The Ducal Palace expresses the Gothic spirit to perfection. It was the great work of Venice at this period. The best architects, the best labourers, and the best painters were employed in beautifying it. At one time the palace fell into decay, and it was obvious to everyone that it should be rebuilt and enlarged. But the alteration would be extremely expensive. Therefore a law was passed preventing anyone suggesting such alterations unless he had previously paid one thousand ducats to the State. At last a man arose who cared not for the thousand ducats, and suggested the necessary alterations. The palace was then rebuilt. It was palace, prison, senate-house, and office of public business, all in one. There were thirty-six great pillars supporting the lower stories alone, all decorated in the richest possible manner. There was no end to the fantasies of the sculptors at that period--exquisite curves, studied outlines, graceful but complex, solid and strong and beautifully proportioned braided work; lilies and flowers of all kinds intertwined. Much of the sculpture is snow-white, with gold as a background; some of it has glass mosaic let into the hollows. The cross is used a good deal; also the peacock, the vine, the dove. [Illustration: THE DOGANA AND SALUTE] The palace of Semitecolo has some beautiful early-Gothic windows, having false cusps in the arches, so as to make the head a trefoil. One sees here the gradual growth of the arch until it culminates in the Doge's Palace type. There are beautiful balustrades to the balconies, original and belonging to the period. In the early-Gothic palaces one notices a certain softening of the angles--that is to say, in the fine fourteenth-century Gothic buildings. The early Gothic architecture has no cusps to the arches; it shows a transitional form between Venetian Romanesque and Venetian Gothic. There are first-floor arcades early-Gothic, with a somewhat Oriental curve in the arch derived by the early Venetian Gothics from Alexandria or Cairo. The capitals of the columns are characteristic of the period: there are dainty balconies with graceful, slender columns, and cusps to the arches. These Gothic palaces were built by a people who were laborious, brave, practical, and prudent; yet they had great ideas of the refinement of domestic life, and the Gothic palaces remain to-day much the same as when they were newly built--marble balconies, great strong sweeps of delicate-looking tracery, clustered arches. It is the Gothic window that is so perfect, so strong,--built, too, with material that was by no means good.