Palazzo Ducale

“ And this is but a part of the palace. The ground floor is altogether uninhabited; the French “École de Rome” occupies a corner of the second floor; while the embassy huddles in chilly fashion in the most habitable corner of the first floor, compelled to abandon everything else and lock the doors to spare itself the useless trouble of sweeping. No doubt it is grand to live in the Palazzo Farnese, built by Pope Paul III and for more than a century inhabited by cardinals ”

“ Most of the streets of Turin converge into the Piazza di Castello, in the centre of which stands the Palazzo Madama, a weird-looking, half-ruined building overgrown with ivy, with a gloomy look about its desolate towers. It is a fine and picturesque old place, especially on a moonlight night—a unique relic of the Middle Ages. Near it are the Royal Palace and the Duomo. The former is not unlike a barrack externally; but it contains a noble staircase and fine banqueting and reception rooms, the ceiling and floors being especially worthy of admiration. ”

“ But one does not need to come here to form an idea of the wealth of good sculpture. The streets alone are full of it. Every palace has beautiful stone-work and an escutcheon which often only a master could execute—as Donatello devised that for the Palazzo Pazzi in the Borgo degli Albizzi. On the great staircase of the Bargello, for example, are numbers of coats of arms that could not be more beautifully designed and incised. ”

“ They are the public palace, the cathedral, and the house of S. Catherine. The civil life, the arts, and 43 the religious tendencies of Italy during the ascendency of mediæval ideas, are strongly set before us here. High above every other building in the town soars the straight brick tower of the Palazzo Pubblico, the house of the republic, the hearth of civil life within the State. It guards an irregular Gothic building in which the old government of Siena used to be assembled, but which has now for a long time been converted into prisons, courts of law, and showrooms. ”

“ Understanding the curiosity the four felt to see their premises, they did the honors of their place, with a minuteness as politely considerate towards the strangers as it was gratifying to the interest felt by them.
First the visitors were led by the bachelor brothers to see the huge old mansion, which they called the Palazzo. Let no one who has seen an ordinary Genoese palace, magnificent with gilding, enriched by priceless pictures, supplied with choice books, and adorned with gorgeous furniture, figure to himself any such combination in the palazzo in question. ”

“ As always in Italian towns, it must be visited early in the day if it is to be seen to advantage. In the morning it is crowded with fruit and vegetable dealers, sitting under bright-coloured umbrellas; in the afternoon it is triste and deserted, save by the cabmen, who pursue the stranger with their importunities. One side of this piazza is occupied by the Palazzo Publico—a large pile of building altogether Gothic in its inclosing walls, I fancy, but they have been so much altered from time to time that not much detail remains. ”

“ The rebuilding of the Palazzo del Parlamento is only second to the enormous monument of Victor Emanuel II. The majority of the buildings erected by individuals and corporations since 1870 present no original or characteristic features, and the best of them are copies or imitations of well-known models. The Cassa del Risparmio, in the Corso, reproduces a Florentine palace; the Palazzo Negroni, near the Piazza Nicotia, is modelled on the Cancelleria and the Palazzo Giraud ”

“ Above are Dante, Petraca, Boccaccio, Giovanni della Casa, and Luigi Alamanni. In the corridor, “as being a more honourable place,” observes Filippo, were the Archbishop S. Antonino, S. Filippo Neri, Maestro Luigi Marsili, Lorenzo il Magnifico and Bartolomeo Cavalcanti, and a bust of Baccio Valori himself—the only one left. From the busts on the façade the palace is generally known in Florence as the Palazzo de’ Visacci, or of the Ugly Faces.
Alessandro, the last of the Valori, died in 1687, and his nephew, Senator Luigi Guicciardini, inherited the palace. ”

“ Yet if the statue could wake to life, the man would not know the familiar place, which has been wholly transformed since his days. The principal ornament of the square is the Palazzo del Consiglio, a beautiful example of cinque-cento architecture, its exuberant decoration still subordinate to the harmony and proportion of the general design. This has been converted into a pantheon for the celebrated men of Verona, whose statues surmount the building, and among whom we recognize many old acquaintances—Cornelius Nepos, Catullus, Pliny the Younger and others of later date and less renown. ”

