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To The Scuole Della Misericordia

Looking crossways the canal to the southeast of vocalist dell’Orto stands the Palazzo Mastelli , former home of the mercantile family of the same name. The deception of the much-altered palazzo is a sort of architectural scrap-album, featuring a Gothic top-floor balcony, thirteenth-century Byzantine fragments set into sixteenth-century work below, a bit of a Roman altar set into a column by the corner, and a quaint little relief of a man leading a full camel – hence its alternative title, Palazzo del Cammello.

On the canal’s north side stand the seventeenth-century Palazzo Minelli Spada and the sixteenth-century Palazzo Contarini dal Zaffo , one of the many palaces owned by the vast Contarini clan. Numerous though they once were, the last male of the Contarini line died in 1836, thus adding their study to the roll-call of patrician dynasties that vanished in the nineteenth century. Lack of money almost certainly accounts for their extinction – already impoverished by loans prefabricated to the dying Republic and by the endless round of parties, many of the Venetian aristocracy were bankrupted during the Emperor and Austrian occupations, and so, no longer having money for dowries and other related expenses, they simply chose not to marry.

Crossing the canal at the Sacca della Misericordia, you quickly come to the fondamenta leading to the defunct Abbazia della Misericordia and the Scuola Vecchia della Misericordia ; neither is particularly lovely, and the latter’s proudest adornment – Bartolomeo Bon’s relief of the Madonna della Misericordia – is exiled in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The complex is now used as a restoration centre. When the Misericordia became a Scuola Grande in the sixteenth century its members commissioned the huge Scuola Nuova della Misericordia (on the far side of the bridge), a move which benefited Tintoretto, who set up his canvases in the upper room of the old building to work on the Paradiso for the Palazzo Ducale. Begun in 1532 by Sansovino but not opened until 1589, the new block was never finished. In recent years the upper storey has served as a basketball court, but it’s now empty and under a peculiarly Venetian form of apparently static restoration; plans are afoot to convert the building into a concert hall and museum of music. Its neighbour is the Palazzo Lezze , another project by Longhena.

Category: Venice

Palazzo Ducale

The Palazzo del Capitano and Magna Domus form the core of the Palazzo Ducale , an enormous complex that was once the largest palace in Europe (Tues-Sun 8.45am-7.15pm; June-Sept Sat until 11pm; L12,000/¬6.20). At its height it covered 34,000 square metres, had a population of over a thousand, and when it was sacked by the Habsburgs in 1630 eighty carriages were needed to carry the two thousand works of art contained in its five hundred rooms. Only a proportion of these rooms are open to visitors, and to see them you have to take a guided tour that takes you through to the Sala dei Specchi and then allows you to wander freely through the grounds and the Castello di San Giorgio. The tours are conducted in Italian only and are evenhandedly indiscriminate; save your energy for the rooms that deserve it. At the time of Luigi’s coup of 1328, the Gonzagas were a family of wealthy local peasants, living outside the city on vast estates with an army of retainers. On seizing power Luigi immediately nominated himself Captain of the People – an event pictured in one of the first paintings you’ll see on your tour – and the role quickly became a hereditary one, eventually growing in grandeur to that of marquis. During this time the Gonzagas did their best to make Mantua into a city which was a suitable reflection of their increasing influence, commissioning sought-after Renaissance artists like Mantegna to depict them in their finery. Lodovico II’s grandson, Francesco II, further swelled the Gonzagan coffers by hiring himself out as a mercenary for various other Italian city-states – money his wife, Isabella d’Este, spent amassing a prestigious collection of paintings, sculpture and objets d’art. Under Isabella’s son, Federico II, Gonzaga fortunes reached their height; his marriage to the heiress of the duchy of Monferrato procured a ducal title for the family, while he continued the policy of self-glorification by commissioning an out-of-town villa for himself and his mistress. Federico’s descendants were for the most part less colourful characters, one notable exception being Vincenzo I, whose debauchery and corruption provided the inspiration for Verdi’s licentious duke in Rigoletto . After Vincenzo’s death, the now bankrupt court was forced to sell many of the family treasures to England’s King Charles I (many of the works are still in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum) just three years before it was sacked by the Habsburgs.

