Palazzo Pisani Moretta is a palace in Venice, located in the San Polo district and overlooking the Grand Canal, between Palazzo Barbarigo della Terrazza and Palazzo Tiepolo.
Built in the second half of the 15th century by the Bembos and
restored shortly after, in 1629 the palace became the residence of a
branch of the noble Pisani family, the Pisani Morettas, whose name
derives from the mispronunciation of Almorò Pisani, founder of the
family. It came into the hands of Francesco Pisani Moretta, the last
male descendant of the family, in 1737 it passed to his daughter Chiara,
who married a member of the Pisani dal Banco family. She provided for
the profound restructuring of the palace: she had the external staircase
torn down, replaced by the grand staircase by Tirali, and she had the
internal rooms frescoed by the most popular painters of her era.
Chiara's son, Vettor, secretly married the bourgeois Teresa Dalla Vedova
(later forced to shut herself up in a female institution) and had a son
by her, named Pietro, not recognized by her father. Vettor also had a
second wife and a second daughter, Chiara, who married Filippo
Barbarigo: as the two lived in adjacent residences, the palaces were
unified. On his father's death, Pietro filed a lawsuit with which he was
able to receive the due part of the inheritance and the count's title.
When Pietro died in 1847, the palace passed to one of his daughters,
married to a Giusti del Giardino. The palace, passed to his heirs and
currently still private, is also remembered for having hosted important
historical figures on the European scene, such as Josephine of
Beauharnais and Joseph II of Habsburg-Lorraine. Recently renovated, it
still hosts sumptuous masquerade balls during the Carnival.
The facade of the building is an example of flowery Venetian Gothic:
divided into three sections by imposing string course frames of
Renaissance workmanship, it has two orders of hexaphores. Both designed
on the model of the openings of the loggia of Palazzo Ducale, however
they appear profoundly different: the quadrilobes on the first floor in
fact highlight the ogival curve of the arch, while those on the second
floor are placed on the cusp, contrary to the custom of the time. On the
sides we find two pairs of ogival single-lancet windows for the main
floor, surrounded by indented frames and perfectly in line with the
traditional tripartition.
The ground floor has centrally two
pointed arch portals on the canal and is surmounted by a mezzanine. Once
there were two other secondary doors, at the ends of the facade. The top
floor was terraced during the 19th century, adding weight to the
structure.
The interior is in Baroque and Neoclassical style and
dates back to the 18th century: the first noble floor, organized around
a portego about 24 meters long and frescoed with works by Jacopo Guarana
(Light defeating darkness and Apollo with the hours of the morning) , is
made up of side rooms, two of which host works by Giambattista Tiepolo
(The meeting between Venus and Mars, 1743) and Pietro Longhi. Other
works once housed in the palace but now transferred elsewhere are The
Family of Dario at the Feet of Alessandro by Paolo Veronese, and The
Death of Dario by Giambattista Piazzetta, now transferred respectively
to the National Gallery in London and to the Ca' Rezzonico Museum, in
Venice. The second noble floor, also containing a small church
overlooking the rear garden, replicates the same scheme, while
presenting a broken portego into a ballroom library.
The land
door of the building is located in Ramo Pisani e Barbarigo, a narrow
calle covered by passages that connected the buildings of the same name,
which were unified for a long time as the two families had been linked
by marriage ties.