The New Palaces of Medieval Venice
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS IX PREFACE XIX LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS XXI Introduction The Building Type 2 Distribution of Functions 23 3 The Social Background 29 4 Architectural Sculpture 45 Conclusion 73 APPENDIXES 81 Key 81 I Ca' del Papa 83 II Ca' Barozzi 1°7 III Fondaco dei Turchi 133 IV Ca' Farsetti 165 v Ca' Loredan 187 GENEALOGICAL TABLES 211 GLOSSARY 219 BIBLIOGRAPHY 223 INDEX 255 ILLUSTRATIONS 265
CAP. 01
THE BUILDING TYPE
LARGE AND MONUMENTALLY articulated resi¬dences of masonry such as those studied, in this book are nowadays called palaces, a term that had a limited meaning down to the late Middle Ages, signifying the seat of a lay or ecclesiastical lord.
In medieval Venice there were only three palaces that went by this name: the seats of the doge, the patriarch of Grado, and the bishop.
The .seats of patrician families were called instead "great houses: Whatever they were termed, buildings of this scale and pretension constituted but a small fraction of the city's residential architecture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
More numerous by far were the abodes of lesser folk, which Venetians called "houses" without further qualification.
Presumably these were a more common and older building type in Venice, simpler in layout and smaller than the "great house".
Whether they anticipated planning features of the "great house" cannot be determined: none survives from the early or central Middle Ages, there have been no excavations in search of their foundations, and descriptions of them in medi¬eval charters tell us nothing of their layout.
Both types of houses, great and small, were built of wood down to the eleventh century.
The com¬mon building material of early medieval domes¬tic architecture throughout western Europe, wood began to be supplanted by masonry with the arri¬val of the new millennium-in pare because in an age of swift population growth, when cities were becoming increasingly densely settled and suffer¬ing increasingly vast conflagrations, masonry offered protection against fife; in part because it made a building more durable and secure against assault.
Gradually, in Venice as on the Continent, mentions of "stone" construction (meaning both scene and brick) grow more frequent in property deeds.
One begins to hear of structures that are partially of wood and partially of masonry, and then of build¬ings that are entirely of masonry.
In the transformation it is likely that building types were handed on.
Indeed, a charter of 1069 mentions a wooden house with two upper storeys (three floor in all when the ground floor is in¬cluded) and a portico across its width.
The description, brief though it may be, evokes a buildings type commonly built of masonry in twelfth - and thirteenth - century Venice.
Venetian pre-Gothic palaces comprise two basic building types.
In each a long, narrow rectangular block, two or more storeys high, contains a large first-floor hall that is reached from an exterior stair.
In one type a long side of the block constitutes the building's principal facciata, articulated on the ground floor by a portico or arcade that gives on to service rooms, and on the first floor by monu¬mental windows that illuminate the building's main room, its hall.
A relatively complete, albeit late, example is the so-called Casa dell’ Angelo, which has been extended, however, by a short arm at right angles to the main block (Figs. 20-21). The hall in suck a building follows its long axis and adjoins the facciata.
Either at the ends of the hall or between it and the lesser, unemphasized long side lie chambers; behind the portico lie service rooms.
Pag.7
A mezzanine, if such there is, may provide rental quarters or service rooms; an attic, if developed into rooms, is given aver to service functions.
The façade generally overlooks a walled court on the landward side of the site, not a street or canal, and the exte¬rior stair is inside that court.
This building type was well established through-out medieval Italy and northern Europe.
A distant progenitor was the palatium that served as the official seat of early medieval emperors and kings: a masonry two-storey block with service rooms downstairs, often arrayed behind an arcade, and the aula regia, or representational hall, upstairs, reached by an exterior stairway and expressed on the out¬side by monumental windows. Generally, such palatia were flanked by ancillary buildings, which housed living quarters far the lord and his house¬hold and a chapel.
During the central Middle Ages the palatium itse1f was often enlarged by the addi¬tion of residential chambers somewhere on the first floor.
Now the type began to diffuse among lesser lords: bishops, abbots, counts, dukes, and their i1k.
Some--above all, prelates-would, like royalty, build a chapel at the palatium 's side.
When, beginning at the end of the tenth century, seigneurial seats were enclosed in walls, becoming castles, or were built ex novo as fortified residences, the palatium block became one of the structures within the castle's inner curtain (Fig. 1).
Writers on medieval architecture have used any number of terms far these blocks: palatium, domicil¬ium, and domus regalis in Latin; Palas (Pfalz when a royal seat) in German; "palace" in English; and the latter word's cognates in other modern languages.
