Architecture - Venice and the Veneto - page 559

Venetians avoid walking between the San Marco quay pillars, where criminals were once executed. Ac-
cording to legend, anyone wandering between these pillars will meet an untimely demise - doomed Mar-
in Falier was beheaded eight months after supposedly passing between them to accept the post of doge.
Renaissance Palaces
As the Renaissance swept into Venice, the changes became noticeable along the Grand
Canal: pointed Gothic arcades relaxed into rounded archways, repeated geometric forms
and serene order replaced Gothic trefoils, and palaces became anchored by bevelled
blocks of rough-hewn, rusticated marble. One Renaissance trendsetter was Bergamo-born
Mauro Codussi (c 1440-1504), whose pleasing classical vocabulary applied equally to
churches, the 15th-century Torre dell'Orologio and several Grand Canal palaces, includ-
ing Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi, better known today as Casinó di Venezia.
Michele Sanmicheli (1484-1559) was from Verona but, like Sansovino, he worked in
Rome, fleeing its sacking in 1527. The Venetian Republic kept him busy engineering de-
fence works for the city, including Le Vignole's Forte Sant'Andrea, also known as the
Castello da Mar (Sea Castle). Even Sanmicheli's private commissions have an imposing
imperial Roman grandeur; the Grand Canal's Palazzo Grimani (built 1557-59) incorpor-
ates a triumphal arch on the ground floor, and feels more suited to its current use as the
city's appeal court than a 16th-century pleasure palace. Sanmicheli is also occasionally
credited with the other Renaissance Palazzo Grimani in Castello, along with Sansovino -
but Venetian Renaissance man Giovanni Grimani seems to have mostly designed his own
home as a suitably classical showcase for his collection of ancient Roman statuary, now in
the Museo Correr.
Palladio
As the baroque began to graft flourishes and curlicues onto basic Renaissance shapes,
Padua-born Andrea Palladio (1508-80) carefully stripped them away, and in doing so laid
the basis for modern architecture. His facades are an open-book study of classical archi-
tecture, with rigorously elemental geometry - a triangular pediment supported by round
columns atop a rectangle of stairs - that lends an irresistible logic to the stunning exteriors
of San Giorgio Maggiore and Redentore.
Critic John Ruskin detested Renaissance architecture in general and Palladio in particu-
lar, and ranted about San Giorgio Maggiore in his three-volume book The Stones of
Venice (1851-53): 'It is impossible to conceive a design more gross, more barbarous,
more childish in conception, more servile in plagiarism, more insipid in result, more con-