se palace has been the principal material from which recent
searchers for the picturesque in Venice compose pictures of the Grand
Canal. It forms the square mass of architecture on the left, in the
continually repeated view of the Church of the Salute seen from the
steps of the Academy.

The genealogy of the family, from the thirteenth century, when they
first appeared in Italy, to the founder of this Venetian lordship, had
better be set before the reader in one view.[11]

GIOVANNI,
Condottiere in service of the Visconti, 1274.
|
NICOLA,
Condottiere, 1297.
|
FEDERICO,
Podesta of Vicenza under the Scaligers, 1331.
|
CONRADO,
Condottiere, 1350.
|
|--------------+-------------|
FEDERIGO, JACOPO, NICOLA,
|
|---------+----------+----------+----------|
NICOLA, GIOVANNI, CONRADO, FEDERIGO, GIORGIO.
Founds Venetian family.

227. Now, as above stated, I believe that the fresco of the three
knights was commanded by the Podesta of Vicenza, on his receiving that
authority from the Scaligers in 1331, and that it represents Giovanni,
Nicola, and himself; while the tomb of Federigo and Nicola would be
ordered by the Venetian Cavallis, and completed without much care for
the record of the rise of the family at Verona.

Whether my identification of the figures seen kneeling in the fresco be
correct or not, the representation of these three Cavalli knights to the
Madonna, each interceded for by his patron saint, will be found to
receive a peculiar significance if the reader care to review the
circumstances influencing the relation of the German chivalry to the
power of the Church in the very year when Giovanni Cavalli entered the
ranks of the Visconti.

228. For the three preceding centuries, Milan, the oldest archbishopric
of Lombardy, had been the central point at which the collision between
the secular and ecclesiastical power took place in Europe. The Guelph
and Ghibelline naturally met and warred throughout the plain of
Lombardy; but the intense civic stubbornness and courage of the Milanese
population formed a kind of rock in their tide-way, where the quarrel of
burgher with noble confused itself with,