Palazzo Grimani di Santa Maria Formosa is a state museum, located in
Venice in the Castello district, near the square of Santa Maria Formosa.
It can be reached by land from Ruga Giuffa, while the water entrance,
much used in ancient times, is from the San Severo canal.
Since
December 2014, the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities has
managed it through the Veneto Museum Complex, which in December 2019
became the Regional Directorate of Museums.
Owned by the Grimani family of the Santa Maria Formosa branch until
1865, after various changes of ownership in 1981 it was acquired, in a
serious state of deterioration, by the Superintendence for Architectural
and Environmental Heritage of the city of Venice and became a State
property. Open to the public on 20 December 2008, after a long
restoration, it is a museum belonging to the Polo Museale Veneto.
The building, whose oldest nucleus was erected in the Middle Ages at
the confluence of the canals of San Severo and Santa Maria Formosa, was
purchased by Antonio Grimani, who became doge in 1521, and was inherited
in the third decade of the 16th century by his grandchildren Carrier
Grimani, prosecutor de supra for the Republic of Venice, and Giovanni
Grimani, Patriarch of Aquileia, who restructured the old factory
inspired by architectural models taken from classical times. The two
brothers wanted to give the building "modern" forms and had it decorated
with high-impact fresco and stucco cycles. In 1558, on Vettore's death,
Giovanni, having become the sole owner of the building, promoted an
expansion of the same with the collaboration of many artists including
Federico Zuccari, architect of the decoration of the monumental
staircase, and Camillo Mantovano, active in various circles . The
patriarch Giovanni Grimani, a refined collector, set up his collection
of antiquities, including sculptures, marbles, vases, small bronzes and
gems, in the halls of the palace. In 1587 he decided to donate the
collection of sculptures and gems to the Serenissima: after his death
the former were placed in the anteroom of the Biblioteca Marciana,
becoming the founding nucleus of the National Archaeological Museum of
Venice.
The long restoration has restored the rooms to the vision of
visitors, including: the Camerino di Callisto, with stuccos by Giovanni
da Udine, the Camerino di Apollo, with frescoes by Francesco Salviati
and Giovanni da Udine, the Sala del doge Antonio, decorated with stuccos
and polychrome marbles, the Sala a Fogliami by Camillo Mantovano, with a
ceiling entirely covered with fruit trees, flowers and animals, and the
Tribuna which housed more than one hundred pieces from the
archaeological collection. The group with the Rape of Ganymede is
displayed there, suspended in the center of the vault decorated with
coffers.
In all likelihood Federico Zuccari is also responsible
for the stucco decoration with the grotesque monster with gaping jaws
visible in the Sala del Camino. Other works exhibited in the museum
refer to the collecting interests of the Grimani family. In the Sala di
Psiche you can admire the canvas with the Offering of gifts to Psyche,
an ancient copy of the original by Francesco Salviati, already placed in
the center of the dismembered wooden ceiling in the mid-19th century.
The second noble floor, devoid of the decorations seen on the first,
hosts temporary exhibitions and cultural events.
For the history
of art and architecture of Venice, the palace is a unique and precious
element. Its peculiar architectural form, the decorations full of
enigmas and different interpretations, as well as the history of the
events of the Grimani family of Santa Maria Formosa, are still today a
passionate subject of study and research.
The following temporary exhibitions are currently on display:
"Domus Grimani 1594-2019. The collection of classical sculptures in the
palace after four centuries"
"Domus Grimani - The Doge's Room"
"Archinto" by Georg Baselitz
"The Flaying of Marsyas" by Mary
Weatherford
(all until November 27, 2022)
From Ruga Giuffa, through a small calle (Ramo Grimani), the building
is accessed through a marble portal which introduces the visitor into
the large courtyard created following an imposing renovation completed
in the 1560s. The original medieval factory, with an L-shaped plan, was
restructured and enlarged in several phases, already starting in the
1530s, by the Vettore brothers and Giovanni Grimani according to a style
inspired by the ancient Roman domus and the cultural climate of the
Renaissance. The loggias that were built were adorned with classical
statues similar to the rooms on the main floor. The loggia that precedes
the entrance to the museum was entirely frescoed with plant motifs and
completed by the wonderful stucco baskets that can still be admired.
