The Accademia

Why it matters

The Gallerie dell'Accademia is the great museum of Venetian painting, from the gold-ground altarpieces of the fourteenth century to the eighteenth, arranged broadly in order of time. It stands on the south bank of the Grand Canal in Dorsoduro, at the foot of the Ponte dell'Accademia, which, like the water-bus landing beside it, takes its name from the museum.

Almost every Venetian painter of note is here: the Bellini family, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Lorenzo Lotto, Tintoretto, Veronese, Tiepolo, Canaletto and Guardi, and with them works by Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Hans Memling and Hieronymus Bosch. The collection also owns Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man, though it is shown only rarely.

An academy in a confraternity

The museum began as the gallery of an art school. The Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia was founded on 24 September 1750, with the painter Giovanni Battista Piazzetta as its first director and Giambattista Tiepolo as its first president, and it was one of the first institutions to study the restoration of paintings, from 1777. In 1807 Napoleon's government refounded it as a royal academy and moved it into buildings it had just emptied: the Scuola della Carità, its church of Santa Maria della Carità, and the convent of the Lateran canons beside them.

The Scuola della Carità was the oldest of the Scuole Grandi, founded in 1260, and it built its house here from 1344. The church's facade was completed in 1441 by Bartolomeo Bon. The convent was begun by Andrea Palladio in 1561 and never finished. The academy's collections opened to the public on 10 August 1817, filled out by paintings from the churches and monasteries Napoleon had closed, and in 1879 the gallery became independent of the school, which moved out in 2004.

The galleries have been rearranged many times. Titian's Assumption hung here in the nineteenth century before it went back to the high altar of the Frari in the 1920s, and between 1944 and 1960 the architect Carlo Scarpa reworked the rooms, thinning out the hang and clearing away false additions. The Vitruvian Man left the building in 2019 only after a court in Venice ruled it could travel safely to an exhibition at the Louvre.

What you actually see

The route is mostly chronological. The first rooms hold the earliest Venetian painting, gold-ground altarpieces by Paolo Veneziano and Lorenzo Veneziano, under the carved and gilded fifteenth-century ceiling of the old chapter hall of the confraternity.

The Renaissance follows. Giovanni Bellini's Madonnas and altarpieces fill a sequence of rooms, and the great narrative canvases of the late fifteenth century hang in the old church: the Miracles of the Relic of the True Cross, painted by several artists, and Carpaccio's cycle of the Legend of Saint Ursula, in a room of its own.

Giorgione's Tempest, painted between 1506 and 1508 for the nobleman Gabriele Vendramin, is the picture many visitors come for. A woman sits nursing a baby; a man with a staff stands to one side, not looking at her; lightning splits the sky over a city behind. What it means has been argued over for centuries, and nobody knows. Its neighbors include Giorgione's portrait of an old woman. One reading, by the scholar Salvatore Settis, sees Adam and Eve with their son Cain after the expulsion from Eden, the lightning standing for God; it is one theory among many.

Then the canvases grow. Titian's Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, of 1538, hangs in the room it was painted for, the Albergo of the Scuola della Carità, the setting and the picture made for each other. And one whole wall is taken by Veronese's Feast in the House of Levi of 1573, more than five meters high and thirteen wide, one of the largest paintings of its century.

The painting that changed its name

Veronese painted the Feast for the refectory of the Dominican friars of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, as a Last Supper to replace one by Titian destroyed by fire in 1571. He filled it with a crowd of figures, among them what the inquisitors called buffoons, drunken Germans and dwarfs, and the Venetian Inquisition summoned him to answer for irreverence and indecorum, with the charge of heresy mentioned. His answer was to change the title: the picture became a banquet given for Christ by Levi, from the Gospel of Luke, which he inscribed on the canvas. The painting stayed as it was.

How to visit

Buy tickets on the museum's official site, where TicketOne is named as the only authorized online reseller; online tickets save the queue at the office. Under-eighteens enter free, and European citizens between eighteen and twenty-five pay a reduced rate. Check the opening calendar there, too, for closures and holidays.

Allow two hours at least. Pace yourself for the long rooms of large canvases at the end, and if you want the Tempest in peace, go to it first. The Vitruvian Man is exhibited only for short periods because light damages it; do not expect it to be on show.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is a few minutes' walk east along the canal, and Santa Maria della Salute is beyond it, so modern art and a Baroque church can follow the old masters in one morning. From the Accademia bridge, look east down the canal to the domes of the Salute and the open basin beyond.