The twelfth has female heads and no lettering.

The thirteenth has named rulers:  Octavius, Titus, Trajan, Priam, Darius, and so forth, all crowned and ruling.

The fourteenth has children and no lettering.

The fifteenth has heads, male and female, and no lettering.  Above it was once another medallion and three triangles.

The sixteenth has pelicans and no lettering.

The seventeenth and last has children with symbols and no lettering.

Above this, on the corner by the bridge, is the group representing the Sin of Ham.  Noah’s two sons are very attractive figures.  Above the Noah group is the Angel Raphael.

The gateway of the palace—­the Porta della Carta—­was designed by Giovanni and Bartolommeo Bon, father and son, in the fourteen thirties and forties.  Francesco Foscari (1423-1457) being then Doge, it is he who kneels to the lion on the relief above, and again on the balcony of the Piazzetta facade.  At the summit of the portal is Justice once more, with two attendant lions, cherubs climbing to her, and live pigeons for ever nestling among them.  I counted thirty-five lions’ heads in the border of the window and thirty-five in the border of the door, and these, with Foscari’s one and Justice’s two, and those on the shields on each side of the window, make seventy-five lions for this gateway alone.  Then there are lions’ heads between the circular upper arches all along each facade of the palace.

It would be amusing to have an exact census of the lions of Venice, both winged and without wings.  On the Grand Canal alone there must be a hundred of the little pensive watchers that sit on the balustrades peering down.  As to which is the best lion, opinions must, of course, differ, the range being so vast:  between, say, the lion on the Molo column and Daniele Manin’s flamboyant sentinel at the foot of the statue in his Campo.  Some would choose Carpaccio’s painted lion in this palace; others might say that the lion over the Giants’ Stairs is as satisfying as any; others might prefer that fine one on the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi by the Rialto bridge, and the Merceria clock tower’s lion would not want adherents.

Why this lovely gateway was called the Porta della Carta (paper) is not absolutely certain:  perhaps because public notices were fixed to its door; perhaps because paper-sellers frequented it; perhaps because the scriveners of the Republic worked hereabouts.  Passing through it we have before us the Giants’ Stairs, designed by Antonio Rizzo and taking their name from the two great figures of Mars and Neptune at the top by Jacopo Sansovino.  On the upright of each step is a delicate inlaid pattern—­where, in England, so often we read of the virtues of malted milk or other commodity.  Looking back from the foot of the stairs we see Sansovino’s Loggetta, framed by the door; looking back from the top of the stairs we have in front of us Rizzo’s statues of Adam and Eve.  This Antonio Rizzo, or Ricci, who so ably fortified Sansovino as a beautifier of Venice, was a Veronese, of whom little is known.  He flourished in the second half of the fifteenth century.