A History of Venetian Architecture

By Ennio Concina (translated by Judith Landry). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998. (L)45 Venice is a special place and, in the minds of Venetians, has always been so. The idea of Venice was important. Medieval Venetians saw themselves as heirs to a Trojan foundation as old as Rome itself, and their real (if often brutal military and rapacious commercial) connections with the Byzantine east fuelled a desire to claim continuity with Constantinople and its artistic traditions.

Fourteenth-century expansion into the North Italian terra firma inspired public interest in the Gothic, while fifteenth-century Venetian debates...