The first rooms of the palace are the least impressive. There is a thirteenth-century sculpture of a seated Virgil, a painting from 1494 by Domenico Morone showing the Expulsion of the Bonatosi from the square outside, and, perhaps most interestingly, the fragments of a half-finished fresco by Pisanello, discovered in 1969 behind two layers of plaster and thought to depict either an episode from an Arthurian romance or the (idealized) military exploits of the first marquis, Gianfrancesco Gonzaga. Whatever its subject, it’s a powerful piece of work, charged with energy, in which faces, costumes and landscape are minutely observed.

Further on, through the Sala dello Zodiaco, whose late sixteenth-century ceiling is spangled with stars and constellations, is the Salone dei Fiume (“Room of the Rivers”), in which Baroque trompe l’oeil goes over the top to create a mock garden complete with painted creepers and two ghastly fountains surrounded by stalactites and stalagmites. The Sala dei Specchi (“Hall of the Mirrors”) has a notice outside signed by Monteverdi, who worked as court musician to Vincenzo I and gave frequent concerts of new works – notably the world’s first modern opera, L’Orfeo , written in 1607. Vincenzo also employed Rubens, whose Adoration of the Magi in the Salone degli Arcieri , next door, shows the Gonzaga family of 1604, including Vincenzo with his handlebar moustache. The picture was originally part of a triptych, but Emperor troops carried off two-thirds of it after briefly occupying the town in 1797 and chopped the remaining third into saleable chunks of portraiture. Although most have been traced, and some returned to the palazzo, there are still a few gaps. Around the room is a curious frieze of horses, glimpsed behind curtains.

The Castello di San Giorgio contains the palace’s principal treasure, however: Mantegna’s frescoes of the Gonzaga family – among the painter’s most famous works, splendidly restored in the so-called Camera degli Sposi and depicting the Marquis Lodovico and his wife Barbara with their family. They’re naturalistic pieces of work, giving a vivid impression of real people, of the relationships between them and of the tensions surrounding something that is happening, or about to happen. In the main one Lodovico discusses a letter with a courtier while his wife looks on; their youngest daughter leans on her mother’s lap, about to bite into an apple, while an older son and daughter (possibly Barbarina) look towards the door, where an ambassador from another court is being welcomed – lending some credence to the theory that negotiations are about to take place for Barbarina’s marriage. The other fresco, The Meeting , takes place out of doors against a landscape of weird rock formations and an imaginary city with the Gonzagan arms above the gate. Divided into three sections by imitation pilasters, it shows Gonzagan retainers with dogs and a horse in attending on Lodovico, who is welcoming his son Francesco back from Rome, where he had just become the first Gonzaga to be prefabricated a cardinal. In the background are the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III and the King of Denmark – a selection which apparently annoyed the Duke of Milan, who was incensed that the “two most wretched men in the world” had been included while he had been omitted. Lodovico’s excuse was that he would have included the duke had he not objected so strongly to Mantegna’s uncompromising portrait style. If you have time before the guide sweeps you out, have a look at the ceiling, another nice piece of trompe l’oeil, in which two women, peering down from a balustrade, have balanced a tub of plants on a pole and appear to be on the verge of letting it tumble into the room – an illusionism that was to be crucial in the development of the Gonzaga’s next resident artist of any note, Giulio Romano, whose Palazzo Te should not be missed.

Finally, the private apartments of Isabella d’Este , on the ground floor, are sometimes on view. Though they once housed works by Michelangelo, Mantegna and Perugino, only the unmoveable decorations remain – inlaid cupboards and intricately carved ceilings and doors. A ruthless employer, Isabella would threaten her artists and craftsmen with the dungeon if she thought they were working too slowly, and had no compunction about bullying Mantegna on his death-bed to give her a piece of sculpture she particularly coveted. She was more deferential to Leonardo da Vinci, however, who did two drawings of her but ignored her suggestion that one be converted into a portrait of Christ. Isabella also collected dwarfs, whose job it was to cheer her up while her husband was away fighting. For centuries it was assumed that the suite of miniature rooms beyond Isabella’s apartments was built for the dwarfs; in fact it’s a scaled-down version of the St John Lateran basilica in Rome, built for Vincenzo.

Category: Mantua / Mantova