Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

The Gallerie dell'Accademia is the foremost museum of Venetian painting, occupying the former complex of the Scuola della Carità, the church of Santa Maria della Carità, and an adjoining monastery — buildings that include work by Palladio — on the south bank of the Grand Canal at the foot of the Accademia bridge in Venice, Veneto. The collection grew from the teaching gallery of Venice's Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1750 and reorganised after the fall of the Republic and the Napoleonic suppression of churches and confraternities, which funnelled countless altarpieces and canvases into the museum. Its galleries trace the development of Venetian art across some five centuries, from the gold-ground panels of Paolo and Lorenzo Veneziano and the Byzantine-influenced fourteenth century, through the luminous early Renaissance of Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, and Cima da Conegliano, to the High Renaissance masters Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, and on to the eighteenth-century painters Tiepolo, Canaletto, Guardi, and Longhi. Among its most famous holdings are Giorgione's enigmatic 'Tempest', Veronese's enormous 'Feast in the House of Levi' — painted as a Last Supper and defended by the artist before the Inquisition — Titian's late 'Pietà', Carpaccio's narrative cycle of the Legend of Saint Ursula, and Gentile Bellini's processions in the Piazza San Marco that record the appearance of late medieval Venice. The museum also preserves Leonardo da Vinci's celebrated drawing of the 'Vitruvian Man', shown only occasionally for conservation reasons. The display is broadly chronological, allowing visitors to follow the evolution of light, colour, and composition that made the Venetian school distinctive. A long programme of restoration and expansion into the former monastery has progressively enlarged the exhibition space and reopened rooms with their works freshly conserved. Together the building and its paintings make the Gallerie dell'Accademia the essential survey of how Venice painted itself, its saints, and its myths over the lifetime of the Republic.