ART HISTORY IN VENICE
Venice has been absurdly prolific in the art
she has produced ... and hoarded. Venetian paintings and sculptures crowd
her churches, her scuole and permanent museums. As if this were not
enough, large exhibition venues host major changing exhibitions each year,
and every other year the Venice Biennale brings the Whitereads, Hirsts and
Baselitzs to shock, titillate and perhaps even inspire with each country's
most cutting-edge modern art.
Venetian churches, scuole and museums
It
would be futile to try to document the tens, maybe hundreds of churches around
Venice that contain major art works - quite reasonably, only a fraction have
websites - but they are all are well-covered by guidebooks we supply in our
homes. The core art collection reflecting Venice's renaissance artistic heritage
is the
Accademia
art gallery, and this sets a helpful context for everything else you will
see.
Palazzo Grassi
Owned
by Fiat, the enormous
Palazzo
Grassi gallery is Venice's equivalent of London's Royal Academy: an outstanding
venue for major arts exhibitions, hosting three or four each year. Always
worth checking out.
Museo Correr
Museo
Correr, on one side of St Mark's Square, is another major gallery for touring
exhibitions. Its home page is on the excellent
Venice
civic museums site (in Italian).
Architecture in Venice
An
enormous subject. Jan-Christoph Rößler's impressive site is gradually
cataloguing
all the palaces of Venice with photos and notes of each one. If you're
curious about a palace you pass, this is the definitive web index.
You'll find this and other substantial art books in each of
our two vacation rental homes; if you're planning to stay elsewhere, you might
want to
buy
it from amazon.co.uk or
amazon.com.
If
you've landed on this page directly from
a web search, why not check out our two
comfortable holiday homes on offer in Venice?
The Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Founded
by an eccentric multimillionaire heiress, the
Peggy
Guggenheim collection is Venice's most important museum of modern art.
It has a significant permanent collection, and hosts touring shows as well.
Biennale di Venezia
Best known for modern art, the cultural colossus of the
Biennale
is a huge annual international festival of
theatre,
dance,
music
and
architecture (alternate years 2004,
2006, 2008 etc) and
modern art (alternate
years 2005, 2007, 2009 etc), running from around March to November ... with
the international festival of
cinema grabbing
the limelight every year in late August/early September.
For more tourist information about Venice see our page covering official
tourist information sites for Venice, or see information
about the Cannaregio area where our two holiday homes are located.
