5 September 2019 – 1 March 2020
Venezia, Palazzo Ducale – Appartamento del Doge

Opening hours: everyday 8.30 – 19.00
Last admission 18.30

Enter the world of Flemish Art as the leading Flemish museums lend exclusive masterpieces to the Palazzo Ducale in Venice.

From 5th September until 1st March 2020 the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, in conjunction with the City of Antwerp, VisitFlanders and the Flemish Community, presents From Titian to Rubens. Masterpieces from Antwerp and other Flemish Collections, an exhibition curated by Ben Van Beneden, director of Rubenshuis in Antwerp. The magnificent Doge’s apartments will be transformed into veritable ‘constkamers’, rooms filled with exquisite art demonstrating the riches of Flemish collections. Featuring masterpieces by artists including Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck and Michiel Sweerts, the exhibition offers a dazzling array of works, and the finest group of Italian and Flemish art to come to Italy.

Three icons of Venetian painting return to their hometown of Venice: Titian’s Jacopo Pesaro presenting Saint Peter to Pope Alexander VI, the altarpiece of the former San Geminiano church, covered by the press worldwide as David Bowie’s Tintoretto’, and Titian’s Portrait of a Lady and her Daughter (thought to be a depiction of Titian’s mistress Milia and their daughter Emilia).

These masterpieces from Flemish collections, both public and private, are rarely lent and some have never, until now, been shown in public. From Titian to Rubens is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

A special section of the exhibition will be devoted to Flemish star composer Adriaan Willaert who settled permanently in ‘la Serenissima’ to become Maestro di Cappella of the Basilica di San Marco in 1527. It was Willaert who founded the celebrated Venetian School of music that was to instruct, among others, Giovanni Gabrieli and Claudio Monteverdi.

Scientific direction Gabriella Belli
Curated by Ben van Beneden

Organized by Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia
In collaboration with Flemish Community, Città di Anversa, VisitFlanders

www.visitantwerpen.be
www.flemishmasters.com

The visit at the exhibition is included in Palazzo Ducale’s ticket

Info and bookings
Call center 848082000 from Italy
+39 041 42730892 from abroad

Opening hours: everyday 8.30 – 19.00
Last admission 18.30

#DaTizianoARubens

From 23 February to 9 June 2019
Venezia, Palazzo Ducale – Doge’s Apartments

Eighteenth-century Venice with its lights and shadows unfolds through the rooms of Palazzo Ducale, in the story of an extraordinary century and its protagonist: Giovanni Antonio Canal, Canaletto.
This was a period of great complexity and value, of excellence in the fields of painting, sculpture and decorative arts. From its beginning, the eighteenth century showed itself to be a century of enormous vitality and great changes: in the language of art, in the history of ideas and techniques, in social life.

The exhibition starts from an overview of the early years of a new artistic form, which broke the bonds with the rigour of classicism and with the theatricality of the baroque, while colour began to take precedence over line. Luca Carlevarijs laid the foundations of Venetian vedutismo, while Rosalba Carriera renewed the art of portraiture. Two young artists of the same generation began painting works in which light acquires a founding, constructive value: in both Giambattista Tiepolo with his aggressive brushstrokes in dynamic compositions, and Canaletto in the painting views, their style would become more controlled and sharper.
The voyage continues with the genre painting of Pietro Longhi, the explosion of vedutismo, the rise of history painting and of landscape, together with that of the capriccio. And this was a great season for engraving too, with which many artists experimented, and of Giambattista Piranesi. The story of this century is also that of a European presence in the Serenissima and of its home-grown artists venturing abroad. The glass art of Murano was also living through a period of glory, as was the making of jewellery and porcelain.
The protagonists of the turn of the century were Francesco Guardi and Giandomenico Tiepolo, son of Giambattista. In Guardi’s vision, his pictorial style, quivering and allusive, was far removed from the sunny certainties of Canaletto, and seemed to evoke a Venice in decay, while the years of carefree and aristocratic lifestyle gave way to a people of irreverent Pulcinellas, where everyone was free and equal, with the revolution burning in France in the background. The century of enlightenment, and the exhibition itself, closed with the emergence of Neoclassicism, dominated by the giant that was Antonio Canova.

