Palazzo Morosini Brandolin Site Features

The ground floor is faced in rusticated stonework, interrupted by two water-entrance portals with ogee arches and four small windows in the same style.

The first piano nobile carries a six-light (hexafoil) window at its center, flanked by two pairs of single-light windows, all with ogee arches and carved Gothic tracery. The second piano nobile above repeats the same arrangement, but its central hexafoil window adds pierced quatrefoil openings between the arches -- a slightly more elaborate variation marking it as the grander of the two main floors.

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.

The palace stands on a corner site in San Polo, where the Rio di San Toma meets the Grand Canal, on the outside of the long bend below the Rialto Bridge.

Corner sites were the prize on this canal. Two exposed elevations instead of one, light from two directions, and a private side canal for boats -- which is why a family with ambitions built here rather than on a straight reach.

Directly across the water is Ca' d'Oro, and the two are usually seen in the same glance from a passing vaporetto. The comparison is unkind but instructive: both are 15th-century Gothic, one restored into a museum and famous, the other reduced by a floor and divided into flats.

There is no useful land approach. The calli behind lead to a door on a narrow fondamenta and nothing else, so the building effectively exists only from the water -- as most Grand Canal palaces were designed to.