"We see here with surprise and delight oriental fancy grafting the full on the empty instead of the empty on the full. A colonnade of robust shafts bears a second and a lighter one decorated with ogives and with trefoils; while above this support, so frail, expands a massive wall of red and white marble, whose courses {354} interlace each other in designs and reflect the light. Above, a cornice of open pyramids, pinnacles, spiracles, and festoons intersect the sky with its border, forming a marble vegetation bristling and blooming above the vermilion and pearly tones of the façade, reminding one of the luxuriant Asiatic or African cactus which on its native soil mingles its leafy poniards and purple petals. "You enter, and immediately the eyes are filled with forms. Around two cisterns covered with sculptured bronze, four façades develop their statues and architectural details glowing with the freshness of the early Renaissance. There is nothing bare or cold; everything is decked with reliefs and figures, the pedantry of erudites and critics not having intervened, under the pretext of purity and correctness, to restrain a lively imagination and the craving for that which pleases the eye. People are not austere in Venice; they do not restrict themselves to the prescriptions of books; they do not make up their minds to go and yawn admiringly at a façade sanctioned by Vitruvius; they want an architectural work to absorb and delight the whole sentient being; they deck it with ornaments, columns, and statues; they render it luxurious and joyous. They place colossal pagans like Mars and Neptune on it, and biblical figures like Adam and Eve; the sculptors of the fifteenth century enliven it with their somewhat realistic and lank bodies, and those of the sixteenth with their animated and muscular forms. Rizzo and Sansovino here rear the precious marbles of their stairways, the delicate stuccoes and elegant caprices of their arabesques: armor and boughs, griffins and fawns; fantastic flowers and capering goats, a profusion of poetic plants and joyous, bounding animals. You mount these princely steps with a sort of timidity and respect, ashamed of the dull black coat you wear, reminding one by contrast of the embroidered silk gowns, the sweeping, pompous dalmatics, the Byzantine tiaras and brodekins, all that seigneurial magnificence for which these marble staircases were designed; and, at the top, to greet you, are two superb women, Power and Justice, and a doge receiving from them the sword of command and of battle. [Illustration: _Court of the Ducal Palace; Giants' Staircase._]