Monumental staircase
Between 1563 and 1565 the barrel vault of
the staircase leading to the portego or through hall on the noble floor
was sumptuously decorated by Federico Zuccari, a young artist of Roman
culture, with allegorical frescoes that refer to the virtues of his
client, completed by grotesques and stucco reliefs with mythological
creatures. The latter reproduce some ancient cameos from the collection
of Giovanni Grimani. Overall, the staircase could compete for
magnificence only with the Scala d'Oro of Palazzo Ducale and with that
of the Marciana Library.
Camaron d'Oro
This room owes its name
to the tapestries embellished with gold thread that once covered its
walls. Here you can admire three pieces from Giovanni Grimani's
collection of antiquities, donated in 1587 to the Public Statuary of the
Serenissima (now the National Archaeological Museum): two busts of
Antinous and a head of Athena. The plaster statue depicting the Laocoon
Group is a very rare eighteenth-century cast of the well-known sculpture
of the first century BC. Cardinal Domenico Grimani had received a small
bronze depicting the group as a gift from Jacopo Sansovino, as Vasari
tells us. The original sculptural group, found in Rome in 1506 at the
Baths of Titus, is kept in the Vatican Museums.
Foliage room
The ceiling of the room known as the room of the foliage, or the
pergola, was made in the 1560s by Camillo Mantovano. It owes its name to
the spectacular ceiling decoration that celebrates nature, luxuriant
with plants and flowers, a dense bush inhabited by numerous animals,
frequently in a predatory attitude and rich in symbolic meanings. In the
lunettes surmounted by grotesques, complex figures in the form of a
rebus allude, perhaps, to the long and troubled trial for heresy
suffered by the patriarch Giovanni Grimani.
grandstand
The
grandstand was also known as the Antiquarium or Camerino delle
Antichità. Originally it housed more than one hundred and thirty ancient
sculptures, among the most valuable in the collection. This
extraordinary space, once closed on three sides, illuminated from above
and inspired by the Pantheon, was the true fulcrum and ultimate
destination of the itinerary along the rooms that precede it. The
variety of sources of inspiration suggests a direct involvement of
Giovanni Grimani himself in the design. The sculpture with the Rape of
Ganymede, which hangs in the center of the room, is a Roman replica of a
late Hellenistic model and was placed back in its original position
after the restoration of the palace.
Starting from May 2019 and
until November 2022, on the occasion of the "Domus Grimani" exhibition,
numerous sculptures that belonged to Giovanni's sixteenth-century
collection were relocated to the Tribuna (see the Domus Grimani
chapter).
Neoclassical room
This room was renovated to be used as a
bedroom on the occasion of the marriage, celebrated in 1791, between
the Roman princess Virginia Chigi and Giovanni Carlo Grimani. For this
purpose, two comfortable dressing rooms were created in the rooms
behind the wall of the fireplace. The decoration of the ceiling,
carried out by Giovanni Faccioli from Verona, faithfully reproduces
some passages of ancient wall painting taken from the Domus Aurea and
from the Aldobrandini Wedding.
Dining room
The suggestive
ceiling of this room, decorated with festoons with game, vegetables
and fish, alternating with floral bands, was created by Camillo
Mantovano and a collaborator around 1567. The compositional scheme,
with the space divided into segments by rays that converge centre,
reproposes a model used in ancient decorations in a modern key. The
seventeenth-century canvas in the center of the ceiling, Saint John
baptizing the crowd, derives from the homonymous painting by Nicolas
Poussin conserved in the Louvre. According to nineteenth-century
guides, it would replace a painting attributed to Giorgione and
depicting the Four Elements.
Doge's room, vestibule and chapel
These three rooms belong to the last building phase of the palace,
completed by 1568. In the chapel, used by the patriarch Giovanni
Grimani for the private celebration of mass, a sixteenth-century
altarpiece attributed to Giovanni Contarini, a follower of Titian, has
been placed in place of the marble altar, removed in the 19th century.
On the ceiling of the chapel and the vestibule, brief Latin
inscriptions still recall the patriarch's procedural events. From the
small window in the vestibule you can see the spiral staircase,
probably invented by Palladio. In the next room, a plaque above the
fireplace recalls and exalts the role of Antonio Grimani, grandfather
of Giovanni and doge of the Serenissima from 1521 to 1523, to whom the
room was dedicated. To underline the importance of these three rooms,
the walls and floors are entirely decorated with marble panels,
according to the ancient taste. Many of them, extracted during the
Roman era in places in Turkey, Greece and Africa, are rare and
precious. In the niches, above the doors and above the fireplace,
there were antique vases, busts and classical sculptural groups.
