Palazzo Morosini Brandolin Site Features

Two hexafores, deliberately unequal

Both main floors carry a six-light window at the centre, and the difference between them is the whole argument of the facade. The upper one adds pierced quatrefoils in the spandrels between its arches; the lower one leaves them solid. It is a small, precise way of announcing which floor mattered -- and it only works if you look at the two together.

The missing floor

A third piano nobile was pulled down around the middle of the 19th century, probably because the structure could no longer carry it. The palace was built to out-scale Ca' Foscari and no longer can, and the loss is legible: the facade now stops abruptly above the second floor, with none of the crowning cornice a building of this ambition would have ended on.

The water gates

Two arched portals open at canal level under a band of rusticated stone, each with its own steps down to the water. Two entrances rather than one is a sign of a house built for a family with more than one household in it -- normal in the 15th century, rare in what survives.

An anonymous building

No architect's name is attached to it. That is worth knowing, because it places the palace among the many Grand Canal fronts produced by workshops rather than by named designers, at the point when Venetian Gothic was a shared trade language rather than a personal style.