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Founding
Founding of Ca' Rezzonico
palazzo and art museum in Venice, Italy
- 1667
- Europe
Founding
palazzo and art museum in Venice, Italy
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Ca' Rezzonico (Italian pronunciation: [ˈka (r)retˈtsɔːniko]) is a palazzo and art museum on the Grand Canal in the Dorsoduro sestiere of Venice, Italy. It is a particularly notable example of the 18th century Venetian baroque and rococo architecture and interior decoration, and displays paintings by the leading Venetian painters of the period, including Francesco Guardi and Giambattista Tiepolo. It is a public museum dedicated to 18th-century Venice (Museo del Settecento Veneziano) and one of the 11 venues managed by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia. The palazzo was originally designed by the architect Baldassarre Longhena in 1649 for the Bon family.
Ca' Rezzonico stands on the right bank of the Grand Canal of Venice, at the point where it is joined by the Rio di San Barnaba. The site was previously occupied by two houses, visible in early paintings of Venice in 1500, which a century and a half later were in a sad state of decay. They belonged to the Bon family, one of Venice's patrician clans. In 1649 the head of the family, Filippo Bon, a Procurator of the city and patron of the arts, decided to transform the two houses into a single large palazzo on the site. For this purpose he employed Baldassarre Longhena (1597-1682), the greatest proponent of Venetian Baroque, a style slowly replacing the Renaissance and Palladian architectural style. Longhena was the designer of the famous dome of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, a Venice baroque landmark. By 1661 Longhena had combined the two earlier structures, and work had begun on the facade facing the canal, and had reached as high as the first, or Noble, floor. However, neither architect nor client was to see the completion of the Palazzo Bon: Longhena died in 1682, and Filippo Bon saw his finances ruined by the cost of the palazzo. He was forced to halt the work.
Filippo Bon died in 1712, and the unfinished palace, already decaying, was inherited by his sons and then grandsons, but none had the funds to complete the construction. In 1750 The Bons offered the unfinished palazzo to Giambattista Rezzonico, a banker and fabric merchant from Lombardy, whose family had bought a title of Venetian nobility in 1648, during the War of Candia with the Ottoman Empire, when the Venetian state coffers were depleted. Rezzonico paid 60,000 gold ducats for the unfinished building. Municipal inspectors examined the building, and concluded that most of the structure was a ruin, in danger of collapse. Only the rear part of the building, completed up to the second floor, had a roof and could be saved. Rezzonico hired the most prestigious architect of his time, Giorgio Massari (1687-1766), who had built the churches of the Jesuits and the church of the Pietà in Venice, as well as the palazzo of the Grassi family, which faced the Rezzonico palace on the other side of the Grand Canal.
The Rezzonicos rushed the reconstruction along. In 1752, the accidental dropping of a piece of marble caused the scaffolding to collapse, dropping five stonemasons to the ground below. Massari largely followed the original plan of Longhena, but made a number of modifications to suit the lighter rococo tastes. He removed some ponderous double columns on the facade replacing them with more slender pillars, and eliminated a heavy plinth of columns, giving the building a lighter, more graceful appearance. He also installed a row of small oval windows above the larger windows on the second floor, adding light and a rococo touch.
The facade was finished between 1750 and 1752. Turning his attention to the interior, Massari broke with Venetian custom and put the major ceremonial room at the back of the building, not overlooking the canal. He doubled the height of the ceiling in this room and eliminated walls to create a more dramatic space. He laid out a ceremonial route that would take visitors from the dock and gateway on the Grand Canal to a fountain in the interior courtyard, surmounted by the coat of arms of the Rezzonico in marble; then taking a triumphal hallway to the monumental stairway which took them up to the grand salon or ballroom. As soon as the salons were completed, their ceilings were painted with frescoes by Giovanni Battista Crosato and in trompe-l'œil by Girolamo Mengozzi Colonna.
The interior work was nearly finished in 1756. The pinnacle of the Rezzonico's power and the Palazzo's grandeur came in 1758, when Carlo, the younger brother of Giambattista Rezzonico, was elected Pope as Clement XIII, the same year Ludovico Rezzonico married Faustina Savorgnan, uniting the two richest families in Venice. To mark that occasion, Rezzonico commissioned the most celebrated painter of Venice, the aging Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, to paint the ceilings of two salons, along painters with Gaspare Diziani and Jacopo Guarana.
The palace was the site of further celebrations in 1759, when Aurelio Rezzonico was elected Procurator of San Marco, and in 1762, when Ludovico Rezzonico was elected to the same position. For three nights, the facades and interiors of the palace were lit with torches and candles in celebration. Upon his election as Pope, Carlo Rezzonico transferred a large part of the family art collection from Venice to Rome.
Fifty years after the completion of the palace, in 1810, the last member of the Venetian branch of the Rezzonicos, cardinal Abbondio of Pisa, died, bringing an end to the family line. The palace nearly became a Jesuit College, but went instead through several families, and in 1832 to Carlo Pindemonte, the grandson of a Piedomontese poet and political figure, Ippolito Pindemonte. Pindemonte sold all the furnishings and art collections of the palazzo. Only the frescos remained in situ. In 1837, Pindemonte sold the empty building to Count Ladislao Zelinsky, who in turn rented the palazzo to the Baron von Bülow, then to count Zichj Cerner. From 1840 to 1857, it was rented to the Duke of Modena and his family, which included Don Carlo, the Duke of Madrid, the pretender to the Spanish throne.
