fed
by this time. Its decorations and fittings, however, were long in
completion; the paintings on the roof being only executed in 1400.[125]
They represented the heavens covered with stars,[126] this being, says
Sansovino, the bearings of the Doge Steno. Almost all ceilings and
vaults were at this time in Venice covered with stars, without any
reference to armorial bearings; but Steno claims, under his noble title
of Stellifer, an important share in completing the chamber, in an
inscription upon two square tablets, now inlaid in the walls on each
side of the great window towards the sea:

"MILLE QUADRINGENTI CURREBANT QUATUOR ANNI
HOC OPUS ILLUSTRIS MICHAEL DUX STELLIFER AUXIT."

And in fact it is to this Doge that we owe the beautiful balcony of that
window, though the work above it is partly of more recent date; and I
think the tablets bearing this important inscription have been taken out
and reinserted in the newer masonry. The labor of these final
decorations occupied a total period of sixty years. The Grand Council
sat in the finished chamber for the first time in 1423. In that year the
Gothic Ducal Palace of Venice was completed. It had taken, to build it,
the energies of the entire period which I have above described as the
central one of her life.

Sec. XX. 3rd. The RENAISSANCE PALACE. I must go back a step or two, in
order to be certain that the reader understands clearly the state of the
palace in 1423. 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, was of course known as the
"Palazzo Vecchio."[127] That fabric, however, still occupied the
principal position in Venice. The new Council Chamber had been erected
by the side of it towards the Sea; but there was not th