 |
|
||||||||||
 |
 |
||||||||||||||
|
 |
||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
Great Discoveries "Personal Tour Guides" will provide you with the most enjoyable and informative way to visit the Doge Palace. Our carefully researched tour identifies and locates the most relevant treasures to ensure that you do not miss important works and that you clearly understand each items artistic and historic significance. As you view these carefully selected treasures, our professional narrators, accompanied by historically appropriate background music, will delight, amuse and inform you, making your visit a most memorable experience. Learn about this grand ducal palace, seat of Venetian governments and home to its many doge's for over 400 years, with informative descriptions, photo's, building diagrams, and sample audio tracks.
Doge is an old Venetian word derived from the Latin dux, meaning “leader,” which specifically applied to the chief magistrate of the republic of Venice for over 1,000 years, from 697 to 1797. The office of doge replaced the tribunes who had led the cluster of earlier settlements in the lagoon. Venetians did not believe their doges received authority from the Pope or the Holy Roman Emperor. This fact alone made the Republic and the doge unique among states and rulers of the time.
Never a democracy or even a pure Republic, Venice, through the will of the people and the vote of an assembly, invested the doge with his power, a power that was by no means absolute. In a city so dependent upon trade and profit, where every political decision affected both, a single doge was not trusted to represent everyone’s interests. Therefore, to protect their wealth and to continue Venice’s success they created the Maggior Consiglio, or Great Council, which consisted of all male members of the noble families of Venice over the age of 18.
While Doge's presided over councils and tribunals, and received ambassadors and sovereigns, they where not permitted to leave the Palace without their Counsilors’ permission. They could not send or receive a note from their wives and they could not accept any gift but flowers. They where expected to pay all of their expenses, furnish the palace with their own furniture, and they could not quit. Six appointed Counsilors closely monitored a doge’s actions and their every decision was submitted to some council or magistracy of the Republic. A doge was the “father figure” of the state. As Goethe once stated about Doge Renier, “He looks like the grand papa of the whole race.”
One hundred and twenty doges reigned between 697 and 1797. Three ruled for less than a year and one for twenty-seven years. The average tenure was five to ten years. The Republic and the reign of the Doges ended in 1797 at the hands of Napoleon. On that occasion, the last doge, Ludovico Manin, left the palace, handed his valet the ducal cap, and said, “Take it. I shall not be needing it again.”
The first ducal palace was built in the early 9th century. There is no record of what it looked like, but it probably had the appearance of a fortress. The original was destroyed by fire in 976 in a citizens’ uprising against Doge Candiano who had made the fatal mistake of placing his personal ambitions above the interests of Venetian trade. The current palace became the doge’s residence between 1172 and 1178. At this time, Doge Zaini began to transform Venice from a city of bricks to one of marble.
A series of fires destroyed much of the palace's medieval interior, which was largely rebuilt in the 16th century and decorated by leading Venetian artists of the time. All historic periods are visible in an extraordinary stratification of structural and decorative elements: from the antique foundations of the original Gothic complex, to the great halls dedicated to political life and decorated by the canvases of Veronese, Titian, Tintoretto and others. Even today, over two hundred years after the fall of the Republic and the last doge, the palace is still Venice’s premier building and its address remains 1, San Marco.
|
|||||||||||||||
The
Doge Palace was the residence of
the Venetian doges from 1340 up to the fall of the Republic in I797.
This beautiful
Doges,
elected for life by a complex balloting procedure within the Maggior
Consiglio, were almost always older men who, the Consiglio reasoned,
would not have time to establish a large following or build a strong
power base. The doge supposedly embodied the power of Venice itself,
not his own, and he was expected to rise above his personal ambitions
to represent the image of the authority and the magnificence of
Venice. When a new doge was chosen, before he took the oath of investiture,
he was presented to the people with the statement "This is
your doge, if it pleases you." Thus preserving the fiction that the
people of Venice ratified the selection. Yet, in a real sense, the
doge was the highest servant of the greater community.
If
the Basilica of St. Mark’s was the spiritual soul of Venice,
then the Doge’s Palace was its heart; pumping political,
legal, financial, and military lifeblood to the body of the Republic. Earlier Venetian buildings were built on pilings, poles, supports
and rafts. The final version of the Palace, that you see today,
seems to mimic that construction. It is unlike a typical gothic building that featured a sturdy substructure supporting thinner,
more graceful arches and spires. One could almost call this architecture
reverse or inverted gothic, in that thicker arcade columns support
thinner loggia columns, which in turn, support a massive upper structure.
It is gravity defying and open to the world. Antonio da Ponte planned
this final product and it is uniquely Venetian Gothic or as one-writer
states: “it is gothic without a trace of gloom.”
for your first sample before playing the second sample, or you
will not hear it.
