Ca' Pesaro Site Features

Baldassare Longhena designed Ca' Pesaro as an exercise in shadow, and it is one of the most sculptural facades on the Grand Canal. The ground floor is faced in bugnato a punta di diamante -- rusticated blocks cut to a projecting point -- which under low sun breaks the whole base into a field of small hard shadows before the eye reaches the upper storeys.

Above it sit two loggias of paired colossal columns framing arched windows, standing well clear of the wall behind them, so each opening is a deep recess rather than a window in a flat plane. The effect reads almost as a stack of triumphal arches rather than a conventional palace front. Where a Gothic palace of the same width presents a screen of tracery, this presents alternating solid and void, and the facade changes substantially as the sun crosses it.

The columns are colossal in the technical sense -- each order rises the full height of its storey -- and the arrangement borrows from Roman palace fronts rather than from anything Venetian. It is the same argument Longhena made at Ca' Rezzonico and, on a much larger scale, at Santa Maria della Salute.

Behind the facade is a proper courtyard with a monumental well-head, finished by 1676 -- decades before the front was. The building went up back to front over fifty years and two architects, and Gian Antonio Gaspari's completion in 1710 followed Longhena's drawings closely enough that the join is not visible from the canal.

The undisputed highlight of the modern art collection is Gustav Klimt's Judith II (1909), acquired not long after it was painted and now one of the most recognizable single artworks on public display in Venice. The Museum of Oriental Art's Edo-period Japanese armor and Hokusai prints offer a completely different register of craftsmanship under the same Baroque roof.

Ca' Pesaro stands on the northern bank of the Grand Canal in Santa Croce, a short walk from the San Stae vaporetto stop and a few minutes from Palazzo Mocenigo.

It occupies a corner where a side canal, the Rio delle Due Torri, meets the Grand Canal, which is why the facade can be seen at an angle as well as head-on -- a second elevation runs down the side canal, and the two together make the building read as a mass rather than a screen.

The stretch of canal here is wide and relatively straight, so the palace is visible from a long way upstream. Longhena designed for exactly that: a facade of this depth and shadow only pays off when it can be seen from a distance and approached slowly.

Behind it, Santa Croce is one of the quieter sestieri, with no through route to San Marco and little of the foot traffic that saturates the other bank. Visitors arriving by boat see a major Baroque palace; visitors arriving on foot come through a network of small campi that give no warning of it at all.