for by the conjecture that the work of the building [the Campanile]
proceeded slowly, either with a view to allowing the foundations to
consolidate, or owing to lack of funds, and that the chroniclers
recorded each resumption of work as the beginning of the work. One point
may, perhaps, be fixt. The Campanile must have been some way above
ground by the year 997, for the hospital founded by the sainted Doge,
Pietro Orseolo, which is said to have been attached to the base of the
tower, was consecrated in that year. The Campanile was finished, as far
as the bell-chamber at least, in 1148, under the Doge Domenico Moresini,
whose sarcophagus and bust surmount the portal of the San Nicoll del
Lido.
The chroniclers are at variance among themselves as to the date of the
foundation, nor has an examination of the foundations themselves led to
any discovery which enables us to determine that date; but one or two
considerations would induce us to discard the earlier epochs. The
foundations must have been designed to carry a tower of the same
breadth, tho possibly not of the same height, as that which has recently
fallen. But in the year of 888 had the Venetians such a conception of
their greatness as to project a tower far more massive than any which
had been hitherto constructed in Italy? Did they possess the wealth to
justify them in such an enterprise? Would they have designed such a
tower to match St. Mark's, which was at that time a small church with
walls of wood? It is more probable that the construction of the
Campanile belongs to the period of the second church of St. Mark, which
was begun after the fire of 976 and consecrated in 1094.
The height of the Campanile at the time of its fall was 98.60 meters
(322 ft.), from the base to the head of the angel, tho a considerable
portion of this height was not added till 1510; its width at the base of
the shaft 12.80 meters (35 ft. 2 in.), and one meter (3 ft. 3 in.) less
at the top of the shaft. The weight has been calculated at about 18,000
tons.
Thanks to excavations at the base of the tower made by Com. Giacomo
Boni, at the request of Mr. C. H. Blackall, of Boston, U. S. A., in the
year 1885, a report of which was printed in the Archivio Veneto, we
possess some accurate knowledge about a portion of the foundation upon
which this enormous mass rested.
The subsoil of Venice is composed of layers of clay, sometimes
traversed by layers of peat, overlying profound strata of watery sand.
This clay is, in places, of a remarkably firm consistency; for example,
in the quarter of the town known as Dorsoduro or "hard-back," and at the
spot where the Campanile stood. A bore made at that point brought up a
greenish, compact clay mixed with fine shells. This clay, when dried,
offered the resisting power of half-baked brick. It is the remarkable
firmness of this clay which enabled the Venetians to raise so ponderous
a structure upon so narrow a foundation.
The builders of the Campanile proceeded as follows: Into this bed of
compact clay they first drove piles of about 9 1/2 in. in diameter with a
view to consolidate still further, by pressure, the area selected. That
area only extends 1.25 meter, or about 4 ft. beyond the spring of the
brickwork shaft of the tower. How deep these piles reach Boni's report
does not state. The piles, at the point where he laid the foundation
bare, were found to be of white poplar, in remarkably sound condition,
retaining their color, and presenting closely twisted fiber. The clay in
which they were embedded has preserved them almost intact. The piles
extended for one row only beyond the superimposed structure. On the top
of these piles the builders laid a platform consisting of two layers of
oak beams, crosswise. The lower layer runs in the line of the Piazza,
east to west, the upper in the line of the Piazzetta, north to south.
Each beam is square and a little over 4 in. thick. This oak platform
appears to be in bad condition; the timbers are blackened and friable.
While the excavation was in progress sea-water burst through the
interstices, which had to be plugged.
Upon this platform was laid the foundation proper. This consisted of
seven courses of stone of various sizes and of various kinds--sandstone
of two qualities, limestone from Istria and Verona, probably taken from
older buildings on the mainland, certainly not fresh-hewn from the
quarry. The seventh or lowest course was the deepest, and was the only
one which escaped, and that but slightly; the remaining six courses were
intended to be perpendicular. These courses varied widely from each
other in thickness--from 0.31 to 0.90 meters. They were composed of
different and ill-assorted stone, and were held together in places by
shallow-biting clamps of iron, and by a mortar of white Istrian lime,
which, not being hydraulic, and having little affinity for sand, had
become disintegrated. Boni calls attention to the careless structure of
this foundation proper, and maintains that it was designed to carry a
tower of about two-thirds of the actual height imposed upon it, but not
more.
