290 THE STONES OF VENICE

lightness and flow of the forms, which the workman can produce out of iron treated in this manner; and it is very nearly as impossible for any metal-work, so handled, to be poor, or ignoble in effect, as it is for cast metal-work to be otherwise.

§ 23. We have next to examine those features of the Gothic palaces in which the transitions of their architecture are most distinctly traceable: namely, the arches of the windows and doors.

It has already been repeatedly stated, that the Gothic style had formed itself completely on the mainland, while the Byzantines still retained their influence at Venice; and that the history of early Venetian Gothic is therefore not that of a school taking new forms independently of external influence, but the history of the struggle of the Byzantine manner with a contemporary style quite as perfectly organized as itself, and far more energetic. And this struggle is exhibited partly in the gradual change of the Byzantine architecture into other forms, and partly by isolated examples of genuine Gothic, taken prisoner, as it were, in the contest; or rather entangled among the enemy’s forces, and maintaining their ground till their friends came up to sustain them. Let us first follow the steps of the gradual change, and then give some brief account of the various advanced guards and forlorn hopes of the Gothic attacking force.

§ 24. The uppermost shaded series of six forms of windows in Plate 14 opposite, represents, at a glance, the modifications of this feature in Venetian palaces, from the eleventh to fifteenth century. Fig. 1 is Byzantine, of the eleventh and twelfth centuries; figs. 2 and 3 transitional, of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries; figs. 4 and 5 pure Gothic, of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and early fifteenth; and fig. 6 late Gothic, of the fifteenth century, distinguished by its added final. Fig. 4 is longest-lived of all these forms: it occurs first in the thirteenth century; and, sustaining modifications only in its mouldings, is found also in the middle of the fifteenth.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]