Palazzo Grassi

Palazzo Grassi, in the San Marco district (sestiere), was built from 1748 to 1772 for the Grassi family, who entrusted the design to Giorgio Massari, an architect who had already taken part in the building of Ca' Rezzonico and of the facade of today's Accademia di Belle Arti. It is described as the last noble residence to rise on the Grand Canal before the Republic of Venice fell.

Merchants, nobles and industrialists succeeded one another there. Baron Simeone de Sina made changes to it in the 19th century. In the 1950s the Marinotti family set up the Centro Internazionale delle Arti e del Costume in it. In 1983 Fiat bought the palace to present art and archaeology exhibitions and had it restored by Gae Aulenti and Antonio Foscari.

In 2005 François Pinault bought the palace. Tadao Ando, whose project for the Fondation François Pinault in Paris, won in competition, had had to be abandoned, received this Venetian commission shortly afterwards: a restoration carried out from 2005 to 2006 to open the first venue of the Pinault Collection. The inaugural exhibition, "Where Are We Going?", opened just four months after the works had begun, in April 2006.

In 2011 Pinault also entrusted Ando with the neighbouring space, which had held a romantic garden with greenhouses, fountains, columns and pergolas for Baron de Sina, replaced in the 1950s by an open-air theatre. The Teatrino, opened in 2013, occupies that space.

Two layers overlap: Massari's palace, altered by its successive owners, and Ando's intervention.

On the Grand Canal side, the facade follows the Venetian architectural tradition, in a sober and regular rhythm; it varies in style and colour on the campo San Samuele side, where the entrance is. The former courtyard has become an imposing atrium in soft colours, set out by a colonnade standing on an inlaid marble floor laid in the 1950s. At the same period the courtyard received a glass roof and a Murano-glass velarium made by Venini, which filtered the light from above; in place from 1951 to 1985, it was taken down during Aulenti and Foscari's restoration.

The atrium leads to the grand staircase. Its walls carry frescoes by Michelangelo Morlaiter and Francesco Zanchi: ladies and masked knights leaning out from a balustrade painted in trompe-l'oeil. On the ceiling, an allegory of Justice crowned by Glory, a work by Giambattista Canal dated 1780, originally decorated the palace's double-height ballroom. From the first floor up, the exhibition rooms offer the 19th-century ceilings commissioned by Baron de Sina, among them the vault of the Neptune and Amphitrite room, a fresco by the Austrian Christian Griepenkerl.

Ando's intervention stays within the limits imposed by the existing architecture, to create a museum system able to renew itself continually. It fits out forty exhibition halls over about 5,000 m². Exhibition spaces, "white boxes", are inserted into the building and contrast with the ornament of the walls and ceilings; the central gallery draws on the soft light of the atrium, and the atrium itself becomes the functional and symbolic centre of the whole. Ando chose grey linoleum for the floors, and lighting by adjustable spotlights fixed to hollow steel beams, which avoids damaging the precious ceilings. Local craftsmen restored some of the original marbles and stuccoes.

Palazzo Grassi presents exhibitions of the Pinault Collection, both monographic and collective. The collection's exhibitions in Venice have shown the first solo exhibitions in Italy of Marlene Dumas, Albert Oehlen and Martial Raysse, as well as of Rudolf Stingel and Luc Tuymans, and major photography exhibitions have featured Henri Cartier-Bresson and Irving Penn.

François Pinault says: "My greatest wish is that this contemporary art centre, divided between Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, remains truly contemporary."

During the exhibition opening period, Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana are open daily except Tuesday: doors open at 10 a.m. and close at 6 p.m., the last visitors being admitted at 5 p.m., and both are closed on 25 December; check the exhibition dates before visiting. A single ticket gives access to the exhibitions on view at both sites.

Address: Campo San Samuele 3231, Venice; vaporetto stops San Samuele and Sant'Angelo. The venues can be reached without architectural barriers from the San Samuele landing stage; inside there are lifts, movable ramps and wheelchairs on request.