Museo Palladio (Palazzo Barbaran da Porto)

The Palladio Museum occupies Palazzo Barbaran da Porto, Andrea Palladio's richly stuccoed and frescoed noble house in Vicenza. Designed around 1569-70 for the nobleman Montano Barbaran, the palace keeps its stuccoes and fresco cycles, and since 2012 it has housed both the museum and the international study centre devoted to the architect who made the city famous.

Why it matters

The museum is run by the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, a research foundation founded in Vicenza in 1958 to study Renaissance and modern architecture. The foundation is based in a Palladian palazzo whose painted and stuccoed rooms preserve the setting of a sixteenth-century residence. Its activities include exhibitions, models, courses and a specialist library.

What to notice

The facade combines rusticated stone and Ionic half-columns on the lower floor with Corinthian half-columns at the piano nobile. Windows sit in aedicula frames with alternating tympanums above balustraded balconies, accompanied by stucco work by Lorenzo Rubini and his workshop, executed around 1570–1572. The portal stands oddly off axis — five bays to the left and three to the right — an asymmetry born as the palace grew by buying into and absorbing its neighbours. Palladio signed the design drawings preserved in London. A four-column atrium leads to a courtyard with a double order of loggias. Ground-floor rooms hold frescoes from about 1566 salvaged from an earlier building; the painted rooms above are attributed to Anselmo Canera, Giambattista Zelotti, Gianantonio Fasolo, Giambattista Maganza and Andrea Michieli.

Context and history

Palladio received the commission between 1569 and 1570 and the palace rose between 1570 and 1575, its asymmetric extension towards the left added as Barbaran bought out the neighbouring house of his cousins. The building passed through noble hands and survived the city's wars and suppressions with its decoration largely intact, a rarity among Vicentine palazzi. In 1958 the city's public authorities founded the CISA as an international study centre for the history of architecture; early editions of its work involved figures such as Rudolf Wittkower, Anthony Blunt and Bruno Zevi, and its directors built it into a publishing and exhibition institution of global standing. Since 2012 the foundation and its public museum have been headquartered here, keeping the palace in scholarly use while opening it to visitors.