Gallery sights in Venice
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Peggy Guggenheim Collection
After tragically losing her father on the Titanic, heiress Peggy Guggenheim befriended Dadaists, dodged Nazis, and amassed avant-garde works by 200 modern artists at her palatial home on the Grand Canal. Peggy’s Palazzo Venier dei Leoni became a modernist shrine, chronicling surrealism, Italian futurism, and abstract expressionism, with a subtext of Peggy’s romantic pursuits – the collection includes key works by Peggy’s ex-husband Max Ernst and Jackson Pollock, among Peggy’s many rumoured lovers. Peggy collected according to her own convictions rather than for prestige or style, so her collection includes inspired folk art and lesser-known local artists alongside artis…
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Gallerie dell’Accademia
Hardly academic, these galleries contain more murderous intrigue, forbidden romance, shameless politicking and near-riots than the most outrageous Venetian parties. The walls of the former Santa Maria della Carità convent complex maintained their serene composure for centuries, with the outstanding architectural assistance of Bartolomeo Bon, Palladio and Carlo Scarpa – but ever since Napoleon installed his haul of Venetian art trophies in this convent in 1807, there’s been nonstop visual drama inside these walls. To guide you through the ocular onslaught, visits are loosely organised by style, theme and painter from the 14th to 18th centuries, beginning with Paolo Venezia…
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Giudecca 795
Do you follow the Titian colourists or go with the Tintoretto flow? Either way, Giudecca 795 has you in mind, featuring contemporary artists with a strong sense of colour and dynamic line. Look for Vito Campanelli’s high-impact all-red paintings and Guitamachi’s graphic train-track cityscapes.
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Fondazione Giorgio Cini
A defunct naval academy has been cleverly converted into a shipshape gallery for the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, preserving the original double-height timber ceiling and going for a weatherbeaten-high-design look with luminous stairs in glass and rusted iron. The gallery hosts high-profile international and Italian shows, ranging from a mind-bending avant-garde Japanese typography show to a retrospective of Venice’s own poetic abstractionist, Giuseppe Santomaso – including his Letters to Palladio, paintings of envelopes with Palladian proportions. Behind Palladio’s grand church extend the grounds of the former monastery with a long history, beginning in the 10th century …
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Scuola Grande di San Rocco
You’ll swear the paint is still fresh on the 50 action-packed Tintorettos painted between 1575 and 1587 for the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Everyone wanted the commission to paint this building dedicated to the patron saint of the plague-stricken, so Tintoretto cheated a little: instead of producing sketches like his rival Veronese, Tintoretto painted a magnificent tondo (ceiling panel) and dedicated it to the saint, knowing such a gift couldn’t be refused or matched by other artists. Take the Scarpagnino staircase to the Sala Grande Superiore, in which Tintoretto covered the ceilings with Old Testament scenes that read like a modern graphic novel. Grab a handglass (m…
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Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista
Political power had its perks for this influential Venetian confraternity, including a lavish 1st-floor meeting hall designed in 1729 by Giorgio Massari, a Codussi-designed double staircase, and Pietro Lombardo’s 1481 courtyard entry arch that tops any red carpet for impressive entrances. Bellini and Titian turned out world-class works for the scuola (religious confraternity) that have been moved to the Gallerie dell’Accademia – but Palma Il Giovane’s works still illuminate the Sala d’Albergo, and Pietro Longhi’s charming Adoration of the Wise Men is still here, with its bright-eyed, wriggling baby Jesus. With the Council of Ten among his clients in the scuola…
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Ca’ d’Oro
Along the Grand Canal, you can’t miss the stunning 15th-century Ca’ d’Oro, its lacy Gothic facade resplendent even without the original gold-leaf details that gave the palace its name (‘Golden House’). Ca’ d’Oro was donated to Venice with an impressive art collection by Baron Franchetti (of Palazzo Franchetti fame). Today it houses these works in the 2nd-floor Galleria Franchetti, plus a jackpot of artwork downstairs plundered from Veneto churches during Napoleon’s Italy conquest. Napoleon had excellent taste in souvenirs, as the 1st floor reveals: bronzes, tapestries, paintings and sculpture ripped (sometimes literally) from Veneto churches were warehoused …
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Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni
