Venetian Gothic architecture
Venetian Gothic is the particular form of Italian Gothic architecture typical of Venice, originating in local building requirements, with some influence from Byzantine architecture, and some from Islamic architecture, reflecting Venice's trading network. Very unusually for medieval architecture, the style is at its most characteristic in secular buildings, with the great majority of surviving examples of the style being secular.
The best-known examples are the Doge's Palace and the Ca' d'Oro. Both feature loggias of closely spaced small columns, with heavy tracery with quatrefoil openings above, decoration along the roofline, and some coloured patterning to plain wall surfaces. Together with the ogee arch, capped with a relief ornament, and ropework reliefs, these are the most iconic characteristics of the style. Ecclesiastical Gothic architecture tended to be less distinctively Venetian, and closer to that in the rest of Italy.
The beginning of the style probably goes back no further than the 13th century, although the dates of early Gothic palaces, and especially features such as windows in them, are largely uncertain. It dominated the 14th century and because of the city's conservatism Venetian Gothic buildings, especially smaller palaces, continued to be built well into the second half of the 15th century,[1] and Venetian Renaissance architecture very often retained reminiscences of its Gothic predecessor.
In the 19th century, inspired in particular by the writings of John Ruskin,[2] there was a revival of the style, part of the broader Gothic Revival movement in Victorian architecture. Even in the Middle Ages, Venetian palaces were built on very constricted sites, and were tall rectangular boxes with decoration concentrated on the front facade. The style was therefore developed for a similar architectural context to that found in late 19th-century city centre streets.
Palaces[edit]
Unlike the palaces or houses of wealthy families in other Italian cities, defence was not a major concern for Venetian palaces, which in any cases often had "moats" on some sides. The crowded city centre encouraged building high by the standards of the period, and the main access for light was often from the front facade, which therefore typically has more and larger windows than palaces elsewhere.[5]
Most palaces doubled as places of business, on the ground floor, and homes above. The ground floors, which even when built were probably rather prone to periodic flooding, have relatively few rooms, and a rather grand stairway leading to the residential upper floors, where ceilings are rather low by the standards of palaces. The portico on a canal allowed goods to be loaded and unloaded, and led to a large space called the androne, where they were stored and business transacted. Upstairs, the portego or salone was another large room, centrally placed and usually T-shaped, received light from the windows and was the main space for dining and entertaining. To the rear an open staircase led to a small courtyard with a well-head and often a rear door to the street.[6] In fact there are no true wells in Venice, and the well-head led down to a cistern sealed from the salty groundwater, which collected rainwater from the roof and courtyard through stone gutters leading to a sand filter system and the cistern.[7]
By the 13th century porticos at the front were often abandoned, and replaced by one or more large doorways leading to the androne.[8]
Palazzo Loredan dell'Ambasciatore. The rectangular windows of the mezzanine show this is fact a late 15th-century building, retaining a Gothic style into the Renaissance.
The influence of Islamic architecture is reflected in some features of the Venetian style, in particular the use of colour and pattern on outside walls, and sometimes stone grills on windows, and perhaps purely decorative crenellations on rooflines. During the period the Venetian economy was heavily bound up with trade with both the Islamic world and the Byzantine Empire, and the architectural styles of these two are somewhat entangled, especially in the early Islamic period.[19]
As an example, decorating walls with large veneers of fancy coloured marble or other stones, which was certainly a Venetian taste, was also found in Byzantine and Islamic architecture, but both had derived it from imperial Roman architecture. There are still examples in Ravenna (ruled by Venice from 1440 to 1509), Milan as well as Rome, and very likely much of the stripping of these from other surviving Roman buildings had not yet taken place.
Venetians may also have regarded some aspects of Byzantine and Islamic architecture as reflecting the world of Early Christianity – all over Italy "eastern" costume very often served for biblical figures in art, and the paintings of some Venetians, for example St Mark Preaching at Alexandria by Gentile Bellini (c. 1505) also use clearly Islamic architecture (including stone grills), although also reflecting the Byzantine styles of Constantinople, which Bellini visited in 1479, only some twenty-five years after it became the Ottoman capital. There were also Venetian connections with Islamic styles though Sicily and southern Italy, and possibly al-Andalus (Islamic Spain). Venetians probably saw the eastern elements in their architecture in a complex way, reflecting and celebrating both their history and the cause of their trade-derived wealth.[20]
Venetian traders, and those of rival cities, reached into Persia and Central Asia in the Pax Mongolica after the Mongol conquests, from roughly 1240 to 1360.[21] There were small Venetian colonies of merchants in Alexandria, as well as Constantinople. Venice's relations with the Byzantine Empire were still more intimate and complicated, involving many wars, treaties, and massacres.