“ A mere projecting shelf is not enough, the whole wall must, Jupiter like, nod as well as frown. Hence, I think the propped machicolations of the Palazzo Vecchio and Duomo of Florence far grander headings than any form of Greek cornice. Sometimes the projection may be thrown lower, as in the Doge's palace of Venice, where the chief appearance of it is above the second arcade; or it may become a grand swell from the ground, as the head of a ship of the line rises from the sea. This is very nobly attained by the projection of the niches in the third story of the Tour de Beurre at Rouen. ”

“ After a specimen of Renaissance architecture, with its columns and superimposed orders comes a mediæval palace of the Gothic-Arabian style, of which the Ducal palace is the prototype, with its open-work, balconies, its ogives, its trefoils and its lace-like acrotera. A little farther is a façade encased in coloured marbles, ornamented with medalions and consoles; then comes a great rose-coloured wall, where a large window with little columns is cut out. Every style is found here: Byzantine, Saracen, Lombard, Gothic, Roman, Greek, and even Rococo ”

“ It will be seen that my supposition that the original design of the Ducal Palace was of considerably less elevation than the present building, would tend to make it very much more like the Byzantine type than it is; but even now no one can dispute the family likeness. The amount of constructive art is as nearly as possible the same. The weight is supported by a succession of shafts placed at very short intervals from each other, and in neither is there any approach to the system of pier, arch, and buttress, so distinctive of Gothic art in the North of Europe. ”

“ It is regularly built, with many squares and broad streets; is the seat of important trade for northern Italy; has varied manufactures; and is rapidly growing. It contains a university, cathedral, castle (Palazzo Madama) , royal palace (with the royal armory and library) , Palazzo Carignano (former seat of Parliament, now containing collections in natural history) , palace of the Academy of Sciences (with a museum of antiquities and picture-gallery) , monument of Cavour, etc. Victor Emmanuel and Cavour were born there. ”

“ The buildings which he caused to be erected by Bernardo Rossellino in 1460–1463 form a noble group of early Renaissance architecture round the Piazza del Duomo. The latter retains Gothic details in the interior, but the façade is simple Renaissance work. The other three sides are occupied by the episcopal and municipal palaces, and the Palazzo Piccolomini, the last, resembling the Palazzo Rucellai at Florence, is the finest, and in front of it is a beautiful fountain. The episcopal palace contains a museum with some fine ecclesiastical vestments, enamels and other works of art. ”

“ In every structure, the base is commonly broad; the monument diminishes in thickness as it encroaches on the sky. The Ducal Palace is the exact opposite of that natural scheme of architecture: the base, pierced by light porticoes surmounted by a gallery of arabesques indented with four-leaved open trefoils, supports an almost bare square mass: one would say it was a fortress built upon pillars, or rather an inverted building planted on its light coping with its thick root in the air. ”

“ Indeed, a detailed examination of the Italian palaces shows that even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such staircases as were built by Fontana in the royal palace at Naples, by Juvara in the Palazzo Madama at Turin and by Vanvitelli at Caserta, were seen only in royal palaces. Even Morelli's staircase in the Braschi palace in Rome, magnificent as it is, hardly reaches the popular conception of the Italian state staircase—a conception probably based rather upon the great open stairs of the Genoese cortili than upon any actually existing staircases. ”

“ Such, then, is the Ducal Palace: a building certainly in some respects of almost unequalled beauty, but at the same time of unequal merit; its first and second stages quite perfect in their bold nervous character, and in the almost interminable succession of the same beautiful features in{210} shaft and arch and tracery, forming perhaps one of the grandest proofs in the world of the exceeding value of perfect regularity and of a repetition of good features in architecture, when it is possible to obtain it on a very large scale. ”

