d Canal.

The room then begun is the one now in existence, and its building
involved the building of all that is best and most beautiful in the
present Ducal Palace, the rich arcades of the lower stories being all
prepared for sustaining this Sala del Gran Consiglio. In saying that it
is the same now in existence, I do not mean that it has undergone no
alterations; it has been refitted again and again, and some portions of
its walls rebuilt; but in the place and form in which it first stood, it
still stands; and by a glance at the position which its windows occupy,
the spectator will see at once that whatever can be known respecting the
design of the Sea Facade, must be gleaned out of the entries which
refer to the building of this Great Council Chamber.

Cadorin quotes two of great importance, made during the progress of the
work in 1342 and 1344; then one of 1349, resolving that the works at the
Ducal Palace, which had been discontinued during the plague, should be
resumed; and finally one in 1362, which speaks of the Great Council
Chamber as having been neglected and suffered to fall into "great
desolation," and resolves that it shall be forthwith completed.

The interruption had not been caused by the plague only, but by the
conspiracy of Faliero, and the violent death of the master builder. The
work was resumed in 1362, and completed within the next three years, at
least so far as that Guariento was enabled to paint his Paradise on the
walls, so that the building must, at any rate, have been roofed by this
time. Its decorations and fittings, however, were long in completion;
the paintings on the roof being only executed in 1400....

The works of addition or renovation had now been proceeding, at
intervals, during a space of a hundred and twenty-three years. Three
generations at least had been accustomed to witness the gradual
advancement of the form of the Ducal Palace into more stately symmetry,
and to contrast the works of sculpture and painting with which it was
decorated--full of the life, knowledge, and hope of the fourteenth
century--with the rude Byzantine chiselling of the palace of the Doge
Ziani. The magnificent fabric just completed, of which the new Council
Chamber was the nucleus, was now habitually known in Venice as the
"Palazzo Nuovo;" and the old Byzantine edifice, now ruinous, and more
manifest in its decay by its contrast with the goodly stones of the
building which had been raised at its side