might be built upon her
burdened islands, but none of them could taken the place, or recall the
memory, of that which was first built upon her unfrequented shore. It
fell; and, as if it had been the talisman of fortune, the city never
flourished again.

I have no intention of following out, in their 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 facade 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
Othello of Shakespeare) in 1462.

Some remnants of the Ziani Palace were perhaps still left between the
two extremities of the Gothic Palace; or, as is more probable, the last
stones of it may have been swept away after the fire of 1419, and
replaced by new apartments for the Doge. But whatever buildings, old or
new, stood on this spot at the time of the completion of the Porta della
Carta were destroyed by another great fire in 1479, together with so
much of the palace on the Rio that, tho the saloon of Gradenigo, then
known as the Sala de Pregadi, was not destroyed, it became necessary to
reconstruct the entire facades of the portion of the palace behind the
Bridge of Sighs, both toward the court and canal.

The palace was not long permitted to remain in finished form. Another
terrific fire, commonly called the great fire, burst out in 1574, and
destroyed the inner fittings and all the precious pictures of the Great
Council Chamber, and of all the upper rooms on the Sea Facade, and most
of those on the Rio Facade, leaving the building a mere shell, shaken
and blasted by the flames. It was debated in the Great Council whether
the ruin should not be thrown down, and an entirely new palace built in
its stead. The opinions of all the leading architects of Venice were
taken, respecting the safety of the walls, or the possibility of
repairing them as they stood. These opinions, given in writing, have
been p