If the structure is relatively tall in proportion to its width and depth, it has even been called a "residen¬tial tower" or, whether fortified or not, a "keep", or equivalent terms in other languages.
It goes without saying that this long-standing terminol¬ogical inconstancy, even confusion, has hindered, rather than furthered, ready comprehension of the development.
Pag.8
Still a later stage in the dissemination of this type was its adoption during the twelfth century¬ --- albeit on a smaller scale and lacking an enclosed front court --- by the rising merchant and profes¬sional classes in medieval cities.
Masonry houses each with a first-floor hall expressed on the exte¬rior by emphasized fenestration and reached by an outside stairway, and with service rooms on the ground floor and chambers above, either next to the hall or above it on a further residential floor, began to appear during the twelfth century in England, France (Figs. 8-9), the Rhineland (Figs. 10-I2), and Spain (Fig. 13), especially in cities.
A confusing variety of names has been given to these buildings too: "Jew's house," "Norman town house," "upper¬-hall house," and "chamber block" in English; maison forte in French; and festes Haus, Etagenhaus, and Saalgeschoj3haus in German.
Of all these terms, the most descriptive are the English "upper-hall house" and German Saalgeschoβhaus. Since most writing on this building type is owed to northern European scholars, the examples they cite are almost without exception English, French, and German.
However, Italian examples from the early and central Middle Ages of both the palatine archetype and the derivative upper-hall house can easily be assembled.
The Ottonian em¬perors, far instance, who were also the rulers of the former Lombard Italic kingdom, maintained palatia in Pavia (the Italic capital) and at least four other cities.
Palatia built or first heard of under the later dynasty of the Hohenstaufen number sixteen.
One can assume chit most of these imperial seats were of the established palatine form.
Only the twelfth¬-century palatium of Parma survives today; although considerably rebuilt, it is still recognizable as a structure of the palatine type (Fig. 2).
Pag.9
The many Ital¬ian abbatial and Episcopal palaces of the period were presumably similar.
With few exceptions they have been repeatedly reconfigured, but at least six retain something of their original form: the abbot's palace of the Benedictine monastery at Pomposa and the episcopal palaces of Como, Parma, Pistoia,
Tuscania, and Verona; all of them follow the palatine model (Figs. 3-4).
When, in the late twelfth century, the north Italian communes began to build meeting houses and offices for themselves, they followed the same scheme, as an established building type far accommodating and proclaiming a sovereign au¬thority (Figs. 5-7).
Finally, Italian versions of the scaled-down palace, the upper-hall house, can be found in the valleys east of Bergamo (Fig. 14), in Verona (Figs. I5-I6), several towns of medieval Lazio (Orvieto, Tarquinia, and Viterbo), Ascoli Piceno, and Castel Fiorentino (near Foggia; Fig. 17).
Their dates run from the ear1y twelfth to the early thirteenth century.
Relatively few Italian specimens have been published thus far, a dearth that probably re¬flects the recentness of urban archaeology in Italy.
Given that the known examples are scattered down the length of the peninsula, it would seem that the building type was widely diffused Italy by the central Middle Ages.
In short, the palatine residence followed the same development in Italy as elsewhere in Europe, diffused among the elite classes and down the social ladder, from a scheme proper to the seats of emperors and kings to One adopted by lords and prelates and eventually, with the twelfth century, to one imitated in the residences of the urban well ¬to-do.
Pag.10
Hence it should not be surprising that the earliest masonry residences of Venice are of this particular type.
Two such edifices were built, one 'as an extension of the other, by the patriarchs of Grado, the first sometime before 1154, the second before the middle of the thirteenth century.
Four other twelfth-century examples of the type are attested by fragmentary remains of their ground-floor arcades (guarda Fig: 18).
As in the patriarchal palace, each arcade, and hence the façade of which it once was a pare, decorates one of the long sides of the block; unlike the palace, however, each of these arcades faces landward and overlooks a courtyard, like a pala¬tine building.
The late-twelfth-century nucleus of the Fondaco dei Turchi, near S. Giovanni Decollato, seems to have been still another early instance, and also faced landward (Figs. 133-34).
A thirteenth¬-century version survives undiminished, albeit altered by an addition, in the Casa dell' Angelo, at the cor¬ner of Rio della Canonica and Rio dell' Angelo (Figs. 20-21); another, handsomely finished but radically restructured, is Ca' Lion-Morosini in campiello del Remer, near S. Giovanni Grisostomo (Fig. 47).
The second palace type found in Venice brings a radical reorientation of the building and its prin¬cipal façade, anew relationship with the urban fab¬ric, and a reorganization of the interior.
