The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

the canal grande The Left Bank
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Not far beyond the unfinished church of San Marcuola stands the Palazzo
Vendramin-Calergi, begun by Mauro Codussi (for the Loredan family) at
the very end of the fifteenth century and finished in the first decade of the
sixteenth, probably by Tullio Lombardo. This is the first Venetian palace to
be influenced by the classically based architectural principles of Leon Battista
Alberti, and is frequently singled out as the Canal Grande’s masterpiece. The
round-arched windows enclosing two similar arches are identifying characteristics
of Codussi’s designs. In the seventeenth century a new wing was added
to the palace, but soon after its completion two sons of the house conspired to
murder a member of the Querini-Stampalia family; as the brothers hadn’t physically
committed the crime themselves, the court had to limit their sentence to
exile, but it ordered the demolition of the new block for good measure. The
palazzo’s most famous subsequent resident was Richard Wagner, who died here
in February 1883; the size of the palace can be gauged from the fact that his
rented suite of fifteen rooms occupied just a part of the mezzanine level.
The Palazzo Soranzo, a bit further along, dates from the same period as the
Vendramin-Calergi, and the contrast between the two gives you an idea of the
originality of Codussi’s design. The Palazzo Gussoni-Grimani della Vida,
on the near side of the Rio di Noale, was rebuilt to Sanmicheli’s designs in the
middle of the sixteenth century. From 1614 to 1618 it was occupied by the
English consul Sir Henry Wotton, best remembered now for his definition of
an ambassador as “an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country”
– a remark that earned him the sack from King James I. Wotton spent
much of his time in Venice running a sort of import-export business; when
he wasn’t buying paintings to ship back to England he was arranging for Protestant
texts to be brought into Venice, a city he thought ripe for conversion.
The Venetians, however, remained content with their idiosyncratic version of
Catholicism, as exemplified by Wotton’s friend, Paolo Sarpi (see p.151). At the
time of Wotton’s residence the facade of the palace was covered with frescoes
by Tintoretto, but they have long since faded to invisibility.
From the Ca’ d’Oro to the Rialto
The next palace of interest is the most beguiling on the canal – the Ca’ d’Oro.
(Ca’ is an abbreviation of casa di stazio, meaning the main family home; it was
only after the fall of the Republic that the title Casa was dropped in favour
of Palazzo.) Incorporating fragments of a thirteenth-century palace that once
stood on the site, the Ca’ d’Oro was built in the 1420s and 1430s, and acquired
its nickname – “The Golden House” – from the gilding that used to accentuate
much of its carving. For more on the Ca’ d’Oro, see p.152.
The facade of the Palazzo Sagredo, on the near side of the Campo Santa
Sofia, is an overlay of different periods, and a good demonstration of the Venetian
custom of adapting old buildings to current needs and principles. The tracery
of the piano nobile is fourteenth-century, and clearly later than the storeys
below; the right wing, however, seems to belong to the fifteenth century.
On the near corner of the Rio dei Santi Apostoli stands the Palazzo Mangilli-Valmarana,
built in the eighteenth century for the English consul Joseph
Smith, who was one of the chief patrons of Canaletto. More interesting is
the Ca’ da Mosto, close to the Rio’s opposite bank. The arches of the first
floor and the carved panels above them are remnants of a thirteenth-century
Veneto-Byzantine building, and are thus among the oldest structures to be
seen on the Canal Grande. Alvise da Mosto, discoverer of the Cape Verde
Islands, was born here in 1432; by the end of that century the palazzo had