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Updated: June 23, 2025
The reign of Foscari followed, gloomy with pestilence and war; a war in which large acquisitions of territory were made by subtle or fortunate policy in Lombardy, and disgrace, significant as irreparable, sustained in the battles on the Po at Cremona, and in the marshes of Caravaggio.
But Mocenigo was not to be deterred, and rising in his place with his thousand ducat penalty in his hand, he urged with such force upon the Council the necessity of rebuilding that he carried his point, and the lovely building much as we now know it was begun. That was in 1422. In 1423 Mocenigo died, his last words being a warning against the election of Foscari as his successor.
The Council of Ten, which had a hand in everything, which disposed without appeal of life and death, of S financial affairs and military appointments, which included the Inquisitors among its number, and which overthrew Foscari, as it had overthrown so many powerful men before this Council was yearly chosen afresh from the whole governing body, the Gran Consiglio, and was consequently the most direct expression of its will.
I have always surprised my confessor at Easter by the extraordinary number of things I have left undone." "I daresay," laughed Foscari, "but I remember that you were not too lazy to save me from drowning when I fell into the Grand Canal in carnival." "I forgot that the water was so cold," said Venier. "If I had guessed how chilly it was, I should certainly not have pulled you out.
Even before reaching the Rialto, you have, on the left, in ascending the Canal, the Palace Dario, in Gothic style; the Palace Venier, which presents itself by an angle, with its ornamentation, its precious marbles and medallions, in the Lombard style; the Fine Arts, a classic façade joined to the old Ecole de la Charité and surmounted by a figure riding upon a lion; the Contarini Palace, in architectural style of Scamozzi; the Rezzonico Palace with three superimposed orders; the triple Giustiniani Palace, in the style of the Middle Ages, in which resides M. Natale Schiavoni, a descendant of the celebrated painter Schiavoni, who possesses a gallery of pictures and a beautiful daughter, the living reproduction of a canvas painted by her ancestor; The Foscari Palace, recognizable by its low door, by its two stories of columnets supporting lancets and trefoils, where in other days were lodged the sovereigns who visited Venice, but now abandoned; the Balbi Palace, from the balcony of which the princes leaned to watch the regattas which took place upon the Grand Canal with so much pomp and splendor, in the palmy days of the Republic; the Pisani Palace, in the German style of the beginning of the fifteenth century; and the Tiepolo Palace, very smart and relatively modern.
Byron's curiously marked predilection for dramatic composition, not merely for dramatic poems, as Manfred or Cain, but for genuine plays, as Marino Faliero, Werner, the Two Foscari, was the only sign of his approach to the really positive spirit.
Here he wrote "Marino Faliero," "The Two Foscari," "Morganti Maggiore," "Sardanapalus," "The Blues," "The fifth canto of Don Juan," "Cain," "Heaven and Earth," and "The Vision of Judgment." I looked in at the court of the palace, a pleasant, quiet place, where he used to work, and tried to guess which were the windows of his apartments.
But Foscari was elected, and the downfall of Venice dates from that moment. Pietro Mocenigo was his successor. In pictures this great church is not very rich, but there is a Cima in the right transept, a "Coronation of the Virgin," which is sweet and mellow. The end wall of this transept is pierced by one of the gayest and pleasantest windows in the city, from a design of Bartolommeo Vivarini.
There is a more formal greatness in the high square Gothic Foscari, just below it, one of the noblest creations of the fifteenth century, a masterpiece of symmetry and majesty. Dedicated to-day to official uses it is the property of the State it looks conscious of the consideration it enjoys, and is one of the few great houses within our range whose old age strikes us as robust and painless.
Then all at once Foscari saw the rings on his fingers. "It is Contarini," he cried, "and somebody has shaved his head!" He burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter, in which the others joined, till the house rang again, and the banished servants came running down to see what was the matter.
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