The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

Ca’ Rezzonico
The eighteenth century, the period of Venice’s political senility and moral degeneration,
was also the period of its last grand flourish in the visual and decorative
arts. The main showcase for the art of that era, the Museo del Settecento Veneziano
(April–Oct 10am–6pm; Nov–March 10am–5pm; closed Tues; e6.50)
spreads through most of the enormous Ca’ Rezzonico, which the city authorities
bought in 1934 specifically as a home for the museum. Recently restored, it’s a
spectacular building, furnished and decorated mostly with genuine eighteenthcentury
items and fabrics: where originals weren’t available, the eighteenthcentury
ambience has been preserved by using almost indistinguishable modern
reproductions. Sumptuary laws in Venice restricted the quantities of silk, brocade
and tapestry that could be draped around a house, so legions of painters, stuccoists,
cabinet-makers and other such applied artists were employed to fanfare the
wealth of their patrons to the world. The work they produced is certainly not
to everyone’s taste, but even if you find most of the museum’s contents frivolous
or grotesque, the frescoes by the Tiepolo family and Pietro Longhi’s affectionate
Venetian scenes should justify the entrance fee, and the informative sheets in each
room allow you to get the most from the displays.
A man in constant demand in the early part of the century was the Belluno
sculptor-cum-woodcarver Andrea Brustolon, much of whose output consisted
of wildly elaborate pieces of furniture. A few of his pieces are displayed in the
chandeliered ballroom at the top of the entrance staircase, and in the last room on
this floor, the Brustolon Room, you’ll find a whole lot more of them, including
the Allegory of Strength console. Featuring Hercules underneath, two river gods
holding four vases and a fifth vase held up by three black slaves in chains, this is
a creation that makes you marvel at the craftsmanship and wince at the ends to
which it was used.
The less fervid imaginations of Giambattista Tiepolo and his son Giandomenico
are introduced in room 2 (off the far right-hand corner of the ballroom)
with the ceiling fresco celebrating Ludovico Rezzonico’s marriage into the hugely
powerful Savorgnan family in 1758. This was quite a year for the Rezzonico clan,
as it also brought the election of Carlo Rezzonico as Pope Clement XIII; the son
of the man who bought the uncompleted palace and finished its construction,
Carlo the pontiff was notorious both for his nepotism (a small painting in this
room shows him with his nephews and niece) and for his prudery – he insisted
that the Vatican’s antique nude statuary be made more modest by the judicious
application of fig leaves. Beyond room 4, with its array of pastels by Rosalba
Carriera, you come to two other Giambattista Tiepolo ceilings, enlivening the
rooms overlooking the Canal Grande on each side of the main portego: an Allegory
of Merit, and Nobility and Virtue Triumphing over Perfidy (which was brought here
in the 1930s). Below the latter you’ll see some pictures by Giambattista’s sons:
Giandomenico, and the younger and far less famous Lorenzo. Giambattista’s first
teacher, Gregorio Lazzarini, is represented by a huge Death of Orpheus in room 12,
where the ceiling panels (and those of the adjoining Brustolon room) are by the
seventeenth-century artist Francesco Maffei, who painted them for a palazzo over
in Cannaregio; should Ca’ Rezzonico kindle a desire to see more work by him,
you should take yourself off to his home city, Vicenza.
In the portego of the second floor hang the only two canal views by Canaletto
on show in public galleries in Venice. An adjoining suite of rooms contains the
museum’s most engaging paintings – Giandomenico Tiepolo’s sequence of frescoes
from the Villa Zianigo near Mestre, the Tiepolo family home. Begun in
1759, the frescoes were completed towards the end of the century, by which time
dorsoduro Northern Dorsoduro
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