Gallerie dell'Accademia Site Features

The Carpaccio cycle

Vittore Carpaccio's Legend of St Ursula, nine large canvases painted in the 1490s for a confraternity, occupies a room of its own. They are as valuable as a record of Venice itself as of the legend -- the ships, quaysides, and crowds are contemporary Venetian ones, painted from life.

Veronese's Feast

Veronese's enormous Feast in the House of Levi was painted as a Last Supper. Summoned before the Inquisition in 1573 to explain the dwarfs, dogs, and drinking Germans in a sacred scene, he changed the title rather than the painting -- one of the better-documented confrontations between an artist and church authority anywhere.

Giorgione's Tempest

The Tempest is among the most argued-over pictures in European painting: a soldier, a nursing woman, a broken column, a storm, and no agreed subject. No contemporary account explains it, and the debate over what it depicts has run for centuries.