Apollo's dressing room
Located in the area of the medieval
factory, the dressing rooms of Apollo, Callisto and Psyche were
decorated between 1537 and 1540 by mannerist trained artists. On the
vault, in a pattern derived from the ceiling of a Roman tomb, the
dispute between Apollo and Marsyas narrated in Ovid's Metamorphoses
takes place. The four episodes are the work of the Florentine
Francesco Salviati. We owe the stuccos, the little figures of
classical divinities, the grotesques and the extraordinary birds to
Giovanni da Udine. In the lunette on the back wall, an allegorical
figure with a Roman setting alludes to the origins and splendor of the
Grimani family. The only sculpture placed here is the head of Talìa,
muse of comedy.
Callisto's dressing room
As in Apollo's
dressing room, the one dedicated to the nymph Callisto and the story
of her metamorphosis also refers to the famous Ovidian text. The story
unfolds through five panels with a gold background, starting from the
first - on the wall opposite the windows - where the sleeping nymph is
loved by Jupiter, up to the epilogue - in the center of the ceiling -
in which Callisto and her son Arcades are transformed into
constellations. Having rediscovered the ancient stucco technique in
Rome, studied on classical ruins, Giovanni da Udine offers in this
ceiling a sample of his great ability, recreating animals, still
lifes, and twelve putti symbolizing the months of the year,
accompanied by four signs of the zodiac . Some round mirrors set in
the stucco embellish the composition and, in accordance with the story
narrated, recall the stars of the firmament.
Psyche's dressing
room
The room is presented in a totally renewed guise, with the
recovery of the sixteenth-century spatiality. The environment had a
wooden coffered ceiling in which five paintings were placed with the
fable of Cupid and Psyche, narrated by Apuleius. Of these, the octagon
in the center has remained, probably a copy of the original made by
Francesco Salviati in 1539, which depicts Psyche venerated as a
goddess for her beauty. Recent works have revealed the existence of a
large fireplace, at the bottom of which a salamander is carved amidst
the flames. The two frescoed candlesticks with birds and fish executed
around 1560 are probably by Camillo Mantovano. In the niches above the
doors four classical heads are displayed.
Fireplace room
The
large corner room, belonging to the oldest part of the building, was
renovated in the 1560s. It is dominated by the splendid fireplace
surmounted by colored marbles and large stucco decorations, where
niches and shelves housed other archaeological pieces from the Grimani
collection. The elegance of the faces portrayed in profile, the
quality of the garlands and fruits and the astonishing monster with
its mouth wide open, visible in the centre, suggest the genius and
inventive extravagance of Federico Zuccari. Fragments of a fresco
decoration that recall the colonnade of the courtyard are still
visible on the walls.
On 7 May 2019 the exhibition "DOMUS GRIMANI 1594 – 2019" was
inaugurated,[3] which celebrates the temporary return of many
masterpieces of Greek, Roman and Renaissance art, which belonged to
the collection of Giovanni Grimani and their relocation in the rooms
where they found until the patriarch's death.
The exhibition
itinerary develops in the series of rooms (Camaron d'Oro, Sala a
Fogliami, Antitribuna) which lead to the Tribuna, through the only
original entrance of the same.
In addition to the sculptures
from the National Archaeological Museum of Venice, there are also
some 16th-century furnishings on display from other Venetian museums
and private collections, with the intention of recreating a
16th-century aristocratic residence: among the most notable works, a
tapestry of Medici manufacture based on a design by Francesco
Salviati, two wooden cabinets, small bronzes by Jacopo Sansovino and
Tiziano Aspetti, two bronze andirons by Girolamo Campagna and a
table inlaid with ancient marble and lapis lazuli that belonged to
the Grimani family.
The Sala del Doge was created at the same time as the expansion works
of the palace commissioned by Giovanni Grimani, patriarch of Aquileia,
and by his brother Vettore and completed in 1568. This space, the ideal
counterpart of the Tribuna and probably also designed by Giovanni
himself, wanted to celebrate the figure of Antonio Grimani, skilled
merchant of spices and first doge of the family. Precisely to evoke the
ancestor's relationship with the eastern Mediterranean, Giovanni and
Vettore decided to embellish the space with ancient and precious marbles
such as yellow alabaster, green serpentine and red porphyry, thus
creating a spectacular setting in which to exhibit part of the classical
sculptures from the family collection.
