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Updated: June 21, 2025
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.
It was also Ziani who had the columns of S. Theodore and the Lion erected on the Molo, while it was in his reign that the first Rialto bridge was begun. Having been Doge for six years, he retired to the monastery of S. Giorgio and there died some years later, leaving a large fortune to the poor of Venice and the church of S. Mark.
His first act as Doge was to punish the assassination of his predecessor, Vitale Michiel, who, for what was held to be the bad management of an Eastern campaign which utterly and disastrously failed, and for other reasons, was killed by the mob outside S. Zaccaria. To him succeeded Ziani and the close of the long feud between the Pope and the Emperor.
As, therefore, the old Byzantine building was, at the time when those works first interfered with it, in the form given to it by Ziani, I shall hereafter always speak of it as the Ziani Palace; and this the rather, because the only chronicler whose words are perfectly clear respecting the existence of part of this palace so late as the year 1422, speaks of it as built by Ziani.
We shall see the new buildings consume, and take the place of, the Ziani Palace, piece by piece: and when the Ziani Palace was destroyed, they fed upon themselves; being continued round the square, until, in the sixteenth century, they reached the point where they had been begun in the fourteenth, and pursued the track they had then followed some distance beyond the junction; destroying or hiding their own commencement, as the serpent, which is the type of eternity, conceals its tail in its jaws.
This first period includes the rise of Venice, her noblest achievements, and the circumstances which determined her character and position among European powers; and within its range, as might have been anticipated, we find the names of all her hero princes of Pietro Urseolo, Ordalafo Falier, Domenico Michieli, Sebastiano Ziani, and Enrico Dandolo.
In this work the painter's wife sat for Venice, as she sat also for Europa in the picture which we have just seen in the Ante-Collegio. The greatest moment in the career of Ziani was the meeting of Barbarossa and the Pope, Alexander III, at S. Mark's, which has already been described; but his reign was eventful throughout.
This first period includes the rise of Venice, her noblest achievements, and the circumstances which determined her character and position among European powers; and within its range, as might have been anticipated, we find the names of all her hero princes, of Pietro Urseolo, Ordalafo Falier, Domenico Michieli, Sebastiano Ziani, and Enrico Dandolo.
The palace of Ziani was destroyed; the existing facade to the Piazzetta built, so as both to continue and to resemble, in most particulars, the work of the Great Council Chamber.
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