"You enter the courtyard, and immediately your eyes are filled with a new richness. Nothing is bare or cold. Erudite and critical pedantry has not here intervened, under the pretext of purity and correctness, to restrain lively imagination and the craving for visual enjoyment. The builders of Venice were not austere; they did not restrict themselves to the prescriptions of books; they did not make up their minds to yawn admiringly at a façade which had been sanctioned by Vitruvious; they wanted an architectural work to delight their whole sentient being. They decked it with ornaments, columns and statues, they rendered it luxurious and joyous. They placed colossal pagans like Mars and Neptune on it, and flanked them with biblical figures like Adam and Eve; the sculptors of the fifteenth century enlivened it with their lank realistic effigies, and those of the sixteenth with their animated and muscular statues. [Illustration: PLATE LXVIII SCALA DEI GIGANTI: DUCAL PALACE] "You mount the princely steps with a sort of timidity and respect, ashamed of the dull black coat you wear, and reminded by contrast of the embroidered silk robes, the pompous sweeping dalmatics, the Byzantine tiaras and brodekins,--all that seigniorial magnificence for which these marble stairways were designed. All the genius of the city at its brightest period assembled here to glorify imperial Venice in the erection of a memorial of her victories and an apotheosis of her grandeur." [Illustration: DUCAL PALACE[1] PIAZZETTA AND SEA FAÇADES]