Above the foundation proper came the base. This consisted of five
courses of stone set in stepwise. These courses of the base were all the
same kind of stone, in fairly regular blocks, and of fairly uniform
thickness. They were all intended to be seen, and originally rose from
the old brick pavement of the Piazza; but the gradual subsidence of the
soil--which is calculated as proceeding at the rate of nearly a meter
per 1,000 years--caused two and a half of these stepped courses to
disappear, and only two and a half emerged from the present pavement.
Thus the structure upon which the brick shaft of the Campanile rested
was composed of (1) the base of five stepped courses, (2) the
foundations of seven courses almost perpendicular, (3) the platform of
oak beams, and (4) the piles. The height of the foundation, including
the base, was 5.02 meters, about 16 ft., or one-twentieth of the height
they carried. Not only is this a very small proportion, but it will be
further observed that the tradition of star-shaped supports to the
foundations is destroyed, and that they covered a very restricted area.
In fact, the foundations of the Campanile belonged to the primitive or
narrow kind. The foundations of the Ducal Palace, on the other hand,
belonged to the more recent or extended kind. Those foundations do not
rest on piles, but on a very broad platform of larch beams--much thicker
than the oak beams of the Campanile platform--reposing directly on the
clay. Upon this platform, foundations with a distended escarpment were
built to carry the walls, the weight of which was thus distributed
equally over a wide area.
Little of the old foundations of the Campanile will remain when the work
on the new foundations is completed. The primitive piles and platform
are to stand; but new piles have been driven in all round the original
nucleus, and on them are being laid large blocks of Istrian stone, which
will be so deeply bonded into the old foundations that hardly more than
a central core of the early work will be left ...
In a peculiar fashion the Campanile of San Marco summed up the whole
life of the city--civil, religious, commercial, and military--and
became the central point of Venetian sentiment. For the tower served the
double needs of the ecclesiastic and the civic sides of the Republic.
Its bells marked the canonical hours; rang the workman to his work, the
merchant to his desk, the statesman to the Senate; they pealed for
victory or tolled for the demise of a Doge. The tower, moreover, during
the long course of its construction, roughly speaking, from the middle
of the tenth to the opening of the sixteenth centuries, was contemporary
with all that was greatest in Venetian history; for the close of the
tenth century saw the conquest of Dalmatia, and the foundations of
Venetian supremacy in the Adriatic--that water-avenue to the Levant and
the Orient--while by the opening of the sixteenth the Cape route had
been discovered, the League of Cambray was in sight, and the end at
hand.
The tower, too, was a landmark to those at sea, and when the mariner had
the Campanile of San Nicolo on the Lido covering the Campanile of St.
Marks, he knew he had the route home and could make the Lido port. The
tower was the center of popular festivals, such as that of the Svolo on
Giovedi grasso, when an acrobat descended by a rope from the summit of
the Campanile to the feet of the Doge, who was a spectator from the
loggia of the Ducal Palace.
HOW THE CAMPANILE FELL[49]
BY HORATIO T. BROWN
We come now to the dolorous moment of the fall in July, 1902.
Infiltration of water had been observed in the roof of Sansovino's
Loggetta where that roof joined the shaft of the Campanile. At this
point a thin ledge of stone, let into the wall of the Campanile,
projected over the junction between the leaden roof of the Loggetta and
the shaft of the tower. In order to remedy the mischief of infiltration
it was resolved to remove and replace this projecting ledge. To do this
a chase was made in the wall of the Campanile, which, at this point,
consisted of a comparatively modern surface of masonry, placed there to
repair the damage caused by lightning strokes.
