by Jon Lackman | 12 April 2006 | Architecture
Writing on Juergen Schulz’s The New Palaces of Medieval Venice, Debra Pincus concludes that his “varied and rich career has been capped by a book that can only be termed revolutionary. Venetian scholarship has clung to the idea that the Venetian palace is a Byzantine import … Instead, Schulz proposes that the early palaces of Venice represent an import from a building type that already had a prominence on the continent in the tenth century. First developed as a palatium, the seat of secular and ecclesiastical lords, the type gradually acquired a residential component, and as such it later filtered down to the wealthy urban merchant … Schulz argues forcefully and with confidence, and to my mind makes an extremely convincing argument.”
