Venetian Palaces

Venetian Palaces by Esther Singleton

Venetian Palaces* by Esther Singleton is a richly compiled architectural and historical survey of the great palaces lining the Grand Canal and the lesser waterways of Venice, assembled from the accounts of distinguished writers, travelers, and connoisseurs whose observations Singleton weaves into an authoritative panorama of the city's built splendor. The work opens with the Grand Canal itself, established as Venice's principal artery — a double reversed S stretching from the isle of Santa Chiara to the Custom-House near the Giudecca, bisected by the Rialto bridge. Contributors including Théophile Gautier frame the Canal as the supreme spectacle of the civilized world: a living gallery where Gothic-Arabian ogives stand beside Renaissance colonnades, Byzantine mosaics adjoin Lombard medallions, and every facade finds its trembling double in the water below. The accumulated presence of architects — Sansovino, Longhena, Scamozzi, Sammichelli, Vittoria, Selva, and the anonymous medieval masters — is treated not as mere catalogue but as evidence of a vanished civic magnificence. The survey proceeds palace by palace along both banks. The Palazzo Corner della Cà Grande, the triple Giustiniani, the Foscari, the Rezzonico, the Dario, the Venier, the Pesaro, the Loredan, and the Barbarigo each receive architectural description alongside personal and dynastic history. The Barbarigo, for instance, holds twenty-two Titians locked under a Russian consul's seal; the Mocenigo preserves the memory of Byron and his turbulent mistress; the Corner della Regina, once belonging to Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, has been reduced to a pawnshop. The Ca' d'Oro — embroidered, denticulated, fantastically light — is noted as the former property of the ballerina Marie Taglioni, who restored it out of what Gautier calls a "charity of repairs." The Vendramini Calergi, the most beautiful palace in Venice by the contributors' collective judgment, serves at the time of writing as the residence of the Duchesse de Berry. Beyond the Grand Canal, the book extends to the smaller palaces and civic structures scattered through the city's labyrinthine network of calli and rii. The architectural styles catalogued span seven or eight centuries: Byzantine severity, Saracen fantasy, Lombard ornament, Venetian Gothic with its trefoiled tracery and open-work acrotera, the classical discipline of the High Renaissance, and the decorative exuberance of the Baroque. Singleton's method is cumulative and comparative — each palace illuminates the next, and the aggregate portrait that emerges is of a city that encoded its entire political, commercial, and artistic history in stone and marble. The human stories embedded in the buildings run from the medieval to the near-contemporary. Enrico Dandolo, conqueror of Constantinople, once occupied the Loredan; the Pisani reflects northern European Gothic influence absorbed through trade; the old Fondaco dei Turchi, once the caravanserai of Levantine merchants when Venice commanded the commerce of the Orient, stands degraded by the time of writing, its Arabian arcades cluttered with hovels. This pattern of grandeur in decay is a persistent note: of the nine hundred patrician families inscribed in Venice's Golden Book, barely fifty survive by the nineteenth century, and their palaces stand as monuments to extinction as much as to achievement. Throughout, the contributors recorded by Singleton marvel at the synthesis Venice achieved — a city without horses, without streets in any conventional sense, where gondolas serve as transport and every threshold opens onto water, where the practical and the magnificent were so thoroughly fused that even utilitarian buildings possess the character of artworks. The book is ultimately an elegy for a vanished aristocratic world as much as an architectural guide, insisting that the physical fabric of the palaces constitutes an irreplaceable record of human genius and civic ambition that no painted canvas or written chronicle can fully substitute.

By Esther Singleton · First published 1905 · Genre: Architectural History, Travel Writing, Cultural History · 2,527 words

First lines

THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

The Grand Canal is to Venice what the Strand is to London, the Rue / Saint-Honoré to Paris, and the Alcala to Madrid, -- the principal artery / for the circulation of the whole city. Its form is that of a double S, / reversed, the sweep of which bounds the city around St. Mark's while / the upper point borders upon the isle of Santa-Chiara, and the lower / point at the Custom-House, near the canal of the Giudecca. This S is / cut about the middle by the bridge of the Rialto.

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architecture · Venice · palaces · Italy · history · Renaissance · design · European architecture · cultural heritage · art history · historical buildings · Italian culture

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