This chase was cut, not piecemeal, but continuously. The work was
carried out on Monday, July 7th. During the process the architect in
charge became alarmed at the condition of the inner part of the wall
laid bare by the cut. He exprest his fears to his superiors, but
apparently no examination of the tower was made till the Thursday
following. Even then the imminence of the danger does not seem to have
been grasped. On Saturday, the 12th, a crack was observed spreading
upward in a sloping direction from the cut above the roof of the
Loggetta toward the northeast angle of the shaft, then crossing the
angle and running up almost perpendicularly in the line of the little
windows that gave light to the internal passage from the base to the
bell-chamber.
This crack assumed such a threatening aspect, and was making such
visible progress, that the authorities in charge of the tower felt bound
to inform the Prefect, tho the danger was represented as not immediate,
and the worst they expected was the fall of the angle where the crack
had appeared. A complete collapse of the whole tower was absolutely
excluded. As a precautionary measure the music in the Piazza was
suspended on Saturday evening. On Sunday orders were issued to endeavor
to bind the threatened angle.
But by Monday morning early (July 14th) it was evident that the
catastrophe could not be averted. Dust began to pour out of the widening
crack, and bricks to fall. A block of Istrian stone crashed down from
the bell-chamber, then a column from the same site. At 9.47 the ominous
fissure opened, the face of the Campanile toward the church and the
Ducal Palace bulged out, the angle on the top and the pyramid below it
swayed once or twice, and threatened to crush either the Sansovino's
Library or the Basilica of San Marco in their fall, then the whole
colossus subsided gently, almost noiselessly, upon itself, as it were in
a curtsey, the ruined brick and mortar spread out in a pyramidal heap, a
dense column of white powder rose from the Piazza, and the Campanile was
no more.
It is certainly remarkable, and by the people of Venice it is reckoned
as a miracle, that the tower in its fall did so little harm. Not a
single life was lost, tho the crowd in the Piazza was unaware of its
danger till about ten minutes before the catastrophe.
THE PALACE OF THE DOGES[50]
BY JOHN RUSKIN
The Ducal Palace, which was the great work of Venice, was built
successively in the three styles. There was a Byzantine Ducal Palace, a
Gothic Ducal Palace, and a Renaissance Ducal Palace. The second
superseded the first totally; a few stones of it (if indeed so much) are
all that is left. But the third superseded the second in part only, and
the existing building is formed by the union of the two. We shall review
the history of each in succession.
1st. The Byzantine Palace. In the year of the death of Charlemagne, 813,
the Venetians determined to make the island of Rialto the seat of the
government and capital of their state. Their Doge, Angelo or Agnello
Participazio, instantly took vigorous means for the enlargement of the
small group of buildings which were to be the nucleus of the future
Venice. He appointed persons to superintend the raising of the banks of
sand, so as to form more secure foundations, and to build wooden bridges
over the canals. For the offices of religion, he built the Church of
St. Mark; and on, or near, the spot where the Ducal Palace now stands,
he built a palace for the administration of the government. The history
of the Ducal Palace therefore begins with the birth of Venice, and to
what remains of it, at this day, is entrusted the last representation of
her power....
In the year 1106, it was for the second time injured by fire, but
repaired before 1116, when it received another emperor, Henry V. (of
Germany), and was again honored by imperial praise. Between 1173 and the
close of the century, it seems to have been again repaired and much
enlarged by the Doge Sebastian Ziani. Sansovino says that this Doge not
only repaired it, but "enlarged it in every direction;" and, after this
enlargement, the palace seems to have remained untouched for a hundred
years, until, in the commencement of the fourteenth century, the works
of the Gothic Palace were begun.
Venice was in the zenith of her strength, and the heroism of her
citizens was displaying itself in every quarter of the world. The
acquiescence in the secure establishment of the aristocratic power was
an expression, by the people, of respect for the families which had been
chiefly instrumental in raising the commonwealth to such a height of
prosperity....
