Palazzi Barbaro Site Features

The two palaces read as a single Grand Canal facade despite being built more than two and a half centuries apart. The older wing, from 1425, is built in the Venetian Gothic style typical of grand residences of its era; the later Baroque wing, added by Antonio Gaspari between 1694 and 1698, brought a different architectural vocabulary and a larger footprint, extended onto land the neighboring Tagliapietra family agreed to share.

Inside, the Baroque ballroom remains one of the more complete surviving examples of a Venetian Baroque interior, with its original stuccowork and ceiling paintings largely intact -- a rarer survival than the exterior of many Grand Canal palaces might suggest.

The ballroom

Gaspari's room of 1694-98 survives with its stuccowork and its ceiling canvases in place, including Sebastiano Ricci's Rape of the Sabine Women and work by Piazzetta. Complete Venetian Baroque interiors are far rarer than Baroque facades -- most were stripped when their families fell -- and this one was not.

An Interior in Venice

Sargent painted the Curtis family in the salon in 1898: four people, low light, and the room itself doing most of the work. Ariana Curtis disliked it and refused the gift, so it went to the Royal Academy in London instead, where it still is. It remains the best record of what the palace was like when it was full of people.

The rooms Henry James used twice

James finished The Aspern Papers here in 1888, then wrote the ballroom into The Wings of the Dove as Milly Theale's Palazzo Leporelli -- a real room turned into a fictional one, and then filmed in the real room again for the 1997 adaptation.

The ceiling that left

Tiepolo's Glorification of the Barbaro Family was painted for the third-floor library ceiling and is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Its absence is part of the building's history rather than a footnote to it: the Barbaro is one of the palaces whose contents are better travelled than its visitors.

The two palaces stand together on the San Marco bank of the Grand Canal, on the short reach between the Accademia Bridge and Campo Santo Stefano, with Palazzo Barbarigo and the Ca' Grande further along the same side.

The site is one of the widest points on the canal, which is why the pair can be seen whole. Directly opposite is the low white front of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and the openness of the water here is the reason both banks read clearly rather than in fragments.

The two facades were built 270 years apart and are meant to be taken as one. Gothic on the left, Baroque on the right, the join marked but not disguised -- a single frontage assembled in two centuries, which is how most great Venetian houses actually grew.

The Accademia Bridge a minute upstream is the standing vantage point, and one of very few places on the canal where a large facade can be studied from dry land without a boat going past the middle of it.