Scientific direction Gabriella Belli
Curated by Alberto Craievich

With the collaboration of RMN – Grand Palais, Paris

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The Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and the National Gallery of Art in Washington present from 7 September 2018 to 6 January 2019 an international research project to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of the Venetian painter Jacopo Tintoretto, one of the giants of sixteenth-century European painting.

The itinerary in the Doge’s Apartment – curated by Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman, under the consultative direction of Gabriella Belli – contains fifty autograph paintings and twenty drawings by Tintoretto, lent by the great international museums, together with the famous cycles painted for the Doge’s palace between 1564 and 1592 – visible in their original position – the exhibition will showcase all the visionary, bold and wholly unconventional painting of Jacopo Robusti. The son of a dyer, Tintoretto knew how to challenge the tradition embodied by Titian, overwhelming it and choosing to innovate: not only with daring technical and stylistic solutions, but also with iconographic experiments that marked a turning point in the history of Venetian painting of the sixteenth century.

Tintoretto reveals himself as a fascinating interpreter in all the different genres he explored, from religious subjects to great history paintings, and from portraiture to profane and mythological themes, of which the exhibition offers illuminating examples thanks to loans from important museums all over the world and from some prestigious private collections: from the museums of London – such as the National Gallery from which arrives The Origin of the Milky Way (1575), the Royal Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Courtauld Gallery – but also of Paris, Ghent, Lyon, Dresden, Otterlo, Prague and Rotterdam.
The Prado of Madrid has loaned five extraordinary works, including Joseph and the wife of Potiphar (circa 1555), Judith and Holofernes (1552-1555) and The Rape of Helena (1578), over three metres long, painted for the court of the Gonzagas, whose great quality can now be appreciated. Susanna and the Elders of 1577, among Jacopo’s most famous masterpieces, comes from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and, thanks to the Staatliche Museen of Berlin, visitors will be able to admire the nobility of the Portrait of Giovanni Mocenigo (1580).
Then there are also important works from the United States: from Chicago and New York, from Philadelphia and Washington. The two self-portraits with which the exhibition opens and closes are emblematic and revealing; one was painted at the beginning and one at the end of Jacopo’s career and are being loaned respectively by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Musée du Louvre.

Internationally renowned art historians have contributed to the project, which will take the form of a major exhibition held at the Palazzo Ducale and the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia.
In these two prestigious venues the 500th anniversary of the birth of Tintoretto will be celebrated by Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia with the exhibition Tintoretto 1519 – 1594 at the Palazzo Ducale and by the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia with the exhibition The young Tintoretto, an integrated sequence of extraordinary masterpieces from the world’s major public and private collections. Many of his paintings in Venice will be restored for the occasion, thanks to the support of Save Venice Inc., which the public will now be able to admire in their full expressive power.

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Discover the timeline Tintoretto and his times >

Scientific direction Gabriella Belli
Curated by Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman

Co-produced with The National Gallery, Washington

In collaboration with Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venezia
Supported by Save Venice Inc.
and Louis Vuitton

Curated by Anna Ottani Cavina

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John Ruskin “returns” to Venice in a major exhibition. For the first time in Italy, an international event focuses on Ruskin the artist and on his relationship with the lagoon city.

What would the myth of Venice be without John Ruskin, the bard of the city’s eternal beauty, which is all the more fascinating and evocative for its being recorded during its decline?

A central figure in the nineteenth-century international art scene, a writer, painter and art critic, John Ruskin (1819-1900) had a very strong bond with Venice, to which he dedicated his most famous literary work, “The stones of Venice”: a study of Venice’s architecture, examined and described in the most minute detail, and a paean to the beauty, uniqueness but also fragility of this city.

