[57] Mr. Hope's Church, in Margaret Street, Portland Place. I do not
altogether like the arrangements of color in the brickwork; but
these will hardly attract the eye, where so much has been already
done with precious and beautiful marble, and is yet to be done in
fresco. Much will depend, however, upon the coloring of this latter
portion. I wish that either Holman Hunt or Millais could be
prevailed upon to do at least some of these smaller frescoes.
APPENDIX.
1. ARCHITECT OF THE DUCAL PALACE.
Popular tradition and a large number of the chroniclers ascribe the
building of the Ducal Palace to that Filippo Calendario who suffered
death for his share in the conspiracy of Faliero. He was certainly one
of the leading architects of the time, and had for several years the
superintendence of the works of the Palace; but it appears, from the
documents collected by the Abbé Cadorin, that the first designer of the
Palace, the man to whom we owe the adaptation of the Frari traceries to
civil architecture, was Pietro Baseggio, who is spoken of expressly as
"formerly the Chief Master of our New Palace,"[58] in the decree of
1361, quoted by Cadorin, and who, at his death, left Calendario his
executor. Other documents collected by Zanotto, in his work on "Venezia
e le sue Lagune," show that Calendario was for a long time at sea, under
the commands of the Signory, returning to Venice only three or four
years before his death; and that therefore the entire management of the
works of the Palace, in the most important period, must have been
entrusted to Baseggio.
It is quite impossible, however, in the present state of the Palace, to
distinguish one architect's work from another in the older parts; and I
have not in the text embarrassed the reader by any attempt at close
definition of epochs before the great junction of the Piazzetta Façade
with the older palace in the fifteenth century. Here, however, it is
necessary that I should briefly state the observations I was able to
make on the relative dates of the earlier portions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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