Studio Research: Museum Hopping in Venice and Florence

Hey Stranger!

My second post regarding my trip to Italy. My academic focus was on the Biennale, but my free time was spent also looking at old master works, that too, blew me away! In Venice, I went to: San Marco/Doges Palace, Fortuny Museum, the academia de Venezia, Peggy Guggenheim, and Ca’ Pesaro. In Florence, I did the academia of Florence and Uffizi gallery.

I’m sitting here trying to pick my favorites, and it’s hard, but I think for Venice it was Ca’ Pesaro, Fortuny, and the Academy. San Marco is BEAUTIFUL, don’t get me wrong, but we went to it as the fourth museum of the day and I feel like I didn’t appreciate the work as much as I could have because I wanted to sleep so badly, so I was crabby, sleepy, and sweating buckets.

I’m going to start with Fortuny. Pictures first:

Next up is Ca’ Pesaro:

The academy of Venice, I focused more on getting detail pictures because these help me make educated guesses about technique and just because to me, the details reveal everything about the artist. To be clear, the academy’s paintings were some of the biggest I saw on this trip- one of the largest was Veronese Feast in the House of Levi, spanning 18ft high and a whopping 42 feet long. It is the one photos I will be including because I’m trying to not make this post incredibly long.

This photo does not nearly capture the scale of this since it's in .5. But I could not fit the whole painting in 1.0!

the full painting pulled from wiki

Only photos I got at san Marco were taken of me craning my neck in every room. There are 1000 rooms in the doges palace but we do not get to see every room! But now you have a better idea of how much walking was happening and why I was so tired. I got to see the doges apartments, Liago, the hall of scrutiny, the hall of great council ( this room is 173 ft x 82 ft), college hall, senate hall, hall of the compass, hall of the council of ten the armory, the hall of philosophers, and…the prisons. Nearly all rooms had paintings covering the entire ceiling so my mouth was just open in shock every single room we walked into. The frames are wood gilded in gold leaf. The craftsmanship on the framing alone left me completely in shock. In little tiny sections (and not in every room, some were COMPLETELY covered) you can see the wood planks of the ceiling behind the frames, so each painting is painted first off the ceiling (not like sistine, where everything was painted directly on the ceiling), placement on the ceiling is meticulously planned in a chronological order in how the artist—Tinoretti wanted to storytell. This entire ceiling is heavy so I’m very curious about what the process was with getting it all up, so I want to think they mounted the paintings first and then built all the frames to the ceiling, but maybe they just mounted paintings already framed and then added more gilded pieces around them.

I wonder how often they check the fastening points and re-enforce areas……