We pass through the Porta della Carta, enter the Cortile and turn to examine Riccio’s famous statues of Adam and Eve opposite the Giant’s Staircase. The inner façade was begun on the E. side by Riccio and continued by Pietro Lombardo and Scarpagnino. The two cisterns of bronze are fine Renaissance work of 1556-57. We ascend the stately Scala dei Giganti and pass Sansovino’s statues of Mars and Neptune at the top. Here, between the two pagan deities, the later Doges were crowned. The Doge stood surrounded by the electors, and was acclaimed by the people below in the courtyard; a line of ducal guards kept the staircase. We mount[94] the Scala d’ Oro to the chambers where the rulers of the Republic held their meetings. Nearly the whole of the architectural decorations and paintings we shall see are later than 1577, when the disastrous fire occurred which destroyed the priceless works of Gentile da Fabriano, Vittore Pisano and the Bellini. With few exceptions they are all by the later Venetian masters, characterised by vigour and breadth of treatment rather than careful execution and reverent feeling. It was a time when the rulers of Venice, their initiative and courage gone, lived on the traditions of a great past, for Lepanto was but a magnificent episode. In few cases was the artist contemporary with the events he depicted. The paintings do, however, enable us to realise the costumes and architecture of the declining Venice of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They have suffered much at the hands of the restorer. When Goethe was examining Titian’s Death of Peter Martyr in S. Zanipolo in 1790, a Dominican friar addressed him and asked if he would like to see the artists at work above. There in the monastery he found an academy of picture restorers established by the Republic working under a director on the paintings of the Ducal Palace. In 1846 Ruskin saw a picture by Paul Veronese, lying on the floor of a room in the palace, in process of restoration. The restorer was working on the head of a white horse, using a brush fixed at the end of a five-foot stick which he dipped into a common house-painter’s pot. In the vestibule (Atrio Quadrato) is a fine ceiling-painting by Tintoretto, Doge Lorenzo Priuli receiving the Sword of State from the Hands of Justice, one of a series of allegorical and devotional pictures, the main feature being the portrait of the Doge, which we shall meet with again and again in the decoration of the palace. The walls are hung with portraits of Procurators of St Mark by the same master, who was their official portrait painter. To the R. is the Hall of the Four Doors (Sala delle Quattro Porte), designed by Palladio. On the R. wall is a late work by Titian, Doge Antonio Grimani kneeling before Faith, a beautiful creation: the figures on either side are by his nephew, Marco Vecelli. Historical and allegorical scenes cover the remaining walls. [Illustration: DUCAL PALACE--THE MARRIAGE OF ST CATHERINE