Beginning in about 1850, the second floor of the palace was rented by the antiquarian and art dealer Jacobo Querci della Rovere, who used it as a gallery to sell paintings by Rubens, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Canaletto, and other old masters. In the 1880s, it became the home of the painter Robert Barrett Browning, whose father Robert Browning, the poet, died in his apartment on the mezzanine floor in 1889. At this time, the American portrait painter John Singer Sargent also had a studio in the palazzo.
In 1906 Browning received an offer from the German Emperor, Wilhelm II, to buy the building, but sold it instead to Count Lionello von Hierschel de Minerbi, a deputy of the Italian parliament and a collector of modern art. The Palazzo became the setting for spectacular costume balls, celebrations by torchlight and candlelight, and concerts.
American songwriter and composer Cole Porter rented Ca' Rezzonico for $4,000 a month in the 1920s. Porter engaged 50 gondoliers and employed a troupe of high-rope walkers to "perform in a blaze of colored lights".
The global depression of the 1930s brought an end to Minerbi's funds and extravagance, and he sought a buyer for the Palace. After four years of negotiations, in June 1935 the city of Venice purchased the Palazzo and began to transform it into a museum of Venetian art from the 18th century. Works of art of the 18th century, including ceiling frescoes, from other houses and collections owned by the municipality were brought together in the Ca' Rezzonico, to accompany the original frescoes on the ceilings. The city also purchased additional works by Tiepolo, Guardi, Canova, and other artists to augment the collection. The building underwent a major restoration in the late 1970s and was completed in 2001.
Visitors typically arrived by gondola at the main entrance, opening onto the Grand Canal. The building is narrow and deep, with the facade on the canal only three rooms wide. Visitors passed through the entrance, and down a long corridor to the courtyard, where a fountain is placed, with the coat of arms of the Rezzonico family. The entrance to the streets of Venice is behind the fountain. From the ground floor, visitors climb to the Piano Nobile by the staircase of honour, which has marble balustrades decorated with statuary by Giusto Le Court. Le Court was the leading sculptor in Venice in the late 17th century, and worked closely on many projects with the first architect of the building, Longhena.
The Palazzo's ceremonial rooms are located on the piano nobile. The largest and most impressive is the grand salon or ballroom, fourteen by twenty-four meters in size, at the rear of the building. This room, created by Massari, is of double height, and appears even higher because of the trompe-l'œil architecture painted on the walls and ceiling by Girolamo Mengozzi Colonna (not by Pietro Visconti, as long believed). The centerpiece of the ceiling, painted by Giovanni Battista Crosato, depicts Apollo riding his carriage between Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. The coat of arms of the Rezzonico family, with a double-headed eagle, also is prominently displayed on the wall of the ballroom facing the entry door. The two enormous chandeliers made of wood and gilded metal, from the mid-18th century, are among the few fixtures that date to the original period of the building. The ballroom is now decorated with 18th century statues by Andrea Brustolon, including a statue of an Ethiopian warrior carved of ebony.
The Salon of the Allegory, a room decorated to commemorate the 1758 marriage of Ludovico Rezzonico, the nephew of Pope Clement XIII Rezzonico, and future procurator of San Marco, to Faustina Savorgnan, is also on the Piano Nobile. The ceiling has a large fresco by Giambattista Tiepolo and his son, Giandomenico Tiepolo, depicting the groom and his bride ferried by Apollo's chariot. It was one of the last works of Tiepolo in Venice, before his departure for Madrid in 1762. Tiepolo completed the work on the ceiling in only twelve days on the scaffolding. The Tiepolo fresco, like the paintings in the Grand salon, is framed by trompe-l'œil paintings of architecture, including a false balustrade, by Girolamo Mengozzi Colonna, who also did the painted frames in the Grand Salon. The painting depicts the bridal couple in a chariot, being led by the sun god, Apollo. Other allegorical figures include cupid blindfold, a flight of putti and doves, the figure of Fame, holding a trumpet; the three graces on a cloud; a bearded old man with a laurel crown symbolizing Merit; and a lion, the symbol of Venice, along with coats of arms of the two families.
The furnishings of the salon included paintings and furnishings by Italian artists of the first half and mid-18th century, including portrait of Pope Clement XIII Rezzonico by Anton Raphael Mengs, a retable by Francesco Zugno, a pupil of Tiepolo, and a prie-dieu of carved walnut illustrating the fantasy of the Italian rococo style.
A passage from the Salon leads to a small chapel, suspended over the Rio San Barnaba. The chapel was built by either Aurelio Rezzonico or Cardinal Rezzonico, the nephew of Pope Clement XIII, in the second half of the 18th century. Some of the original decoration remains, including the sculpted and gilded rococo stucco sculpture on the white walls, and a retable, The Virgin and Saints, by a pupil of Tiepolo, Francesco Zugno, and prie-dieu, or seat for kneeling and praying, in the twisting and turning Venetian rococo style.
was originally a room for holding audiences; in that room the Papal Legate informed Cardinal Rezzonico that he had been elected Pope the day before. The ceiling is decorated with frescos depicting the Triumph of the Arts over Ignorance, presented in a trompe-l'œil painted frame, with allegorical scenes painted in the corners. The paintings, particularly The Triumph of Poetry, date from the time when Tiepolo was working in the main salon, and are usually attributed to either Giambattista Crosato or Gaspare Diziani of Belluno. The room takes its name from the number of pastel portraits by Rosalba Carriera and other notable Venetian artists. They include a fine pastel portrait of the opera singer Faustina Bordoni by Carriera. Another notable pastel portrait is that of Cecilia Guardi Tiepolo, wife of the painter Tiepolo, painted by her son Lorenzo. It was painted in 1757.
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