356 THE STONES OF VENICE

its present form; with the exception of alterations in doors, partitions, and staircases among the inner apartments, not worth noticing, and such barbarisms and defacements as have been suffered within the last fifty years, by, I suppose, nearly every building of importance in Italy.

§ 30. Now, therefore, we are at liberty to examine some of the details of the Ducal Palace, without any doubt about their dates.¹ I shall not, however, give any elaborate illustrations of them here, because I could not do them justice on the scale of the page of this volume, or by means of line engraving. I believe a new era is opening to us in the art of illustration,* and that I shall be able to give large figures of the details of the Ducal Palace at a price which will enable every person who is interested in the subject to possess them; so that the cost and labour of multiplying illustrations here would be altogether wasted. I shall therefore direct the reader’s attention only to such points of interest as can be explained in the text.

§ 31. First, then, looking back to the woodcut at the beginning of this chapter, the reader will observe that, as the building was very nearly square on the ground plan, a peculiar prominence and importance were given to its angles, which rendered it necessary that they should be enriched and softened by sculpture. I do not suppose that the fitness of this arrangement will be questioned; but if the reader will take the pains to glance over any series of engravings of church towers or other four-square buildings in which great refinement of form has been attained, he will at once observe how their effect depends on some modification of the sharpness of the angle, either by groups of buttresses, or by turrets and niches rich in sculpture. It is to be noted also that this principle of breaking the angle

* See the last chapter of the third volume [ch. iv. § 3 n.]

¹ [It should be remembered, in reading the rest of this chapter and especially if the reader is studying the capitals on the spot, that the Palace has been restored since Ruskin wrote. Particulars of the restoration are given in a note below, pp. 464-466.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]