Peggy Guggenheim Collection: Palazzo Venier dei Leoni
Why is it significant?
From the gate on the quiet calle you see only a wall, a garden and a long, low white building. Walk through to the Grand Canal side, though, and you discover a palace that simply stops after a single storey, as if somebody had run out of patience halfway through a sentence.
Key Facts
| Place | Peggy Guggenheim Collection: Palazzo Venier dei Leoni |
|---|---|
| Address | Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, Dorsoduro 701, 30123 Venezia VE, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 45.43080, 12.33150 |
| Part of Walk | Art on the Water: Dorsoduro, the Accademia and the Zattere in Venice |
| Generated | Generated |
From the gate on the quiet calle you see only a wall, a garden and a long, low white building. Walk through to the Grand Canal side, though, and you discover a palace that simply stops after a single storey, as if somebody had run out of patience halfway through a sentence.
That is the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, the most famous unfinished palace in Venice. The Venier family began building it in 1749, planning a vast marble palace to rival anything on the canal. Then the money, or the will, ran out, and only the ground floor was ever completed. The name, of the lions, comes from the lion heads carved along the waterfront, and from a legend that the family once kept a real lion in the garden.
In 1949 the palace was bought by Peggy Guggenheim, an American heiress who had spent the years around the outbreak of war in Paris buying modern art at the rate, she said, of a picture a day. She filled these rooms with Picasso, Magritte, Dalí, Kandinsky, Pollock and Max Ernst, whom she had married, opened her house to visitors, and was rowed around the canals in one of the last private gondolas in the city, with her little dogs on board.
On the terrace over the canal stands Marino Marini's bronze horseman, the Angel of the City, arms flung wide and, let us say, very visibly delighted to see Venice. The story goes that the most enthusiastic part of him was made to be unscrewed, and that Peggy removed it on the days when processions of nuns passed by on the water.
Peggy died in 1979, and her ashes lie in the garden, beside the graves of her beloved dogs, whom she called her babies. The collection passed to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, founded by her uncle. Leave by the calle and follow the little campi and bridges west for five minutes, towards the wooden bridge and the great museum at its foot.