Through a careful study of
historical sources – including Giovanni Grimani's will, historical
descriptions of the time and late 19th century photographs recently
discovered in the archives of the National Gallery in Washington – the
curators Daniele Ferrara, director of the Veneto and Toto Regional
Directorate of Museums Bergamo Rossi, director of Venetian Heritage,
were able to relocate twenty sculptures inside the room, including the
Dionysus group leaning against a satyr from the Roman imperial era in
the niche of the front wall. Eleven other sculptures have instead been
placed in the adjoining rooms: six in the vestibule, one in Callisto's
Camerino and four in the Psyche Room.
Simultaneously with the rearrangement of the Sala del Doge, the
Palazzo Grimani Museum is hosting an exhibition, curated by Mario
Codognato, of new and recent works by the German artist Georg Baselitz.
Born in 1938, he is one of the most significant artists of his
generation.
Entitled Archinto, the exhibition, produced by
Gagosian in collaboration with Venetian Heritage, is set up on the main
floor of the museum. Twelve canvases created specifically for the Sala
del Portego are placed in its original eighteenth-century stucco frames,
where until the 19th century the portraits of the Grimani family stood
out. Thanks to a special agreement, these works will remain on long-term
loan to the museum thanks to the artist's concession.
In
Archinto, Georg Baselitz pays homage to Venice and its rich artistic
tradition, on the one hand re-establishing a historical continuity and
on the other signaling a break between celebrated Renaissance
portraiture and its contemporary equivalents.
The title of the
exhibition and his works refer to the enigmatic portrait of Cardinal
Filippo Archinto that Titian painted in 1558. Bringing the sensitivity
of the Old Masters into a contemporary context, the ghostly quality of
Georg Baselitz's paintings confirm his interest in the techniques of
engraving and alludes to the constant artistic theme of human mortality.
Set up on the second floor of the museum, the exhibition was designed
in collaboration with the well-known architect and designer Kulapat
Yantrasast and will open in conjunction with the start of the 59th
Biennale Arte. The works that make up the cycle The Flaying of Marsyas
are inspired by Titian's great masterpiece of the same name from 1570-76
- The Punishment of Marsyas, now kept in the Archbishop's Museum of
Kroměříž in the Czech Republic - and reflect the everlasting fascination
that this painting exerts on Weatherford . Inspired by the delicate
palette of the Renaissance painter and paying homage to the
characteristic light of Venice, Weatherford uses Flashe paint and neon
lights to restore the effect of the ancient canvas. The artist responds
to Titian's composition by translating the violent character of his
mythological theme into a more spontaneous form, also alluding to
destiny, arrogance and the relationship between the human and the
divine.
Weatherford's approach to painting is rooted in personal
experience and evokes a variety of urban and rural environments through
experimentation with light, colour, texture, gesture and the interplay
between the painted surface and three-dimensional elements. In his
best-known works, layers of Flashe vinyl emulsion are sponged onto heavy
linen panels topped with neon glass tubes, a material that Weatherford
began using in 2012, drawing inspiration from old illuminated signs
still visible in Bakersfield, California. California, where he was then
working as a guest artist. Casting a bright light on the paintings'
regular fields of color, the pipes and their power cables often look
like hand-drawn lines.
Mary Weatherford's The Flaying of Marsyas
complements the museum's current exhibition program, which features both
classical and contemporary art. The piano nobile of Palazzo Grimani
currently hosts the exhibitions Domus Grimani, which focuses on the
return of classical statues from the Grimani collection to the Palazzo,
and Archinto, an exhibition of new and recent work by Georg Baselitz,
which includes twelve canvases created especially for the Sala del
Portego, a long-term loan from the artist to the museum. The Flaying of
Marsyas and Archinto both feature the work of contemporary artists who
have drawn inspiration from a building which represents the Renaissance
in Venice in an unusual way, being Tuscan-Roman rather than Venetian in
style. The myth of Marsyas is also represented in the frescoes by
Francesco Salviati that decorate the ceiling of Apollo's Camerino, thus
creating a further link between the palace and the new Weatherford
cycle.
The Flaying of Marsyas and Archinto are produced by
Gagosian and organized in collaboration with the Veneto Regional Museums
Directorate and the Venetian Heritage Foundation.