The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

Veneto-Byzantine palaces
The oldest surviving palaces are Veneto-Byzantine,
a style that was originally two-storey, with storage
below and living accommodation upstairs, and steeply
arched colonnades across the whole facade, as can
be seen in the Ca’ Farsetti and Ca’ Loredan, by
the Rialto bridge. Another Byzantine feature are the
decorative stone panels called paterae, some of
which were brought back from Constantinople after
the Fourth Crusade, though most of the paterae that
survive are later reworkings of the genre. A taste for
surface decoration – attributable in part to the city’s
trading ties with the Islamic world – was to prove highly
durable: just as the facades of the Veneto-Byzantine
palaces were adorned with carved panels and coloured
marble, so the later ones were studded with reliefs and
heraldic devices, and sometimes even frescoed.
Gothic palaces
Around the mid-thirteenth century the steep Byzantine arch started to
mutate into an arch with a pointed crown, and by end of the following
century the Venetian Gothic style – the city’s dominant type – had fully
evolved, featuring peaked arches (often with three lobes) on large windows
that were often linked with elaborate tracery (the Palazzo Ducale provided
a model for this). The windows were clustered together in the centre of the
facade between symmetrically placed side windows, indicating an interior
plan that had by now reached its definitive form, with all the upper stories
more or less arranged in the same way.
The most spectacular examples of Venetian Gothic are the Ca’ d’Oro and the slightly later
Fòscari and Giustiniani palaces, whose extravagance reflects the increasing wealth of a city
that was now a dominant maritime power with a sizeable terra firma domain. Palaces at this time
were becoming bigger and taller than ever before, and the density of housing was increasing to
accommodate a population that rose by forty percent in the fifteenth century, to around 140,000.
g Palazzi Giustiniani and Ca’ Fòscari g Ca’ Farsetti and Ca’ Loredan