Admired by Tolstoy and Proust,  and capable of strongly influencing the aesthetics of his time with his interpretation of art and architecture, Ruskin now returns to Venice and to one of the sites that inspired him: the Doge’s Palace, that emblematic building he explored in depth from different angles in sketchbooks, watercolours, architectural studies, plaster casts, albumen and platinum prints.

The exhibition is hosted in the sequence of rooms and halls he depicted so many times in his own work, where the backdrop by Pier Luigi Pizzi emphasises the architectural and sculptural features of Gothic and Byzantine, medieval and anti-classical Venice that he so loved and wished to preserve from oblivion.

“[Venice]… is still left for our beholding in the final period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak—so quiet,—so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow.

I would endeavour to trace the lines of this image before it be for ever lost, and to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat, like passing bells, against the Stones of Venice.” John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. I, ch. I, § 1

Realised at the behest of Gabriella Belli as a tribute to the knowledge and myth of Venice, the exhibition is curated by Anna Ottani Cavina: it offers the first fully comprehensive presentation in Italy of the work of an artist who “crossed every border in the name of an interdisciplinary vision, practised when the term did not yet exist”.

Pervaded by a religious spirit matured in Victorian England, animated by an ethical vision that impelled him to intervene on a social and political level with the utopian goal of an organic and happy society for all (impressing even Gandhi with his vision), Ruskin was a strenuous opponent of the expanding mechanisation and materialism, and during the course of his life worked on and discussed social issues, art, landscape and nature; he wrote about mineralogy and botany, as well as economics, architecture and restoration, worried that the techniques then in use would eventually cause the destruction of medieval buildings.

The exhibition has had to make a choice and, being unable to explore all the complexity of Ruskin and his versatile genius in so many different fields, it focuses on him as artist, based on a hundred of his works that document his vocation for translating reality into images, recording his “tireless striving to understand the world” on thousands of sheets in pen and watercolour. Exceptionally, all the works on display are international loans—a major merit of the exhibition—given that Italian museums do not have any of his works.

“The colourful approach of Ruskin”, writes Ottani Cavina, “will be a revelation for the Italian public, since he is the greatest of the Victorian watercolourists”. A warning for the salvation of Venice, the exhibition therefore aims to be also a challenge to celebrate John Ruskin as a great and unusual painter, leaving aside his eclecticism and his own determination to privilege the written word.

The city, the architecture, the great Venetian masters whose works he reproduced, reinterpreting them, the drive to explore nature, in a mix of curiosity and imagination, are the leitmotif of this encounter with the works of Ruskin, who as a critic strove on behalf of modernity, recognising, in particular, the revolutionary power of Turner’s painting, which he defended against detractors in various writings and in the multi-volume work “Modern Painters”.

The encounter with a mature Turner when he was young was fundamental for Ruskin who declared that “nature has given a special eye and a savagely beautiful imagination” to the artist. And to stress the point, some extraordinary views of Venice by the “painter of light” will be on show, such as “Venice, Punta della Dogana and Santa Maria della Salute” lent by the National Gallery of Washington and “Venice, Ceremony of the Marriage of the Sea” from the Tate in London.

Ruskin’s painting did not in reality aim at the sublime as did Turner, nor to an abstraction that was all colour and light: his painting is descriptive, analytical and sought to immortalise reality; and yet in the study of natural features or in the obsessive rendering of architectural details there is a true sense of vision, as he was convinced—by none other than the paintings of “his” Turner—that the true artist is a seer, a prophet or even a “scribe of God”; capable, that is, of grasping and depicting the divine truth contained in nature.

In addition to the journey to Italy and a fascination for nature—illustrated with a series of watercolours that focus on the theme of mountains and the landscapes of the peninsula—the heart of the exhibition will nevertheless focus on the relationship between the artist and Venice.

