768 deborah howard
Quattrocento Venice, for the Gothic style in architecture coincided with
the height of Venice’s power and prosperity.83 With its main trading links
aligned towards the Islamic world in the east and Germany in the north,
the vocabulary of Venice was continually enriched by contact with visual
cultures based on the pointed arch, profuse vegetal ornament, and intri-
cate two-dimensional relief carving.84
It is only in the past two decades that this wider cross-cultural perspec-
tive has come to the fore in academic debate.85 Venice had no reason
to emulate the achievements of Brunelleschi and his contemporaries in
Florence. In the very years in which Michelozzo was building the Palazzo
Medici in Florence, Doge Foscari erected his huge family palace in Venice,
highlighting the city’s pride in its Gothic heritage.86 As the largest palace
in the city when Francesco Sansovino published his guidebook in 1581,
Ca’ Foscari continued to house high-prestige visitors long after Roman
classicism had made its triumphant entry onto the Venetian scene.87
Architectural PatronageThe impact of Marxism’s focus on the economic and political context,
combined with the Modernists’ enthusiasm for functionalism, ushered
in a growing interest in architectural patronage from the 1970s onwards.
Research into patronage illuminates a number of important factors: the
function and later use of buildings; construction history; the methods of
finance; and institutional or dynastic structures. Patronage studies benefit
especially from the nature of the documentation, but its interpretation
needs careful reassessment, for while powerful individuals and institutions
alike often leave copious evidence of their activities, it must be recognized
that they themselves influenced the content and perspective of the sources.
More recently, the impact of post-modernist theory has encouraged a
83 This is underlined by Ralph Lieberman who chose a Gothic palace for the cover of
his Renaissance Architecture in Venice.
84 These influences are discussed in Howard, Venice & the East; and Bernard Aikema
and Beverly Louise Brown, eds., Renaissance Venice and the North: Crosscurrents in the
Time of Dürer, Bellini and Titian, exh. cat. (London, 1999).
85 See, for example, Howard, Venice & the East; Stefano Carboni, ed., Venice and
the Islamic World, 828–1797, exh. cat. (New York, 2007) (also available in French and in
shortened form in Italian); and Concina, Tempo novo.
86 Dennis Romano, The Likeness of Venice: A Life of Doge Francesco Foscari 1373–1457
(New Haven/London, 2007), pp. 245–53.
87 Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima, fol. 149r–v.