e city any incipient or
imperfect types of the form of the Ducal Palace; it was difficult to
believe that so mighty a building had been the conception of one man,
not only in disposition and detail, but in style; and yet impossible,
had it been otherwise, but that some early examples of approximate
Gothic form must exist. There is not one. The palaces built between the
final cessation of the Byzantine style, about 1300, and the date of the
Ducal Palace (1320-1350), are all completely distinct in character, so
distinct that I at first intended the account of them to form a separate
section of this volume; and there is literally _no_ transitional form
between them and the perfection of the Ducal Palace. Every Gothic
building in Venice which resembles the latter is a copy of it. I do not
mean that there was no Gothic in Venice before the Ducal Palace, but
that the mode of its application to domestic architecture had not been
determined. The real root of the Ducal Palace is the apse of the church
of the Frari. The traceries of that apse, though earlier and ruder in
workmanship, are nearly the same in mouldings, and precisely the same in
treatment (especially in the placing of the lions' heads), as those of
the great Ducal Arcade; and the originality of thought in the architect
of the Ducal Palace consists in his having adapted those traceries, in a
more highly developed and finished form, to civil uses. In the apse of
the church they form narrow and tall window lights, somewhat more
massive than those of Northern Gothic, but similar in application: the
thing to be done was to adapt these traceries to the forms of domestic
building necessitated by national usage. The early palaces consisted, as
we have seen, of arcades sustaining walls faced with marble, rather
broad and long than elevated. This form was kept for the Ducal Palace;
but instead of round arches from shaft to shaft, the Frari traceries
were substituted, with two essential modifications. Besides being
enormously increased in scale and thickness, that they might better bear
the superincumbent weight, the quatrefoil, which in the Frari windows is
above the arch, as at _a_, Fig. XXI., on previous page, was, in the
Ducal Palace, put between the arches, as at _b_; the main reason for
this alteration being that the bearing power of the arches, which was
now to be trusted with the weight of a wall forty feet high,[75] was
thus thrown _between_ the quatrefoils, instead of