Ca' Farsetti is an early example (Figs. 169/0).
The façade now decorates one of the short sides of the structure, making the building seem taller in proportion to its width than the palaces and upper-hall houses of old, more compact and more massive.
Courtyard and stairs to the first floor have been relocated at the back, that is, beyond the other short side.
A minor façade with less elaborate articula¬tion may have marked this end of the building, but no medieval rear façades have survived, nor are any records of their elevations known.
On the ground floor or the front façade may be opened in its entirety as an arcade, or may have a screen of a few columns and arches before a recessed entrance porch.
A long straight hall leads down the central axis of the build¬ing, from the front arcade or porch to the rear court, giving on to service or rental rooms on either side.
Pag.11
A mezzanine, if such there be, may contain more service rooms or rental rooms, of which the latter may form a single unit with rental rooms beneath them on the ground floor.
Mezzanine windows may be tucked inside the portico of the arcade or porch.
On the first floor the traditional hall lies directly behind the main façade.
But the rear of the hall now opens into a long hallway leading down thy central axis of the building.
The traditional hall has become a kind of transept to the new hallway; in plan, the two rooms together form a capital letter “T”, of which the traditional hall is the crossbar and the hallway the stern. The rooms are lit from two rows of serried windows: ornate ones on the main façade and of unknown character at the far end of the hallway.
The attic is often no more than a shallow open loggia atop the façade, as wide as the building and bordered at the front by a low colonnade.
As this building type evolved, the transept hall contracted, leaving space for a small chamber at One or each front corner of the first floor, and giving the plan of the two rooms the shape of an “L” or “T” with shortened cross bar.
Examples are Ca' Loredan and Ca' Falier (Figs. I97 and 44, respectively).
Eventually, the transept disappeared entirely, giving way to large chambers at the building's front and leaving the long hallway between them, now effectively the building's one and only hall.
Exte¬rior articulation developed in tandem with the plain: on the ground floor, arcades disappeared, and there remained only colonnaded porches, as wide as the lower hallway, with tall windows left and right.
On the first floor, a continuous bank of windows con¬tinued to express the front face of the building's main room, whether a diminished hall or the for¬ward end of a hal1way, but one or two single win¬dows now appeared left and right, lighting the new corner chambers.
Framed by walls on all four sides, corner chambers were capable, furthermore, of sup¬porting low corner towers at the roof line, which allowed the truly vain to crown a residence with a seigneurial accent.
Pag.12
Besides Ca' Farsetti and Ca' Loredan, cited above, Romanesque examples of the building type include Ca' Barzizza on the Grand Canal near S. Silvestro (late twelfth century in its nucleus), Ca' da Mosto on the Grand Canal near SS. Apostoli, and Ca' Donà and Ca' Businello on the Grand Canal near Rio dei Meloni (all second quarter of the thirteenth century; Figs. 29, 38).
An example of the type's more evolved form, with an “L”-shaped hall, from the mid-thirteenth century, is Ca' Falier near SS. Apostoli (Figs. 44-45).
By the later thirteenth century this second palace type had become the standard in Venice; all later palace architecture in the city, whether Gothic, Renaissance, or Baroque in style, descends from it. Its origins remain obscure.
Most scholars assume that somewhere in early medieval or ancient architecture must lie a model from which the type derives.
Despite a century or so of searching, however, no convincing prototype has been found.
Instead, the problem has grown into a tangle of unsustainable hypotheses built on false assumptions, circular reasoning, and improbable ideas.
Until quite recently, far instance, critics hunted exclusively far exterior resemblances, looking far an elevation that anticipated the typically Vene¬tian façade.
Their preferred example in Venice was the Fondaco dei Turchi’s façade toward the Grand Canal.
Here two superposed arcades stand between flat, windowed walls that rise above the general roof line, forming low square towers (Fig. 137).
Yet this elevation was uncommon in Venice.
Only one other building among the seventeen Roman¬esque palaces known from standing remains or from their images in Jacopo de' Barbari's woodcut view of Venice of 1500 undeniably had a similar, tow¬ered façade, namely, the now-destroyed Ca' Molin dalle Due Torri on the Riva degli Schiavoni (Fig. 35).
Other early palaces with pairs of tower are mentioned in documents but no longer exist, for example, palaces of the Contarini, Sgaldario, and Giustinian at, respectively, S. Stae, S. Margarita, and the western bend of the Grand Canal.
It is unwise, however, to conclude from terse mentions that these buildings resembled the Fondaco dei Turchi.
The towers of the Contarini palace may have been a mere decorative flourish, while those of the Sgaldario's building are explicitly described as of unequal size.