Doge's Palace, Venice
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
The Doge's Palace can refer to: The Doge's Palace (Italian: Palazzo Ducale di Venezia) is a gothic palace in Venice. The palace was the residence of the Doge of Venice.
Its two most visible façades look towards the Venetian Lagoon and St Mark's Square, or rather the Piazzetta. The use of arcading in the lower stories produces an interesting "gravity-defying" effect. There is also effective use of colour contrasts.
The current palace was largely constructed from 1309 to 1324, designed perhaps by Filippo Calendario. It replaced earlier fortified buildings of which relatively little is known. Giovanni and Bartolomeo Bon created the Porta della Carta in 1442, a monumental late-gothic gate on the Piazzetta side of the palace. This gate leads to a central courtyard.
The palace was badly damaged by fire in 1574. In the subsequent rebuilding work it was decided to respect the original Gothic style, despite the submission of a neo-classical alternative design by Palladio. However, there are some classical features — for example, since the 16th century, the palace has been linked to the prison by the Bridge of Sighs.
As well as being the ducal residence, the palace housed political institutions of the Republic of Venice until the Napoleonic occupation of the city. Venice was ruled by an aristocratic elite, but there was a facility for citizens to submit written complaints at what was known as the Bussola chamber.
The building is preserved as a museum. Inside, the visitor can see paintings by Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, which glorify the Venetian state. In 2007, there was a temporary exhibition on "Venice and Islam".
Contents |
See also
Romania
The Central rail station, in Iaşi, built in 1870, had as a model the architecture of the Doge's Palace. On the central part, there is a loggia with five arcades and pillars made of curved stone, having at the top three ogives.
Russia
In Moscow, the Central House of Artists / Tretyakov Gallery building on Krymsky Val street, near the Fallen Monument Park, was built in the 1970s as resembling the Doge's Palace, with lower part made of huge windows and upper part looking, from the outside, as a solid wall, also creating a "gravity-defying" view.
United Kingdom
There are a number of nineteenth-century imitations of the palace's architecture in the United Kingdom, e.g. the Wool Exchange, Bradford, the Wedgwood Institute, Burslem, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh and Templeton's Carpet Factory in Glasgow. These revivals of Venetian Gothic were influenced by the theories of John Ruskin, author of the three-volume The Stones of Venice, which appeared in the 1850s.
United States
The Montauk Club in Park Slope, Brooklyn (1889) imitates elements of the palace's architecture, although the architect is usually said to have been inspired by another Venetian Gothic palace, the Ca' d'Oro.
The elaborate arched facade of the 1895 building of Congregation Ohabai Shalome in San Francisco is a copy in painted redwood of the Doge's Palace.
The ornate gothic style of the Doge's Palace (and other similar palaces throughout Italy) was impressively replicated in the Hall of Doges at the Davenport Hotel in Spokane, Washington by architect Kirtland Cutter.
