The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

326
Vicenza, Verona and around
| Vicenza
The Museo Civico and Teatro Olimpico
The Corso Palladio ends with one of the architect’s most imperious buildings,
the Palazzo Chiericati. Begun in 1550 and completed about a hundred years
later, this commission was a direct result of Palladio’s success with the Basilica
(see opposite), being a house for one of the Basilica’s supervisors, Girolamo
Chiericati. It’s now the home of the Museo Civico-Pinacoteca Palazzo
Chiericati (Tues–Sun 9am–5pm; entry with Card Musei), many of whose
pieces were gathered together in the 1810s to keep them out of the grasp of
the marauding French.
The collection of paintings starts on the ground floor with a fine trio – a
Veronese putto, Hans Memling’s Crucifixion and Lorenzo Lotto’s Madonna and
Child. Upstairs celebrated names such as Tintoretto, Giambattista Tiepolo,
van Dyck, Breughel the Elder, Piazzetta, the Bassano family and Luca Giordano
punctuate a picture collection that is given its backbone by Vicentine
artists – notably Montagna, Buonconsiglio, Fogolino (a tumultuous Adoration
of the Magi), Maffei and Carpioni. Though none of these local artists is likely
to knock you flat, there are some fine pieces amid the workaday stuff (the tiny
bronze plaquettes made by Valerio Belli, for example), as well as a smattering
of oddities; Carpione’s disgusting bubble-blowing cherub (an allegory of
life’s fragility) might stick in the mind, as could Francesco del Cairo’s orgasmic
Herodiade with the Head of the Baptist. And be sure to take a look at the ceiling