Palazzo Cavalli-Franchetti, or simply Palazzo Franchetti, is a
building in Venice located in the San Marco district, in the immediate
vicinity of the Accademia bridge. It extends to the rear in Campo Santo
Stefano, near the church of San Vidal.
Since 1999 it has belonged
to the Veneto Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts, which hosts
frequent cultural events and exhibitions.
Built in the second half of the fifteenth century in Gothic style by
the Marcellus family, the Gussoni and Cavalli families later also lived
there. In 1847 it was ceded to the young Archduke Frederick Ferdinand of
Habsburg-Teschen, senior commander of the imperial war navy. Federico
eliminates the old divisions between the Cavalli and Gussoni parts and
therefore reunifies the building unit; in addition to this, he started a
substantial work of functional modernization as regards the interior of
the building.
In the 19th century it passed to Enrico, Count of
Chambord, who entrusted a first restructuring to the architect Giovanni
Battista Meduna. Meduna, under the careful supervision of the court
stewards, not only brought a massive series of transformations to the
palace, but in a certain sense redesigned its reasons and logic,
starting it to become one of the emblems of the Venetian nineteenth
century.
In 1878 it was bought by Baron Raimondo Franchetti,
father of Alberto, composer, and of Giorgio (supporter of the recovery
of the Ca' d'Oro). The Franchettis initiated radical restorations, led
by Camillo Boito, so much so that for a large part of the building we
could speak of neo-Gothic.
In September 1922 the widow, Sarah
Luisa de Rothschild, gave the building to the Federal Credit Institute
for the Risorgimento delle Venezie, which proceeded to a new phase of
works and functional adaptations. The new staircase with lift was built
and various branches of internal stairs were demolished; rearranged with
Fortuny materials and "style" furniture, not always in great taste;
metal platforms adapted to new office requirements. This phase of the
work had its most impressive and significant intervention in the
arrangement of the second noble floor, with the creation of an immense
piece of furniture-boiserie for the central Casellario. It is a
masterful neo-Gothic bookcase and shelving of surprising quality and
effect, served for the upper floor by the two spiral staircases,
arranged in a mirror image at one of the ends of the room (the
workmanship refers explicitly to the lines of the Boitian staircase).
It is a remarkable example of Gothic architecture, one of the
most prestigious of those located in the lagoon city. The façade,
which dates back to the 15th century, has however been heavily
restructured, following the Venetian neo-Gothic canons: the external
decorative apparatus appears, in fact, far from the formal
simplicity typical of many other Venetian Gothic buildings.
The five-light windows of the two noble floors in particular
denounce this typicality, distinguished by characteristic fretwork
similar to those of Palazzo Pisani Moretta. That of the first noble
floor is characterized by intertwined arches, decorated with raised
quadrilobes with respect to the traditional arrangement that sees
them close to the capital, and by a central projecting balcony; that
of the second main floor instead has quadrilobes placed at the apex
of the arch and has no balcony. This composition is flanked by
numerous other holes, similar to pentafore by drawing; the
exceptions are the single lancet windows on the second floor, which
have an ogival shape, and the water portal.
The side façade,
which overlooks a large garden, instead offers a more solid design,
characterized by seven single-lancet windows on each floor: this
relative simplicity is lost, however, in the rear façade, which
follows the front one and even adds large windows to the ground
floor.
The plan of the building, in its complexity, follows
the typical scheme of the Venetian Palazzo: it is characterized by a
central portego, flanked by smaller rooms.
The building has
two internal staircases, which mirror each other onto a vast atrium,
illuminated by a quadrifora: one of the two is the famous staircase
designed by Camillo Boito and located in an oblong rear body,
detached from the main building, with the help of the sculptor
Augusto Felici, the decorator Carlo Matscheg and the engineer
Manetti, who created a profoundly changed architecture thanks to
ornate paintings, carved marble, cast and wrought iron, worked
stones, lamps and furnishings of eclectic taste, which denounce a (
dubious) historicist choice, in line with the demands of the time.
The structure ends with a rear wing, which has rooms in
succession.