and St. Mark’s, that the ancient forms of gallery defence may still be seen. At Murano, between the pillars of the apse, a beautiful balustrade is employed, of which a single arch is given in the Plate opposite, fig. 4, with its section, fig. 5; and at St. Mark’s, a noble round arched parapet, with small pillars of precisely the same form as those of Murano, but shorter, and bound at the angles into groups of four by the serpentine knot so often occurring in Lombardic work, runs round the whole exterior of the lower story of the church, and round great part of its interior galleries, alternating with the more fantastic form, fig. 6. In domestic architecture, the remains of the original balconies begin to occur first in the beginning of the fourteenth century, when the round arch had entirely disappeared; and

[Version 0.04: March 2008]