In short, the best protective “walls” of Venice were simply the water that surrounded the city.įrom there it was not necessary to build a palace “fortress” to protect the doge and the powers of the city of Venice. In addition, it would also have been necessary to possess flat bottoms or very small keel boats such as those of the Venetian. The protection of Venice from external threats rested entirely on the lagoon.Īny enemy who wanted to attack Venice without knowing precisely its secret navigation routes could only run aground his boats on the sandbanks of the lagoon. The Doge's Palace: an “open” and non-fortified space The most obvious example is the Ca d'Oro on the Grand Canal, the great Ca' Foscari or Palazzo Priuli.īy building a palace reproducing both the structure and organization of the palace of King Solomon, King of the Holy Land, and the orientalism linked to the evangelist Saint Mark himself, whose body had been brought back from Alexandria to Egypt, Venice realized a perfect symbolic synthesis as to the image of the independent and powerful city that it was wanted both to impose on the world and pass on to the people of Venice. The Doge's Palace with the introduction these oriental architectural motifs, many Venetian nobles in turn began to incorporate them into their own palaces.Ī way for them to “get closer” to power by appropriating the same architectural symbols as those of the Palace. It should be understood that Venice, with its privileged trade with the East, was particularly well placed to know in detail the architectural and decorative principles of the Islamic world of the time. Mark's Basin, a diamond design that was originally made of bricks both in eastern Turkey but also in Iran.Īnd one can complement this Orientalist painting with the double brace arch used in the Doge's Palace, also typically of Islamic origin. The same type of aliasing was also found on the mosques of Cairo and Baghdad.Īnother example of Oriental inspiration is the Seldjukide pattern of tiles that cover the top of the facade on the side of the St. Particularly as regards the sibling, very Islamic, of the ridge of the Ducal Palace directly derived from the type of whiting used in Syrian palaces but also in the Mamluk mosques. The ornaments of the facade of the Doge's Palace are indeed typical of the ornaments of the religious buildings of the Middle East. The resumption of these Orientalist elements is another way for Venice to show its filiation with the palace of the Grand King. This symbolic claim of King Solomon's Palace is also amplified by all the Orientalist elements of architecture and decoration that have been integrated into the Doge's Palace. In our “terrestrial” palaces, we begin with foundations and massive infrastructure, designed to bear the weight of the architectural ensemble that will rise above it.Ī large “box” has been placed on porticoes that transmit their load directly to the pilings of the foundations by a system of arches and vaults very elaborate in this sense. This lagoon constraint was at the origin of the design of the Ducal Palace, namely that it was conceived contrary to the traditional laws of architecture. The construction of the Doge's Palace, like that of the other Venetian buildings, obviously had to take into account the constraints associated with a construction carried out on the water, with the foundations of stilts and all the fragility that it means. These architectural choices, which have managed to combine technical constraints of lagoon construction and harmony of proportions, are at the origin of the visual success but also of the architectural performance represented by the Doge's Palace. In addition, the columns on the ground floor, excluding their capitals, have a height exactly equal to half the height of their floor.Īnd many other examples of this harmony of proportions could also be cited. The proportions on the vertical plane are also remarkable since, if one divides its height by four, we notice that each arcade level of the first two levels corresponds to a quarter of the total height. The height and total depth of the wing are indeed the same and correspond to one third of the total length of the facade. Mark's Basin can be seen as an alignment of three cubes. The wing of the Doge's Palace on the side of the St. The Doge's palce is a marvel of architectural balance.
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