Porta della Carta Site Features

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.

The four Virtues

Prudence and Charity sit in canopied niches above, Temperance and Fortitude below, flanking the opening. The choice is pointed: these are the qualities the Republic expected of the office behind the door, set where every petitioner passed them on the way in.

The Foscari group

Above the cornice, Doge Francesco Foscari kneels before the Lion of St Mark. The doge is shown smaller than the lion and physically lower -- a deliberate statement that the office answered to the state rather than embodying it. Napoleon's forces destroyed the original in 1797 precisely because it read as a symbol of the old order; what stands there now is Luigi Ferrari's 19th-century recreation of the same composition.

The name

It was not called the Porta della Carta until the late 15th century -- earlier records call it the porta grande, the porta del bando, and the porta dorata. The "paper" of the current name most likely refers to the state archives and the scribes who worked at this corner writing petitions for people who could not.

The gate occupies the narrow gap where the Doge's Palace meets St Mark's Basilica -- a slot only a few metres wide, which is why the composition climbs vertically instead of spreading.

It opens onto the Piazzetta San Marco, the short arm of the square running down to the lagoon, so anyone arriving by water came up the Piazzetta and met this facade head-on. That was the intended approach: the gate was built to be the ceremonial entrance seen by envoys and delegations landing at the Molo, not by people wandering in from the city behind.

Because it sits at the junction of two much larger buildings, it is easy to walk past. The clearest view is from a few metres out into the Piazzetta rather than from directly beneath it, where the upper half of the composition is lost to foreshortening.