Around 1421 Marin Contarini - a member of one of the ruling Venetian families - began building a house on a site across the Grand Canal from the Rialto. This new palace replaced another, on the same site, which he had bought from his wife's family. More than twenty years later the scaffolding came down to reveal the most resplendent domestic Venetian-Gothic façade of them all. The house was a place to live and do business. It was also, and more obviously, an advertisement for the power and wealth of the Contarini clan. It is still among the most splendid buildings in Venice. More than two hundred years later, Louis XIV built a monument to power on a much grander scale. His palace frontage is not the jolliest Classical building in Paris, but it is still the most impressive and among the most magisterially consistent.

LRB 22 July 1993 | PDF Download