Palazzo Grassi Site Features

Palazzo Grassi is built in the Venetian Classical style, a more restrained, symmetrical departure from the Gothic and Baroque palaces that line most of the Grand Canal. Its facade, designed by Giorgio Massari, favors clean classical proportions over the elaborate window tracery of the city's older buildings.

Inside, the original 18th-century decoration survives around the main stairwell and ceilings, frescoed by Michelangelo Morlaiter, Francesco Zanchi, Giambattista Canal, and Christian Griepenkerl. Tadao Ando's 2006 renovation left this historic shell largely intact while rebuilding the interior around it, creating roughly 5,000 square meters of exhibition space across around 40 rooms.

The courtyard and staircase

Massari's plan is built around an enclosed classical courtyard, unusual on the Grand Canal, where most palaces run a corridor straight from the water gate to the back. Off it rises the ceremonial staircase, its walls and vault frescoed by Michelangelo Morlaiter and Francesco Zanchi -- the most intact surviving 18th-century interior in the building.

Ando's galleries

Tadao Ando's 2006 work is deliberately reversible in feel: white plastered volumes and concrete inserted inside the historic rooms, lit from above, leaving the frescoed ceilings and the courtyard untouched. The result is roughly 5,000 square metres across some forty rooms, and it is usually possible to see where the 18th century stops and the intervention starts.

Rotating exhibitions

There is no permanent display. Shows are drawn from the Pinault Collection and change periodically, sometimes given over entirely to a single living artist -- so what is on the walls bears no relation to the building's own period, and a repeat visit is a genuinely different one.

Palazzo Grassi sits on the Grand Canal at Campo San Samuele, on the San Marco bank, just upstream of the Accademia bridge and almost directly opposite Ca' Rezzonico on the Dorsoduro side.

The two make a useful pair to see from the water: Ca' Rezzonico is Baroque and heavily modelled, Palazzo Grassi late and classical, flat and symmetrical -- roughly a century apart on facing banks, and the clearest short lesson in how Venetian palace design changed before the Republic ended.

It has its own vaporetto stop at San Samuele, and the campo behind it opens directly onto the canal, so unlike most Grand Canal palaces the building can be approached and seen from land as well as water.

Its sibling venue, Punta della Dogana, sits at the far end of the same stretch of canal where it opens into the Bacino -- close enough that the two are routinely visited on one ticket and one walk.