“ And the Ducal Palace itself owes the peculiar charm which we have hitherto felt, not so much to its greater size as compared with other Gothic buildings, or nobler design (for it never yet has been rightly drawn) , as to its comparative isolation. The other Gothic structures are as much injured by the continual juxtaposition of the Renaissance palaces, as the latter are aided by it; they exhaust their own life by breathing it into the Renaissance coldness: but the Ducal Palace stands comparatively alone, and fully expresses the Gothic power. ”

“ Beautiful circular church, cupola silvery, ribbed outside, at Ariccia, opposite Palazzo Chigi; a great grim palace, stained grey with damp and time, flanked by four sorts of towers; windows scarce. This solemn type of sixteenth-century White Devil of Italy palace or villa recurs in this neighbourhood; places to keep their secrets; some apparently on the very border of the Campagna, where vines and olives end. ”

“ There is nothing within it so entrancing as its exterior—always with the exception of Tintoretto's, "Bacchus and Ariadne."
The Ducal Palace is Gothic made sprightly and sunny;{66} Gothic without a hint of solidity or gloom. So light and fresh is the effect, chiefly the result of the double row of arches and especially of the upper row, but not a little due to the zig-zagging of the brickwork and the vivid cheerfulness of the coping fringe, that one has difficulty in believing that the palace is of any age at all or that it will really be there to-morrow. ”

“ Arnolfo died when he had built his Palazzo in rugged strength, as it still stands, with walls like living rock and heavy Tuscan cornices—tho it was reserved to the other masters to put upon it the wonderful crown of its appropriate tower—and just as the round apse of the cathedral approached completion; a hard fate for a great builder to leave such noble work behind him half done, yet the most common of all fates. ”

“ A nude bronze statue of the god by Giovanni da Bologna stands eight feet high, in a somewhat repellent attitude, above the pedestal and basin. It is always the centre of a lounging crowd which throngs the square throughout the day. On the west side of the Piazza is the Palazzo Pubblico, with a façade that still retains, despite restoration, traces of eight elegant pointed windows. A figure of the Virgin in terra-cotta, once gilded, stands under a good canopy high up on the empty space of the great wall of the façade. ”

“ And then other names fell hastily from the driver’s lips as his horse went on at a fast trot. There was the Palazzo Colonna, with its garden edged by meagre cypresses; the Palazzo Torlonia, almost ripped open by recent “improvements”; the Palazzo di Venezia, bare and fearsome, with its crenelated walls, its stern and tragic appearance, that of some fortress of the middle ages, forgotten there amidst the commonplace life of nowadays. ”

“ There is no mention of any additions to the Ducal Palace during his reign, but he was succeeded by that Francesco Dandolo, the sculptures on whose tomb, still existing in the cloisters of the Salute, may be compared by any traveller with those of the Ducal Palace. Of him it is recorded in the Savina Chronicle: "This Doge also had the great gate built which is at the entry of the palace, above which is his statue kneeling, with the gonfalon in hand, before the feet of the Lion of St. Mark's." ”

“ They are never drawn singly, or as the principal subject, nor can they be. The building which faces the Ducal Palace on the opposite side of the Piazzetta is celebrated among architects, but it is not familiar to our eyes; it is painted only incidentally, for the completion, not the subject, of a Venetian scene; and even the Renaissance arcades of St. Mark’s Place, though frequently painted, are always treated as a mere avenue to its Byzantine church and colossal tower. ”

“ Such buildings as the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, the Ducal Palace of Venice, and many others were the material manifestation of a state of municipal pride, and popular love of beauty and propriety in public monuments. Upon these buildings the best craftsmanship was lavished, while the dwellings of the most wealthy citizens were modest in scale, though often beautiful in design. ”

“ This house has many old sculptured slabs worked into the façade, and it seems a great pity that it should so have fallen from its proper state. An ugly modern iron balcony has been set beneath its Gothic windows. Adjoining is a house which also has pretty Gothic windows, and then the dull and neglected Palazzo Mocenigo, with brown posts. Then comes the Rio S. Gio. Crisostomo, and next it a house newly faced, and then the fascinating remains of the twelfth-century Palazzo Lion, consisting of an exposed staircase and a very attractive courtyard with round and pointed arches. ”