Discover Porta della Carta

Built in the ornate late Gothic style, the gate is narrow and tall by necessity -- wedged between the Doge's Palace and St. Mark's Basilica, it had no room to spread horizontally, so its decoration climbs instead. Twisting marble colonnettes, foliage, and putti frame the doorway, with the four Virtues set in canopied niches against the flanking pilasters: Charity and Prudence above, Temperance and Fortitude below.

Over the cornice, a bust of St. Mark the Evangelist sits beneath a statue of Justice, and above that, framed by an arch with mixtilinear (multi-curved) molding, a four-lobed Gothic window echoes the proportions of the palace's own facade windows nearby. The whole composition culminates in the Foscari-and-lion relief at the very top.