Baroque palazzo · 17th–18th century · Venice, Dorsoduro

Ca’ Rezzonico — Museum of 18th-Century Venice

Ca’ Rezzonico is a monumental Baroque palace on the Grand Canal in Venice’s Dorsoduro sestiere, today housing the Museo del Settecento Veneziano — the Museum of 18th-Century Venice. Begun in 1649 by Baldassare Longhena for the Bon family and completed a century later by Giorgio Massari for the Rezzonico, the palace is one of the grandest on the Grand Canal. Its ballroom, frescoed ceilings by Giambattista Tiepolo, and period furniture collections offer the most complete surviving portrait of patrician Venetian life in the final, glittering century of the Republic.

At a glance

Type: Baroque palazzo · civic museum
Period: Begun 1649 (Longhena); completed c. 1750 (Massari)
Style: Venetian Baroque
Location: Fondamenta Rezzonico 3136, Dorsoduro, Venice
Coordinates: 45.4336° N, 12.3271° E

Overview

Ca’ Rezzonico dominates the western reach of the Grand Canal with a vast three-storey facade of Istrian stone, considered one of Longhena’s most powerful compositions. The Museo del Settecento Veneziano opened here in 1936 and fills the palace with paintings, furniture, lacquerwork, porcelain and decorative arts assembled to recreate the atmosphere of 18th-century Venetian aristocratic life. The museum is administered by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors annually as one of the city’s most significant civic museums.

History

The palazzo was commissioned in 1649 by Filippo Bon and designed by Baldassare Longhena, the architect also responsible for the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute. On Longhena’s death in 1682 the building was still incomplete at the second floor; work stalled for decades before the Rezzonico family — a newly ennobled Genoese banking dynasty who had purchased Venetian patrician status — acquired it and commissioned Giorgio Massari to complete the upper floors and interior between 1745 and 1758. The family’s most famous member, Carlo Rezzonico, was elected Pope Clement XIII in 1758, the year the palace reached completion. In 1888 the poet Robert Browning died in the palace, which had by then passed through several owners including the painter Pen Browning.

What you see

The ballroom on the piano nobile is the largest room in any Venetian palace, with a ceiling fresco by Giambattista Crosato and carved furniture by Andrea Brustolon. The adjacent Throne Room preserves ceiling paintings by Giambattista Tiepolo — the Allegory of Merit and Nuptial Allegory — relocated here from another Venetian palace. Further rooms display Venetian vedute paintings, the reconstructed pharmacy of the Ai Do San Marchi, the Gerolamo Medebach puppet theatre, and a series of intimate cabinet rooms with original lacquerwork and chinoiserie furnishings. The loggia at the rear overlooks a canal-side garden, rare in Venice.

Cultural significance

Ca’ Rezzonico preserves the most complete museum portrait of the Venetian Settecento anywhere in the world, the era of Goldoni, Casanova, Canaletto and Tiepolo. It documents the aesthetic world of the Serenissima in its last century of independence before Napoleon’s 1797 dissolution of the Republic. The Tiepolo ceiling paintings rank among the most important Baroque fresco cycles surviving in a secular Venetian interior.

Practical information

Address: Fondamenta Rezzonico 3136, 30123 Venezia (Dorsoduro)
Hours: Check official website (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia) for current opening times; closed Tuesdays
Admission: Paid entry; combined tickets available with other civic museums
Virtual tour: 360° virtual tour available online via the museum’s digital resources

Getting there

The Ca’ Rezzonico vaporetto stop (ACTV lines 1 and 2) is on the Grand Canal directly in front of the palace water entrance; this is the most convenient approach. Alternatively, from the Accademia stop walk west along Fondamenta Nani and Fondamenta Rezzonico (approximately 8 minutes on foot). Water taxis can land at the palace’s private dock. No road vehicle access is possible in Venice; walking from Santa Lucia station takes approximately 30 minutes through Dorsoduro.

Sources & resources

Find it on the map

Google Maps See the location on a full map → Street View Walk around the place virtually → OpenStreetMap Free community cartography →

The building that now houses the 18th-century Venetian Museum was built by the will of the Bon family, an exponent of the ancient Venetian nobility. In the mid-seventeenth century they entrusted the execution to the most famous architect of the period: Baldassarre Longhena, who also owed the construction of Ca &#39;Pesaro and the Basilica della Salute. However, the monumental project proves too ambitious for the Bon fortunes. The building, in fact, has not yet finished after the architect&#39;s death in 1682 and shortly thereafter, given the inability of the family to bear the huge costs of the construction site, the works are blocked and the factory remains incomplete. In 1750 Giambattista Rezzonico, of recent nobility - acquired in 1687 through the outlay of money -, bought the building and entrusted its completion to Giorgio Massari, at the time the famous architect.



It will be this family that gives the building its name. The works were completed in just six years, in time to celebrate their unstoppable social rise which culminated in 1758, when Carlo, son of Giambattista was elected pontiff with the name of Clement XIII. However, the parable of the Rezzonico family is very short and is already consumed with the next generation. Without male heirs, the family died out in 1810 with the death of Abbondio. During the nineteenth century the building changed ownership several times and was gradually stripped of all its furnishings. Among his last tenants are the famous poet Robert Browning - who spent the summers of 1887 and 1888 here, dying in December 1889 -, and the great musician Cole Porter, who lived there from 1926 to 1927. Now reduced to an empty container , the palace was purchased by the city of Venice in 1935 to house eighteenth-century art collections. In addition to the paintings, there are gathered furnishings, objects of daily life, as well as torn frescoes or ceiling canvases from other city buildings. This creates an extraordinary environmental museum which in its rooms, in addition to presenting works from one of the happiest seasons of European art, preserves the splendor and splendor of a Venetian eighteenth-century residence.



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The Palace

The main access to the building was originally the one on the Grand Canal, through the monumental water gate. A look at the facades of the other buildings allows you to evaluate the great novelty of the architectural solutions adopted by Baldassarre Longhena in this circumstance. The architect developed the solution proposed for the first time by Jacopo Sansovino on the facade of Ca &#39;Corner della Ca&#39; Granda, abandoning the traditional layout of the Venetian palace which envisaged a tripartite structure for the facade: a row of windows in the part central and two wings on the sides. His project, on the other hand, reproduces a single architectural module on the entire surface, in this case deduced from that of the Procuratie Nuove in Piazza San Marco, but reinterpreted in a Baroque key, with an accentuated relief of the various elements to create a contrasted play of light and shadow . The changes also affect the building&#39;s floor plan. The traditional closed portico that in the ancient Venetian palaces crossed the building longitudinally, from the water gate to the earth gate, is interrupted here by an internal courtyard, a type typical of the mainland palace, which was not applied in Venice.



The solution, despite its simplicity, is effective. Instead of a dark space, devoid of any architectural and scenographic value, a succession of areas of light and shadow is created that further expands the space and guides the visitor&#39;s gaze towards the family crest, placed in full light above the fountain. In the portego there is now a gondola built in the nineteenth century, which has the traditional &quot;felze&quot; in the center, a removable cabin that guaranteed comfortable intimacy for travelers.


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Ca’ Rezzonico, 18th-century Venetian Museum – Virtual Tour