pect, but known to the Venetian Ciceroni; and by inquiring for it,
and passing a little beyond it down the Fondamenta San Severo, the
traveller will see, on the other side of the canal, a palace which the
Ciceroni never notice, but which is unique in Venice for the
magnificence of the veined purple alabasters with which it has been
decorated, and for the manly simplicity of the foliage of its capitals.
Except in these, it has no sculpture whatever, and its effect is
dependent entirely on color. Disks of green serpentine are inlaid on the
field of purple alabaster; and the pillars are alternately of red marble
with white capitals, and of white marble with red capitals. Its windows
appear of the third order; and the back of the palace, in a small and
most picturesque court, shows a group of windows which are, perhaps, the
most superb examples of that order in Venice. But the windows to the
front have, I think, been of the fifth order, and their cusps have been
cut away.

Sec. XLIII. When the Gothic feeling began more decidedly to establish
itself, it evidently became a question with the Venetian builders, how
the intervals between the arches, now left blank by the abandonment of
the Byzantine sculptures, should be enriched in accordance with the
principles of the new school. Two most important examples are left of
the experiments made at this period: one at the Ponte del Forner, at San
Cassano, a noble house in which the spandrils of the windows are filled
by the emblems of the four Evangelists, sculptured in deep relief, and
touching the edges of the arches with their expanded wings; the other
now known as the Palazzo Cicogna, near the church of San Sebastiano, in
the quarter called "of the Archangel Raphael," in which a large space of
wall above the windows is occupied by an intricate but rude tracery of
involved quatrefoils. Of both these palaces I purposed to give drawings
in my folio work; but I shall probably be saved the trouble by the
publication of the beautiful calotypes lately made at Venice of both;
and it is unnecessary to represent them here, as they are unique in
Venetian architecture, with the single exception of an unimportant
imitation of the first of them in a little by-street close to the Campo
Sta. Maria Formosa. For the question as to the mode of decorating the
interval between the arches was suddenly and irrevocably determined by
the builder of the Ducal Palace, who, as we have seen, taking his first