The Accademia is one of the smallest of the world’s great art galleries, and picture for picture perhaps the most concentrated collection of masterpieces anywhere — though its rambling layout may surprise first-time visitors. But there are changes afoot as it expands into spaces once occupied by the Venice Fine Arts Academy. This means more works on permanent display and larger special exhibitions.
In the days of the Venetian Republic, the city saw no reason to have a public picture gallery. Paintings were everywhere: in the Doge’s Palace, administrative buildings, churches, chapels, monasteries, convents, hospitals, orphanages, confraternity houses and in hundreds of private palazzi. But after Napoleon’s overthrow of La Serenissima in 1797, civic and religious institutions were forcibly closed and their art works pillaged.
Out of this catastrophe the Accademia emerged. Founded in 1756, with Giambattista Tiepolo as its first president, the Venetian Academy was now to form the basis of a new multi-disciplinary art school with an educational picture gallery attached (access was originally limited to staff and students). Furnished with spoils from the suppressed institutions, it was first opened to the public in 1817. Back then, the location was seen as inconvenient, since this was half a century before the first Accademia Bridge across the Grand Canal (the design of the present wooden one dates to 1933). Even more irksome were the haphazardly amalgamated premises, consisting of the 15th-century Venetian Gothic Carità church, the Palladian Convento dei Canonici Lateranensi and the meeting hall and rooms of the Scuola della Carità, Venice’s oldest lay confraternity, founded in 1260.
Bizarre reconfigurations included the horizontal and vertical divisions of the Carità church to create studios on the ground floor and two exhibition halls on the first. After the gallery and school administrations were separated in 1879, their continued forced cohabitation led to chronic complaints of lack of space.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in