In the first year of the fourteenth century, the Gothic Ducal Palace of
Venice was begun; and as the Byzantine Palace was, in its foundation,
coeval with that of the state, so the Gothic Palace was, in its
foundation, coeval with that of the aristocratic power. Considered as
the principal representation of the Venetian school of architecture, the
Ducal Palace is the Parthenon of Venice, and Gradenigo its Pericles.
Before it was finished, occasion had been discovered for farther
improvements. The Senate found their new Council Chamber inconveniently
small, and, about thirty years after its completion, began to consider
where a larger and more magnificent one might be built. The government
was now thoroughly established, and it was probably felt that there was
some meanness in the retired position, as well as insufficiency in the
size, of the Council Chamber on the Rio.
It appears from the entry still preserved in the Archivio, and quoted by
Cadorin, that it was on the 28th of December, 1340, that the
commissioners appointed to decide on this important matter gave in their
report to the Grand Council, and that the decree passed thereupon for
the commencement of a new Council Chamber on the Grand Canal.
The room then begun is the one now in existence, and its building
involved the building of all that is best and most beautiful in the
present Ducal Palace, the rich arcades of the lower stories being all
prepared for sustaining this Sala del Gran Consiglio. In saying that it
is the same now in existence, I do not mean that it has undergone no
alterations; it has been refitted again and again, and some portions of
its walls rebuilt; but in the place and form in which it first stood, it
still stands; and by a glance at the position which its windows occupy,
the spectator will see at once that whatever can be known respecting the
design of the Sea Façade, must be gleaned out of the entries which
refer to the building of this Great Council Chamber.
Cadorin quotes two of great importance, made during the progress of the
work in 1342 and 1344; then one of 1349, resolving that the works at the
Ducal Palace, which had been discontinued during the plague, should be
resumed; and finally one in 1362, which speaks of the Great Council
Chamber as having been neglected and suffered to fall into "great
desolation," and resolves that it shall be forthwith completed.
The interruption had not been caused by the plague only, but by the
conspiracy of Faliero, and the violent death of the master builder. The
work was resumed in 1362, and completed within the next three years, at
least so far as that Guariento was enabled to paint his Paradise on the
walls, so that the building must, at any rate, have been roofed by this
time. Its decorations and fittings, however, were long in completion;
the paintings on the roof being only executed in 1400....
The works of addition or renovation had now been proceeding, at
intervals, during a space of a hundred and twenty-three years. Three
generations at least had been accustomed to witness the gradual
advancement of the form of the Ducal Palace into more stately symmetry,
and to contrast the works of sculpture and painting with which it was
decorated--full of the life, knowledge, and hope of the fourteenth
century--with the rude Byzantine chiselling of the palace of the Doge
Ziani. The magnificent fabric just completed, of which the new Council
Chamber was the nucleus, was now habitually known in Venice as the
"Palazzo Nuovo;" and the old Byzantine edifice, now ruinous, and more
manifest in its decay by its contrast with the goodly stones of the
building which had been raised at its side, was of course known as the
"Palazzo Vecchio." That fabric, however, still occupied the principal
position in Venice. The new Council Chamber had been erected by the side
of it toward the Sea; but there was not then the wide quay in front, the
Riva dei Schiavoni, which now renders the Sea Façade as important as
that to the Piazzetta. There was only a narrow walk between the pillars
and the water; and the old palace of Ziani still faced the Piazzetta,
and interrupted, by its decrepitude, the magnificence of the square
where the nobles daily met.
Every increase of the beauty of the new palace rendered the discrepancy
between it and the companion building more painful; and then began to
arise in the minds of all men a vague idea of the necessity of
destroying the old palace, and completing the front of the Piazzetta
with the same splendor as the Sea Façade. But no such sweeping measure
of renovation had been contemplated by the Senate when they first formed
the plan of their new Council Chamber. First a single additional room,
then a gateway, then a larger room; but all considered merely as
necessary additions to the palace, not as involving the entire
reconstruction of the ancient edifice. The exhaustion of the treasury,
and the shadows upon the political horizon, rendered it more imprudent
to incur the vast additional expense which such a project involved; and
the Senate, fearful of itself, and desirous to guard against the
weakness of its own enthusiasm, passed a decree, like the effort of a
man fearful of some strong temptation to keep his thoughts averted from
the point of danger. It was a decree, not merely that the old palace
should not be rebuilt, but that no one should propose rebuilding it. The
feeling of the desirableness of doing so was too strong to permit fair
discussion, and the Senate knew that to bring forward such a motion was
to carry it.