By the 15th century, the Slavic community in Castello was so sizeable that its religious confraternity was dedicated not to one, but three patron saints: George, Tryphone and Jerome of Dalmatia. This building was constructed in the 16th century, and the Renaissance interiors remain more or less intact. Venice’s Dalmatian community was so influential that the virtuoso painter Vittore Carpaccio himself painted the 1502–07 cycle of the lives of the saints on the ground floor. Though he never left Venice, Carpaccio clearly did his research: his scenes with Dalmatian backdrops are so minutely detailed that some Slavic visitors claim to recognise the locations as their home…
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Scuola Grande di San Marco
Instead of a simple Saturday father–son handyman project, sculptor Pietro Lombardo and his sons had something more ambitious in mind: a high Renaissance polychrome marble facade for the most important confraternity in Venice. Instead of ending with panicked calls to a plumber, the results are stunningly obvious in the marble frontage standing at right angles to the Zanipolo – though Codussi was brought in to put the finishing touches on this Renaissance gem. Below the magnificent lions of St Mark prowling above the portals, don’t miss the sculpted trompe l’œil perspectives on the lower half of the facade. The scuola is the main entrance to the Ospedale Civile, wi…
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Punta della Dogana
Fortuna, the weathervane atop Punta della Dogana, swung Venice’s way when bureaucratic hassles in Paris convinced billionaire art collector François Pinault to create a gallery extension at the Palazzo Grassi and transfer his world-class collection to the Punta della Dogana. At the ship’s-prow end of Dorsoduro, Venice’s historic 17th-century customs house was relaunched in 2009 after a three-year reinvention by architect Tadao Ando as Venice’s splashiest contemporary art space. The inaugural show traced the creative processes of Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and other contemporary art stars from rough drafts to end products, installed in converted warehou…
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Museo delle Icone
Glowing colours and all-seeing eyes fill the gallery of the Museum of Icons, a treasure box of some 80 Greek icons made in 14th- to 17th-century Italy – especially the expressive San Giovanni Climaco, which shows the saintly author of a Greek spiritual guide distracted from his work by visions of souls diving into hell. The museum goes by a confusing variety of names: it’s also known as the Museo dei Dipinti Sacri Bizantini (Museum of Holy Byzantine Paintings), attached to the Chiesa di San Giorgio dei Greci, and technically, it’s housed in the Istituto Ellenico (Hellenic Institute). This seat of Venice’s Greek Orthodox community was built by Baldassare Longhena, serv…
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Scuola Grande dei Carmini
Eighteenth-century backpackers must have thought they’d died and gone to heaven at the Scuola Grande dei Carmini, a shelter run by Carmelite nuns with interiors by Tiepolo and Longhena worthy of a doge. Longhena designed the stuccoed stairway to heaven, glimpsed in Tiepolo’s nine-panel ceiling of a resplendent Virgin in Glory upstairs before you enter the high-ceilinged hostel room itself, a wonder of boiserie (carved woodwork). Sadly, cots are no longer available in this jewel-box building, but the Venice Opera (www.venice-opera.com) sometimes stages performances here.
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Galleria di Palazzo Cini
With luck you may get to look at this curious collection of Tuscan intruders. Oddly, the main façade of this 16th-century building looks over the Rio di San Vio rather than the Grand Canal. Spread out over two floors are around 30 works, mostly from the 14th and 15th centuries, including some by Lippi, Piero della Francesca (Madonna col Bambino), Botticelli (Il Giudizio di Paride, or The Judgment of Paris) and Beato Angelico.
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Fortuny Tessuti Artistici
Marcel Proust waxed rhapsodic over Fortuny’s silken cottons printed with boho-chic art nouveau patterns, and here you can see why. Visitors can browse 260 textile designs in the gated showroom, but fabrication methods have been jealously guarded in the garden studio for a century. To see more of Fortuny’s original designs and his home studio, head to Palazzo Fortuny.
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Galleria d'Arte Moderna
This fine baroque mansion is considered one of the most important on the Grand Canal, started by Longhena and completed in 1710 by Gaspari. Since 1902 it has housed the Galleria d'Arte Moderna, a broad collection that includes pieces by De Chirico, Miró, Chagall, Kandinsky, Klee, Klimt, Moore and others.
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