This bond, cultivated during the span of a lifetime, started in his first encounter at the age of sixteen and was nourished by eleven journeys undertaken between 1835 and 1888. It is made evident from different points of view—Studies of clouds, Sunsets, Full moons, Views of the lagoon, Studies after the great Venetian painters: Carpaccio, Veronese, Tintoretto—but essentially focuses on the crucial theme of the “nature of gothic art”, with its rediscovery and celebration: the highest moment of art and architecture not only from an aesthetic but also a moral point of view.

Ruskin’s most important work in this regard is the magnificent “The Stones of Venice” (1851-1853, 3 volumes), plus the splendid in folio prints of the “Examples of the Architecture of Venice”, published in the same period, and “St. Mark’s Rest”, published as a revision of The Stones of Venice, after he had witnessed the demolition of important parts of the Basilica of St Mark’s, and which became a guide to the city “for the few travellers who still care about its monuments”.

Finally, to accompany this fascinating voyage, there are also a selection of the “Venetian Notebooks” (sketchbooks, measurements, plans, cross-sections and many notes), Ruskin’s manuscripts for The Stones of Venice (fragments of blue paper never before exhibited and conserved at the Morgan Library in New York), some early editions, daguerreotypes, historical photographs and emblematic paintings by the great Venetian painters of the sixteenth century to compare with the studies that the English critic had made of them.

Ruskin’s Venice is a paradigm, a discovery, an obsession; a city ​​that he considered worth loving for its absolute beauty and hating for its decay, in a close relationship between architecture and civil society; Venice to praise and to save: Ruskin, the “Director of consciences”, as Proust defined him in the obituary published a few days after his death (on 27 January 1900), launched a warning that is still topical today.

NOTICE: we inform our  visitors that on Friday 19 January 2018 Palazzo Ducale will remain closed to the public due to an institutional event hosted. We apologize for the inconvenience.

In collaboration with the City of Venice, the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia presents a major exhibition illustrating the establishment and development of Porto Marghera, one of the most important industrial and commercial sites of Europe, in the splendid setting of the Doge’s Apartment in the Doge’s Palace.

Curated by Gabriella Belli with the participation of Paolo Apice, it will run from 4 November 2017 to 28 January 2018 and represents the fulcrum of the initiatives arranged for the 100th anniversary of the industrial site (1917-2017) promoted by the City of Venice at the behest of its mayor, Luigi Brugnaro.

The Comitato Nazionale per il Centenario della nascita di Porto Marghera (National Committee for the Centenary of the Birth of Porto Marghera), set up in 2016, has in addition arranged a packed schedule of initiatives to recall the great industrial history of Porto Marghera, but also to reflect on its future, in the awareness that this historic site has played an important part in all the positive and negative periods of industry in twentieth-century Italy.

The exhibition in the Doge’s Palace aims to illustrate the key role that Porto Marghera exerted on the territory of Venice and the mainland and on its manufacturing and economic history, as well as on the social and cultural history of the country. This will not be a merely rhetorical or commemorative overview, therefore. Indeed, with the aim of addressing the younger generations, the project has gone to great lengths to reconcile history with imagination, objective data with creative data, the aspects of production with more evocative facets.

With rigour and imaginative lightness, a new tale is presented the narrative voice of which is the language of contemporary art, displayed in the Doge’s Palace for the first time.

• Discover the itineray of the exhibition >

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Curated by Gabriella Belli, with the participation of Paolo Apice
Layout project by Daniela Ferretti

Venice is the first city in Italy to host the renowned exhibition of Indian gems and jewels from The Al Thani Collection. Showcasing over 270 pieces, the exhibition will explore five centuries of the jewelled arts made in and inspired by the Indian subcontinent.

Dazzling gems, precious stones and jewels brimming with centuries of history and legend, together with historic and contemporary creations take us on a journey through five centuries of sheer beauty and remarkable craftsmanship charting the glorious tradition of Indian jewellery: from the descendants of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane to the great Maharajas, whose lavish jewellery commissions in the 20th century produced stunning and innovative works from the European jewellery houses.

