already a distinct Gothic, curiously developed from Lombardic and
Northern (German?) forms; and the influence of the principles exhibited
in the vast churches of St. Paul and the Frari began rapidly to affect
the Venetian-Arab school. Still the two systems never became united; the
Venetian policy repressed the power of the church, and the Venetian
artists resisted its example; and thenceforward the architecture of the
city becomes divided into ecclesiastical and civil: the one an
ungraceful yet powerful form of the Western Gothic, common to the whole
peninsula, and only showing Venetian sympathies in the adoption of
certain characteristic mouldings; the other a rich, luxuriant, and
entirely original Gothic, formed from the Venetian-Arab by the influence
of the Dominican and Franciscan architecture, and especially by the
engrafting upon the Arab forms of the most novel feature of the
Franciscan work, its traceries. These various forms of Gothic, the
_distinctive_ architecture of Venice, chiefly represented by the
churches of St. John and Paul, the Frari, and San Stefano, on the
ecclesiastical side, and by the Ducal palace, and the other principal
Gothic palaces, on the secular side, will be the subject of the third
division of the essay.

SECTION XXXIV. Now observe. The transitional (or especially Arabic)
style of the Venetian work is centralized by the date 1180, and is
transformed gradually into the Gothic, which extends in its purity from
the middle of the thirteenth to the beginning of the fifteenth century;
that is to say, over the precise period which I have described as the
central epoch of the life of Venice. I dated her decline from the year
1418; Foscari became doge five years later, and in his reign the first
marked signs appear in architecture of that mighty change which Philippe
de Commynes notices as above, the change to which London owes St.
Paul's, Rome St. Peter's, Venice and Vicenza the edifices commonly