Why Ruskin called it the central building of the world
Understanding the Doge's Palace façade
The palace is the defining example of Venetian Gothic, and its most remarkable feature is that it appears to be built upside down. This explains what you are looking at and why it works.
Book your Doge's Palace entry ↗The inversion
Conventional stone architecture puts mass at the bottom and lightness at the top, because that is how loads travel. The Doge's Palace does the reverse: an open arcade of thirty-six columns at ground level, a loggia of seventy-one columns and quatrefoil tracery above that, and on top of both a nearly solid wall of marble containing the largest rooms in the building. The heavy element is carried on two storeys that are mostly void.
Why it stands up
Because the upper wall is not as heavy as it looks. It is a relatively thin screen of marble facing over a lighter core, and the loads are concentrated into the columns rather than spread along a solid line. It is essentially an early curtain wall dressed as a masonry one — and the arcade below is doing considerably less work than the eye assumes.
The diamond pattern
The upper wall is faced in alternating pink Verona marble and white Istrian stone laid in a diamond lattice. The effect at a distance is of a woven textile rather than masonry, which is deliberate: this is a merchant republic that made its money in cloth and spice, and the façade of its seat of government looks like a fabric.
The quatrefoil band
The band of four-lobed openings above the loggia columns is the most copied motif in Venice and turns up on palaces along the Grand Canal and, later, on nineteenth-century buildings across Europe. It also does something clever: by perforating the exact line where the eye expects a solid transition, it makes the wall above appear to float.
The corner capitals
The ground-arcade columns carry carved capitals, and the two at the corners are narrative. The one nearest the Ponte della Paglia shows the drunkenness of Noah; the one at the Porta della Carta end shows the judgement of Solomon. Their placement is not accidental — they faced the people arriving to do business with the Republic's courts.
The columns look too short
They do, and they are. The ground level of Venice has risen substantially since the fourteenth century as the city subsided and the lagoon rose, and the bases of the arcade columns are now partly buried. They were designed with visible plinths and considerably more elegant proportions than they now show.
Gothic, but not northern Gothic
Venetian Gothic borrows the pointed arch from the north and the ogee, the interlace and the surface patterning from the Islamic architecture Venice traded with across the eastern Mediterranean. It is a hybrid, and the palace is the most complete statement of it: a Gothic frame carrying Byzantine and Islamic ornament on a building serving a republic that thought of itself as neither eastern nor western.
Ruskin
John Ruskin devoted much of The Stones of Venice to this building and called it the central building of the world, meaning that it was the point at which the Roman, Lombard and Arab architectural traditions met. His enthusiasm shaped how the Victorian world saw Venice, and a great deal of Gothic Revival architecture in Britain traces back to his drawings of these columns.