Discover Palazzo Vendramin Calergi

Mauro Codussi's facade of the 1480s is the moment the Grand Canal stops being Gothic. Instead of a screen of pointed tracery it presents three storeys of paired round-headed windows arranged in calm, regular bays between engaged columns -- Corinthian above, each order carried consistently across the full width -- a Roman grammar applied to a Venetian house for the first time at this scale. Its symmetry and restraint mark it as one of the key transitional buildings between Venetian Gothic and the fuller Renaissance that followed.

The proportions are what make it calm rather than merely correct. The window pairs sit inside larger round arches, the columns are spaced to the same rhythm on every floor, and the horizontal cornices are strong enough to read from across the water. Nothing here is doing anything surprising, which was the surprise.

Across the frieze runs the family motto Non nobis Domine non nobis -- "not to us, Lord, not to us" -- carved into a facade that cost the Loredan family a reported 200,000 ducats. The line is Psalm 115 and it is a claim to humility made at maximum expense.

Codussi began in 1481 and died before the work was done; the Lombardo family of architects finished it in 1509, twenty-eight years after it started. Behind the palace, unusually for the canal, there is a real garden.