VII. GOTHIC PALACES 327

times, the Venetian interiors having, in almost every case, been remodelled by the Renaissance architects. This change, however, for once, we cannot regret, as the walls and ceilings, when so altered, were covered with the noblest works of Veronese, Titian, and Tintoret; nor the interior walls only, but, as before noticed, often the exteriors also. Of the colour decorations of the Gothic exteriors I have, therefore, at present taken no notice, as it will be more convenient to embrace this subject in one general view of the systems of colouring of the Venetian palaces, when we arrive at the period of its richest development.* The details, also, of most interest, respecting the forms and transitional decoration of their capitals, will be given in the final Appendix to the next volume, where we shall be able to include in our inquiry the whole extent of the Gothic period: and it remains for us, therefore, at present, only to review the history, fix the date, and note the most important particulars in the structure of the building which at once consummates and embodies the entire system of the Gothic architecture of Venice,-the DUCAL PALACE.¹

* Vol. III., Chap. I. I have had considerable difficulty in the arrangement of these volumes, so as to get the points bearing upon each other grouped in consecutive and intelligible order.

¹ [Here we reach what Ruskin considered the climax of his subject, as appears from the following letter to his father:-

“Sunday, 26th April [1852].-... The fact is the whole book will be a kind of great ‘moral of the Ducal Palace of Venice,’ and all its minor information will concentrate itself on the Ducal Palace and its meaning, as the History of Herodotus concentrates itself on the Battle of Salamis. He rambles all over the world and gives the History of Egypt and of Babylon and of Persia and of Scythia and of Phśnicia and of old Greece, and to a careless student the book appears a farrago of unconnected matter, but a careful one soon discovers that all in the eight first books are mere prefaces to the ninth, and that whatever is told, or investigated, is to show what the men were, who brought their ships beak to beak in the straits of Salamis. And so I shall give many a scattered description of a moulding here and an arch there, but they will be mere notes to the account of the Rise and Fall of the Ducal Palace, and that account itself will be subservient to the showing of the causes and consequences of the rise and fall of Art in Europe.”]

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