Since antiquity, India has been a land rich in precious stones and home to an extraordinarily refined jewellery tradition. Here, gems and jewels are an integral part of daily wear and lifestyle. South Asia is renowned for the fine quality of the diamonds from Golconda, beautiful Badakhshan spinels – ruby-like in their colour – and the enchanting hues of Kashmir sapphires. The region also received rubies from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Burma, as well as pearls from the Persian Gulf.

When the Mughal rulers rose to power in the 16th century, their master jewellers elevated their craft to an incomparable art form in its own right.

Promoted by Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia and presented against a stunning and ethereal backdrop in the Doge’s Palace, Venice, the exhibition Treasures of the Mughals and of the Maharajas – The Al Thani Collection will give the Italian public the first-ever opportunity to admire nearly 300 pieces from the precious collection assembled by His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al Thani, a member of the Qatari Royal Family.

In India, jewellery is about more than embellishment. Every gem has its own meaning that refers to a cosmic purpose, or invokes a favourable horoscope. In popular culture, particular forms of jewellery suggest the rank, caste, region of birth, marital status or wealth of the wearer. Precious metals and gemstones have also been used in the adornment of courtly rooms, as well as in ceremonial dresses, weapons and furnishings.

The Venice exhibition is an incredible journey into the universe of Indian jewellery from the 16th century to the present day. The route is marked by the milestones of this art, which has never ceased to amaze and fascinate Western minds, arousing their curiosity with images of jewel-bedecked royals and gods.
It is a spectacular trip through five centuries of remarkably refined artistic taste and perfected technique, represented by historic Indian diamonds and legendary jewels. The curators of the exhibition are Amin Jaffer, Senior Curator of The Al Thani Collection, and distinguished Italian scholar of East Asian art Gian Carlo Calza; Gabriella Belli has been appointed academic director.

The historical starting point of the exhibition is the court style of the Mughals (1526-1858), the Timurid Dynasty founded by Babur after his conquest of much of Northern India in 1526. The Mughals developed their own style and disseminated it across India from the first years of the dynasty, but it is to the fourth and fifth Mughal emperors that we owe the golden age of patronage, when jewellers crafted marvellous creations that merged exceptional quality gems with both Eastern and Western art and culture.

With the Mughal decline, the consequent period of political instability, and the drift into British colonial rule from the mid 18th century, the patronage of great jewellery passed into the hands of rulers of the successor states, be they maharajas, nizams or nawabs. Wealthy and increasingly westernised in their tastes, these rulers sometimes worked closely with the leading European houses, particularly with Cartier. They brought new life into jewellery, setting ancient gems in modern compositions and creating a new design by mixing Indian traditions with Western jewellery culture.

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Scientific direction: Gabriella Belli
Curated by: Amin Jaffer, Gian Carlo Calza

• NOTICE: EARLY CLOSING OF THE MUSEUM ON 22 SEPT. 2017 >

13 May- 24 November 2017
Doge’s Palace – Prisons

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Douglas Gordon (Glasgow 1966) presents in Venice the world premiere of his video installation Gente di Palermo! (Citizens of Palermo), which includes a reassembled home movie he shot in the Cupuchin Catacombs in Palermo, an underground cemetery which houses thousands of exposed embalmed corpses.

The mummies, either standing or lying down, are divided into gender, age and social categories. While visiting the children’s wing, Gordon came across an abandoned inflatable dolphin fluttering freely among the corpses.

Gordon has often focused in his art on the juxtaposition of doubles and opposites: here the macabre contrast between life and death, between the playful aspect of the inflatable dolphin and the dramatic nature of the context, is encapsulated in a few frames whose heavy pathos derives from their warning of the brevity of life, but also from the macabre and ironic presence of a toy that belongs more in an amusement park than a cemetery.

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Curated by: Mario Codognato

Exhibition co-produced in collaboration with:
Venetian Heritage Onlus, The British Council, Canon