Venetian Gothic architecture
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.
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.
Above that the normal building material is brick, although the grander facades were usually faced with Istrian stone, a fine limestone that is not strictly a marble, although it is often so called.
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.
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.
[8] The Gothic Period arrived in Venice during a time of great affluence, when the upper class was funding the building of new churches as well as new, opulent homes for themselves.
Influenced by the Doge's Palace, the creators of this new style meshed Gothic, Byzantine, and Oriental themes to produce a totally unique approach to architecture.
The Venetian Gothic, while far more intricate in style and design than previous construction types in Venice, never allowed more weight or size than necessary to support the building.
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.
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.
[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.
The style was revived in the 19th century, largely through the influence of British architectural critic John Ruskin and his treatise The Stones of Venice.
Because of the shortage of space in Venice, most palazzi were high (by medieval standards) rectangular boxes, with an ornamented facade, but very often plain on the other external elevations.
Hence the basic shape suited 19th-century requirements very well, and the Venetian-ness of the style appeared mainly in the elaborate windows, cornice and other decoration to the facade.
