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The Gürzenich House, now used for public balls and imperial receptions, is a magnificent fifteenth-century building, adorned with dwarf towers at each corner, a high, carved and stone-roofed niche with statue over the round-arched door, transom windows filled with stained glass, and carvings of shields, animal heads, colonnettes and other devices between and above these windows.
In the former, two accommodating lions have elongated their bodies to form the framework, their heads doing duty for the head of the bed, and their tails being curled up under the feet of the sleeper. The bed is surmounted by a kind of canopy, under which the mummy lay in state. In shape it is a temple, the rounded roof being supported by elegant colonnettes of painted wood.
It is the same hour of sunset as when she had sat there three days before, knitting beside the open casement, with the twisted marble colonnettes and delicate tracery. The same subtile fragrance of the magnolia rises upward from the waxy leaves of the tall flowering trees growing beneath in the Moorish garden.
Here is the Euphrasian altar, standing on a slab of marble with sunk squares in the corners for the bases of the ciborium columns, and enough panels and colonnettes to make a restoration of the chancel of the choir, though it is equally likely that they belonged to a baldacchino above the font, similar to that which still exists at Cividale, and once existed at Pola and at Cittanova.
Some are cipollino, and two are apparently cut from antique columns, one having four shafts attached to the central cylindrical mass, and the corresponding one on the other side being panelled, with octagonal colonnettes attached. The pier at the choir steps has two small columns instead of one.
The knop has twisted colonnettes at the angles, with swags hanging from the lower parts, and half-length figures above a canopy with one arch and two half-arches on each face; on the flat surfaces between are miscellaneous saints; below are three bishops and three other saints, and below them are representations of the six days of creation; the words "Opvs· Presbyteri· Pavli· Silvii· Tivnio· lavs· Deo" can be deciphered.
Eitelberger says the paintings above the side altar are ascribed to the younger Palma. The cross of lamps which hangs in the nave recalls S. Mark's, Venice, as do the harmonious tone of the interior and the colonnettes of precious marbles of the pulpit. The great crucifix was brought from Venice in 1508. The organ was made by Frater Urbinus in 1485.
The next stage has twisted colonnettes at the angles, the third squat single shafts, and on a little crowning member pierced with four arches stands a gilded angel, the rest of the canopy being octagonal. The proportions of the figures are squat, and the carving rather rough.
The colonnettes and arch moulds are both twisted in this door; in that to the right they are plain; the figures on brackets are similar. The lintels and jambs have elaborate arabesque scrolls, which remind one of Provençal Romanesque ornament. The lower part of the wall has courses of pinkish marble among the white, and bands of inlaid ornament decorate both the wall and the campanile.
The imposing entrance court is a hundred and twelve metres in width by a hundred and fifty-two metres in length, and to see it as it was originally, before the destruction of the Galerie d'Ulysse, one must imagine it as closed in by a series of small pavilions with their frontons of colonnettes preceded only by a staircase and two drawbridges crossing the moat, which at that time surrounded the entire confines of the palace.
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