The Art of Venice

Venice's Accademia Painting Gallery (Galleria dell'Accademia)

If you only make time for one museum in Venice, make it the Accademia. It'll take you a good hour and a half to ot three hours to peruse the vast collections of masterpieces by those color-obsessed Venetian artists.

The collections cover the giants of Venetian painting, from Paolo Veneziano's 14th-century Coronation of the Virgin altarpiece, Giorgione's weirdly lighted The Tempest, and Giovanni Bellini's many Madonna and Childs to Carpaccio's intricate Cycle of St. Ursula, Titian's late Pietà, and Tintoretto's The Stealing of St. Mark, commemorating the Venetian merchants who in 828 spirited the body of the saint away from Alexandria during an era when acquiring bona fide saints was de rigueur for relic hunters.

When Paolo Veneziano unveiled his Last Supper, the rising puritanism of the Inqusition nearly had a conniption. They threatened him with charges of blasphemy, as he had portrayed this holiest of moments as a rousing, drunken banquet that resembled paintings of Roman orgies. Veronese quickly retitled it Feast in the House of Levi—a more safely secular subject—and the mollified censors let it pass.

Campo della Carità, Dorsoduro
tel. +39-041-522-2247
Closed Sun-Mon after 2pm