reader. The face of the palace, from this point to the Porta della
Carta, was built at the instance of that noble Doge Mocenigo beside
whose tomb you have been standing; at his instance, and in the beginning
of the reign of his successor, Foscari; that is to say, circa 1424. This
is not disputed; it is only disputed that the sea facade is earlier; of
which, however, the proofs are as simple as they are incontrovertible:
for not only the masonry, but the sculpture, changes at the ninth lower
shaft, and that in the capitals of the shafts both of the upper and
lower arcade: the costumes of the figures introduced in the sea facade
being purely Giottesque, correspondent with Giotto's work in the Arena
Chapel at Padua, while the costume on the other capitals is
Renaissance-Classic: and the lions' heads between the arches change at
the same point. And there are a multitude of other evidences in the
statues of the angels, with which I shall not at present trouble the
reader.

SECTION XLVI. Now, the architect who built under Foscari, in 1424
(remember my date for the decline of Venice, 1418), was obliged to
follow the principal forms of the older palace. But he had not the wit
to invent new capitals in the same style; he therefore clumsily copied
the old ones. The palace has seventeen main arches on the sea facade,
eighteen on the Piazzetta side, which in all are of course carried by
thirty-six pillars; and these pillars I shall always number from right
to left, from the angle of the palace at the Ponte della Paglia to that
next the Porta della Carta. I number them in this succession, because I
thus have the earliest shafts first numbered. So counted, the 1st, the
18th, and the 36th, are the great supports of the angles of the palace;
and the first of the fifteenth century series, being, as above stated,
the 9th from the sea on the Piazzetta side, is the 26th of the entire
series, and will always in future be so numbered, so that all numbers