aken away from them, and still they
would be beautiful and strange. They are not less striking in the
loneliest streets of Padua and Vicenza (where many were built during the
period of the Venetian authority in those cities) than in the most
crowded thoroughfares of Venice itself; and if they could be
transported into the midst of London, they would still not altogether
lose their power over the feelings.

Sec. II. The best proof of this is in the perpetual attractiveness of all
pictures, however poor in skill, which have taken for their subject the
principal of these Gothic buildings, the Ducal Palace. In spite of all
architectural theories and teachings, the paintings of this building are
always felt to be delightful; we cannot be wearied by them, though often
sorely tried; but we are not put to the same trial in the case of the
palaces of the Renaissance. 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. 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.

[Illustration: Fig. XXI.]

Sec. III. And it is just that it should be so seen, for it is the original
of nearly all the rest. It is not the elaborate and more studied
developement of a national style, but the great and sudden invention of
one man, instantly forming a national style, and becoming the model for
the imitation of every architect in Venice for upwards of a century. It
was the determination of this one fact which occupied me the greater
part of the time I spent in Venice. It had always appeared to me most
strange that there should be in no part of th