Valle says, that* "the wall of the saloon is thicker by fifteen inches than the shafts below it, projecting nine inches within, and six without, standing as if in the air, above the piazza; and yet this wall is so nobly and strongly knit together, that Rusconi, though himself altogether devoted to the Renais sance school, declares that the fire which had destroyed the whole interior of the palace had done this wall no more harm than the bite of a fly to an elephant. "Troveremo che el danno che ha patito queste muraglie sarà conforme alla beccatura d'una mosca fatta ad un elefante.”‡

§ XI. And so in all the other palaces built at the time, consummate strength was joined with a lightness of form and sparingness of material which rendered it eminently desirable that the eye should be convinced, by every possible expedient, of the stability of the building; and these twisted pillars at the angles are not among the least important means adopted for this purpose, for they seem to bind the walls together as a cable binds a chest. In the Ducal Palace, where they are carried up the angle of an unbroken wall forty feet high, they are divided into portions, gradually diminishing in length towards the top, by circular bands or rings, set with the nailhead or dog-tooth ornament, vigorously projecting, and giving the column nearly the aspect of the stalk of a reed; its diminishing proportions being exactly arranged as they are by Nature in all jointed plants. At the top of the palace, like the wheat-stalk branching into the ear of corn, it expands.

Dominio in tanto pericolo d' habitar un palazzo fabricato in aria.”—Pareri di XV. Architetti, con illustrazioni dell' Abbate Giuseppe Cadorin, (Venice, 1838) p. 104.

"Il muro della sala è più grosso delle colonne sott' esso piedi uno e onze tre, et posto in modo che onze sei sta come in aere sopra la piazza, et onze nove dentro."-Pareri di XV. Architetti, p. 47.

+ Compare "Seven Lamps," chap. iii. § 7.

Pareri, above quoted, p. 21..

into a small niche with a pointed canopy, which joins with the fantastic parapet in at once relieving, and yet making more notable by its contrast, the weight of massy wall below. The arrangement is seen in the woodcut, Chap. VIII.; the angle shafts being slightly exaggerated in thickness, together with their joints, as otherwise they would hardly have been intelligible on so small a scale.

The Ducal Palace is peculiar in these niches at the angles, which throughout the rest of the city appear on churches only; but some may perhaps have been removed by restorations, together with the parapets with which they were associated.

§ XII. Of these roof parapets of Venice, it has been already noticed that the examples which remain differ from those of all other cities of Italy in their purely ornamental character. (Chap. I. § XII.) They are not battlements, properly so-called; still less machicolated cornices, such as crown the fortress palaces of the great mainland nobles; but merely adaptations of the light and crown-like ornaments which crest the walls of the Arabian mosque. Nor are even these generally used

the Ducal Palace, on the Casa d' Oro, and, some years back, were still standing on the Fondaco de' Turchi; but the majority of the Gothic Palaces have the plain dog-tooth cornice under the tiled projecting roof (Vol. I. Chap. XIV. § IV.); and the highly decorated parapet is employed only on the tops of walls which surround courts or gardens, and which, without such decoration, would have been utterly devoid of interest. Fig. XXIII. represents, at b, part of a parapet of this kind which surrounds the court-yard of a palace in the Calle del Bagatin, between San G. Grisostomo, and San Canzian: the whole is of brick, and the mouldings peculiarly sharp and varied; the height of each separate pinnacle being about four feet, crowning a wall twelve or fifteen feet high: a piece of the moulding which surrounds the quatrefoil is given larger in the figure at a, together with the top of the small arch below, having the common Venetian dentil round it, and a delicate little moulding with dog-tooth ornament to carry the flanks of the arch. The moulding of the brick is throughout sharp and beautiful in the highest degree. One of the most curious points about it is the careless way in which the curved outlines of the pinnacles are cut into the plain brickwork, with no regard whatever to the places of its joints. The weather of course wears the bricks at the exposed joints, and jags the outline a little; but the work has stood, evidently from the fourteenth century, without sustaining much harm.

§ XIII. This parapet may be taken as a general type of the wall-parapet of Venice in the Gothic period; some being much less decorated, and others much more richly: the most beautiful in Venice is in the little Calle, opening on the Campo and Traghetto San Samuele; it has delicately carved devices in stone let into each pinnacle.

The parapets of the palaces themselves were lighter and more fantastic, consisting of narrow lance-like spires of marble,

set between the broader pinnacles, which were in such cases generally carved into the form of a fleur-de-lis: the French word gives the reader the best idea of the form, though he must remember that this use of the lily for the parapets has nothing to do with France, but is the carrying out of the Byzantine system of floral ornamentation, which introduced the outline of the lily everywhere; so that I have found it convenient to call its most beautiful capitals, the lily capitals of St. Mark's. But the occurrence of this flower, more distinctly than usual, on the battlements of the Ducal Palace, was the cause of some curious political speculation in the year 1511, when a piece of one of these battlements was shaken down by the great earthquake of that year. Sanuto notes in his diary that "the piece that fell was just that which bore the lily," and records sundry sinister anticipations, founded on this important omen, of impending danger to the adverse French power. As there happens, in the Ducal Palace, to be a joint in the pinnacles which exactly separates the “part which bears the lily" from that which is fastened to the cornice, it is no wonder that the omen proved fallacious.

§ XIV. The decorations of the parapet were completed by attaching gilded balls of metal to the extremities of the leaves of the lilies, and of the intermediate spires, so as literally to form for the wall a diadem of silver touched upon the points with gold; the image being rendered still more distinct in the Casa d'Oro, by variation in the height of the pinnacles, the highest being in the centre of the front.

Very few of these light roof parapets now remain; they are, of course, the part of the building which dilapidation first renders it necessary to remove. That of the Ducal Palace, however, though often, I doubt not, restored, retains much of the ancient form, and is exceedingly beautiful, though it has no appearance from below of being intended for protection, but serves only, by its extreme lightness, to relieve

the eye when wearied by the breadth of wall beneath; it is nevertheless a most serviceable defence for any person walking along the edge of the roof. It has some appearance of insecurity, owing to the entire independence of the pieces of stone composing it, which, though of course fastened by iron, look as if they stood balanced on the cornice like the pillars of Stonehenge; but I have never heard of its having been disturbed by anything short of an earthquake; and, as we have seen, even the great earthquake of 1511, though it much injured the Gorne, or battlements of the Casa d'Oro, and threw down several statues at St. Mark's,* only shook one lily from the brow of the Ducal Palace.

§ xv. Although, however, these light and fantastic forms appear to have been universal in the battlements meant primarily for decoration, there was another condition of parapet altogether constructed for the protection of persons walking on the roofs or in the galleries of the churches, and from these more substantial and simple defences, the BALCONIES, to which the Gothic palaces owe half of their picturesque effect, were immediately derived; the balcony being, in fact, nothing more than a portion of such roof parapets arranged round a projecting window-sill sustained on brackets, as in the central example of the annexed figure. We must, therefore, examine

It is a curious proof how completely, even so early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Venetians had lost the habit of reading the religious art of their ancient churches, that Sanuto, describing this injury, says, that "four of the Kings in marble fell from their pinnacles above the front, at St. Mark's church;" and presently afterwards corrects his mistake, and apologises for it thus: "These were four saints, St. Constantine, St. Demetrius, St. George, and St. Theodore, all Greek saints. They look like Kings." Observe the perfect, because unintentional, praise given to the old sculptor.

I quote the passage from the translation of these precious diaries of Sanuto, by my friend Mr. Rawdon Brown, a translation which I hope will some day become a standard book in English libraries.