Gallerie dell'Accademia
Why is it significant?
In front of you, at the foot of the famous wooden bridge, stands a building that looks more like a church and a convent glued together than a museum. And that is exactly what it is.
Key Facts
| Place | Gallerie dell'Accademia |
|---|---|
| Address | Campo della Carità, Dorsoduro 1050, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 45.43140, 12.32810 |
| Part of Walk | Art on the Water: Dorsoduro, the Accademia and the Zattere in Venice |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you, at the foot of the famous wooden bridge, stands a building that looks more like a church and a convent glued together than a museum. And that is exactly what it is. The Gallerie dell'Accademia live in the old Scuola della Carità, its church and its monastery, three buildings knitted into one treasure house of Venetian painting.
The academy of fine arts was founded in 1750, and in 1807, under Napoleon, it moved here. That was no coincidence. Napoleon's administration was closing dozens of churches, convents and confraternities, and thousands of paintings suddenly needed a home. Altarpieces that had hung above candles and incense ended up on museum walls, which is why the collection reads like a tour of Venice's lost churches.
One painting never had to move at all. In the old meeting room of the confraternity hangs Titian's Presentation of the Virgin, painted in the 1530s for exactly that wall. A little girl in blue climbs an enormous staircase all alone, while at the bottom an old woman with a basket of eggs sits completely uninterested in the miracle above her. Look too for Giorgione's Tempest, a small, mysterious canvas that nobody has ever fully explained.
And then there is the trial. In 1573 Paolo Veronese painted a huge Last Supper for a Dominican convent, crowded with dwarfs, dogs, drunken soldiers and Germans with halberds. The Inquisition summoned him and asked what all those people were doing at the Lord's table. Veronese defended the freedom of painters, and in the end he simply changed the title. It became the Feast in the House of Levi, and the problem disappeared along with the name.
The museum even owns Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, the man in a circle and a square, but the drawing is so fragile that it is shown only rarely. Now turn your back on the bridge and walk straight south down the wide Rio Terà, towards the light, until you reach the Giudecca Canal.