VIII. THE DUCAL PALACE 353

intricate details, the operations which were begun under Foscari, and continued under succeeding Doges, till the palace assumed its present form, for I am not in this work concerned, except by occasional reference, with the architecture of the fifteenth century: but the main facts are the following. The palace of Ziani was destroyed; the existing façade to the Piazzetta built, so as both to continue and to resemble, in most particulars, the work of the Great Council Chamber. It was carried back from the Sea as far as the Judgment angle; beyond which is the Porta della Carta, begun in 1439, and finished in two years, under the Doge Foscari;* the interior buildings connected with it were added by the Doge Christopher Moro (the Othello¹ of Shakespeare)† in 1462.

* “Tutte queste fatture si compirono sotto il dogado del Foscari, nel 1441.”-Pareri, p. 131.

† This identification has been accomplished, and I think conclusively, by my friend Mr. Rawdon Brown, who has devoted all the leisure which, during the last twenty years, his manifold offices of kindness to almost every English visitant of Venice have left him, in discovering and translating the passages of the Venetian records which bear upon English history and literature. I shall have occasion to take advantage hereafter of a portion of his labours, which I trust will shortly be made public.²

¹ [This was a slip on Ruskin’s part which, though he tacitly corrected it in the next volume, escaped his revision here. Rawdon Brown’s ingenious identification of Shakespeare’s Othello refers not to this Doge (who, according to a contemporary was short-statured and squint-eyed), but to another Cristoforo Moro who lived a generation later, and was an officer of the Republic during the wars of the League of Cambrai. Ruskin states the case correctly in the Venetian Index (Vol. XI.), under the heading, “Othello, House of,” where the reference to Brown’s researches is given. In a letter to his father from Venice (Oct. 15, 1851), Ruskin mentions (again confusing the two men, it will be seen) that Lockhart (then editor of the Quarterly) “had refused a paper of Mr. Brown’s nailed on some book or other lately out, but in reality all about Othello, who was, in reality, the Doge Ludovic Moro, whose shield bore three mulberries-the same as the sign of the Desdemona handkerchief-and who among the various annals of great services done by him for the state is -just at Shakespeare’s time, and before Moro was Doge-described one day as coming from Cyprus, ‘wearing his beard long, for the death of his wife;’ and there is a great deal more which Mr. Brown has fished out about him, very interesting.”]

² [See in the next volume, ch. iii. § 10, and appendices 4 and 9. Rawdon Brown’s principal publications are “Calendar of State Papers relating to English affairs existing in the Archives of Venice,” 1864, etc., issued by the Commission for printing and publishing State Papers. “Four years at the Court of Henry VIII. A selection of despatches (from S. Giustiniano) to the Signory of Venice, 1515-1519, 2 vols., 1854.” Ruskin quotes a passage from these despatches in the next volume (appendix 9). “Avisi di Londra. An account of News Letters sent from London to Venice during the first

X. Z

[Version 0.04: March 2008]