Palazzi Barbaro Historical Timeline

Origins

The older of the two palaces was built in 1425 by Giovanni Bon, one of Venice's leading stonemasons, for the Spiera family. In 1465, Zaccaria Barbaro, a Procurator of St. Mark's, acquired the building, giving the palace the family name it has carried ever since.

Turning points

Between 1694 and 1698, the architect Antonio Gaspari extended the family residence with a new Baroque wing, built with the neighboring Tagliapietra family's permission. The addition gave the Barbaro a grand ballroom, decorated with Baroque stucco work and paintings on Roman themes, including Sebastiano Ricci's Rape of the Sabine Women and works by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta. In the 18th century, a library was added on the third floor, its ceiling crowned by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's The Glorification of the Barbaro Family -- a painting that now hangs in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, not in the palace itself.

Influential people

In 1881, the American Daniel Sargent Curtis -- a relative of the painter John Singer Sargent -- rented the palace, purchasing it outright in 1885. Curtis and his wife, Ariana, restored the building and turned it into a magnet for American and European artists and writers visiting Venice: Henry James, James Whistler, Robert Browning, Claude Monet, and Edith Wharton all passed through its rooms. Sargent himself painted the Curtis family in the palace's salon in his 1898 work An Interior in Venice, and the painter Anders Zorn painted Isabella Stewart Gardner's portrait there in 1894.

Cultural evolution

Henry James finished his novel The Aspern Papers while staying at the Palazzi Barbaro, and later drew directly on the Baroque ballroom's interior for a key scene in The Wings of the Dove. The connection outlived James himself: the palace was used as a filming location for the 1997 film adaptation of The Wings of the Dove, and for the 1981 television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited.

Present-day significance

The Palazzi Barbaro remain private property, still linked to the Curtis family's original restoration, and are not generally open to the public -- but the palace's Grand Canal facade and its role in shaping how generations of writers and artists pictured Venice have made it one of the most storied private addresses in the city.