The decree, thus passed in order to guard against their own weakness,
forbade any one to speak of rebuilding the old palace, under the penalty
of a thousand ducats. But they had rated their own enthusiasm too low;
there was a man among them whom the loss of a thousand ducats could not
deter from proposing what he believed to be for the good of the state.
Some excuse was given him for bringing forward the motion, by a fire
which occurred in 1419, and which injured both the Church of St. Mark's,
and part of the old palace fronting the Piazzetta. What followed, I
shall relate in the words of Sanuto.
"Therefore they set themselves with all diligence and care to repair and
adorn sumptuously, first God's house; but in the Prince's house things
went on more slowly, for it did not please the Doge to restore it in the
form in which it was before; and they could not rebuild it altogether in
a better manner, so great was the parsimony of these old fathers;
because it was forbidden by laws, which condemned in a penalty of a
thousand ducats any one who should propose to throw down the old palace,
and to rebuild it more richly and with greater expense.
"But the Doge, who was magnanimous, and who desired above all things
what was honorable to the city, had the thousand ducats carried into the
Senate Chamber, and then proposed that the palace should be rebuilt;
saying: that, since the late fire had ruined in great part the Ducal
habitation (not only his own private palace, but all the places used for
public business), this occasion was to be taken for an admonishment sent
from God, that they ought to rebuild the palace more nobly, and in a way
more befitting the greatness to which, by God's grace, their dominions
had reached; and that his motive in proposing this was neither ambition,
nor selfish interest; that, as for ambition, they might have seen in the
whole course of his life, through so many years, that he had never done
anything for ambition, either in the city, or in foreign business; but
in all his actions had kept justice first in his thoughts, and then the
advantage of the state, and the honor of the Venetian name; and that, as
far as regarded his private interest, if it had not been for this
accident of the fire, he would never have thought of changing anything
in the palace into either a more sumptuous or a more honorable form; and
that during the many years in which he had lived in it, he had never
endeavored to make any change, but had always been content with it as
his predecessors had left it; and that he knew well that, if they took
in hand to build it as he exhorted and besought them, being now very
old, and broken down with many toils, God would call him to another life
before the walls were raised a pace from the ground. And that therefore
they might perceive that he did not advise them to raise this building
for his own convenience, but only for the honor of the city and its
Dukedom; and that the good of it would never be felt by him, but by his
successors." ...
Then he said, that 'in order, as he had always done, to observe the
laws, he had brought with him the thousand ducats which had been
appointed as the penalty for proposing such a measure, so that he might
prove openly to all men that it was not his own advantage that he
sought, but the dignity of the state.' There was no one (Sanuto goes on
to tell us) who ventured, or desired to oppose the wishes of the Doge;
and the thousand ducats were unanimously devoted to the expenses of the
work. "And they set themselves with much diligence to the work; and the
palace was begun in the form and manner in which it is at present seen;
but, as Mocenigo[51] had prophesied, not long after, he ended his life,
and not only did not see the work brought to a close, but hardly even
begun."
There are one or two expressions in the above extracts which, if they
stood alone, might lead the reader to suppose that the whole palace had
been thrown down and rebuilt. We must however remember, that, at this
time, the new Council Chamber, which had been one hundred years in
building, was actually unfinished, the council had not yet sat in it;
and it was just as likely that the Doge should then propose to destroy
and rebuild it, as in this year, 1853, it is that any one should propose
in our House of Commons to throw down the new Houses of Parliament,
under the title of the "old palace," and rebuild them....