Palazzo Dario

Possibly dating from the spring of 1846, this study shows the whole façade of a palace on the lower reach of the Grand Canal, between the Accademia and the Salute. Built in about 1487 for Giovanni Dario – unusually, not a nobleman, but secretary to the Venetian Republic in Constantinople – it exemplifies the style of “Renaissance engrafted on Byzantine”, with remarkable inlaid panels of marble, that made it acceptable to Ruskin as a building not from the heyday of Venetian Gothic. Henry James compared it to “a house of cards that hold together by a tenure it would be fatal to touch.”