Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca' d'Oro

The Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca' d'Oro is the state museum inside Venice's late-Gothic Grand Canal palace of 1421–1440, named for its long-lost gilded facade. Franchetti bought the neglected palace in 1894 and donated it, with his collection, to the Italian State in 1916; the gallery opened in 1927.

Why it matters

The Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca' d'Oro is a state museum inside the most theatrically named of all Grand Canal palaces, a late-Gothic building whose openwork facade made it a byword for the city itself. The palace was raised between 1421 and 1440 for the merchant Marino Contarini, who acted as his own overall designer, and its marble front was once finished in gold and full colour — a splendour so singular that Venetians set the family name aside and called the house simply "of gold". Baron Giorgio Franchetti (1865–1922) bought the neglected building in 1894, stripped away nineteenth-century additions, assembled an important collection within it, and gave both palace and collection to the Italian State in 1916; the gallery opened in 1927 and has grown through holdings from other Venetian state museums ever since.

What to notice

• The facade: three superimposed loggias with Gothic tracery, sheathed in lightly veined marble with inserts of red Verona marble and crowned by spires of alternating heights. The gilding and polychromy — red, ultramarine, black, white and gold, applied even to the pinnacle tips by the painter Jean Charlier, remembered as Zuane de Franza — have been entirely lost.
• The courtyard: the original wellhead carved by Bartolomeo Bon in 1427, recovered on the Paris antiquarian market during Franchetti's works, above a floor mosaic of ancient marbles designed by the baron himself in imitation of paleo-Christian basilicas.
• The collection's pillars, as catalogued by the regional museums office: Andrea Mantegna's Saint Sebastian, Carpaccio's Annunciation, Andrea Sansovino's Madonna and Child, a Van Dyck portrait of Marcello Durazzo, and the bronzes, medals, tapestries and furniture of Franchetti's bequest.
• The baron's tomb: his ashes rest in the atrium beneath a porphyry stone.
• The ceramics section installed since 1992 in the adjoining Palazzo Duodo.

Context and history

Contarini rebuilt a Venetian-Byzantine house he had bought from the Zeno family, mixing Lombard masters — the Milanese Matteo Raverti — with Venetians led by Giovanni Bon and his son Bartolomeo; his own account books, kept in the State Archives, record the roughly fifteen-year campaign and show a patron who supplied designs, not just money. The building later changed hands and collected 1800s remodellings by Giovanni Meduna, until Franchetti bought it in 1894 and began returning it to its fifteenth-century character. His 1916 donation created the state gallery that opened in 1927.