Venice, palazzo Vendramin Grimani opens to the public for the first time

On Monday, May 24, Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, the 18th-century home of Doge Pietro Grimani, opens to the public for the first time in Venice. For the occasion, the Albero d’Oro Foundation will offer an unprecedented exhibition tour that will take visitors through the rooms of the first piano nobile, discovering the history of the palace, the illustrious families who have inhabited it over six centuries and the restoration work that has affected it in recent months.

The palace will be open for tours by reservation only, free of charge from May 24 to June 6, 2021. From June 7, 2021, the palace will remain open to the public, again by reservation and with guided tours from Thursday to Sunday.

The museum tour will feature both ancient works, including tapestries, paintings, furniture and other objects, and contemporary works, such as watercolors by French painter Yvan Salomone, on loan from international, Italian and Venetian private collections. In addition, the itinerary will be enriched by the photographs of artist Patrick Tourneboeuf (Paris, 1966), in order to tell through the eye of the French architect and photographer the evolution of the palace before and after the works. This work constitutes the first commission of the Golden Tree Foundation, which will also build its own collection over time. The account of the dispersed art collections, begun by the family of Doge Grimani, includes an initial nucleus of paintings that belonged to the palace: Portrait of Andrea Contarini by Domenico Tintoretto, Imeneo by Sebastiano Ricci and Portrait of Maria Ragazzoni by Francesco Montemezzano.

Finally, the hallway on the ground floor hosts the photographic project Invisibilia by Venetian artist Ugo Carmeni, a reinterpretation in macroscopic terms of some of the small formal elements of relief that decorate the 16th-century facade of Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, identified and captured during the restoration work.

Thanks to the Golden Tree Foundation, a nonprofit cultural institution established in 2019 by a group of French and Venetian entrepreneurs and professionals who are passionate about culture with ties to Venice, Palazzo Vendramin Grimani is coming back to life. The building was acquired and restored thanks to the intervention of a private fund with the aim of returning it to the public as a place of culture.

The name chosen for the Foundation is a direct tribute to the branch of the Grimani family of the Golden Tree that animated the palace for centuries: the family gave the Republic a doge, Pietro (from 1741 to 1752), who was already an ambassador to England where he met Isaac Newton and became an honorary member of the Royal Society. From the first decade of the eighteenth century Pietro Grimani made the palace an Enlightenment coterie, enlivened by the presence of exponents of various branches of culture, from architecture to poetry, from science to philosophy. Besides being refined collectors, the Grimani dell’Albero d’Oro were important patrons of architectural, sculptural and pictorial works both in Venice and in the mainland and overseas dominions. The upheavals that followed the fall of the Republic (1797) and the various hereditary divisions caused the family’s art collections to be dispersed. The Golden Tree Foundation aims, through a future exhibition project, the result of careful research still in progress, to recompose a large part of the dispersed collections.

Palazzo Vendramin Grimani intends to be reborn as a new place of transmission, artistic and cultural exchange open to all those who love Venice and frequent it. An important part of the Foundation’s cultural programming is represented by scholarships, prizes and multidisciplinary projects, promoting research and international exchanges in collaboration with public and private institutions. Residencies, workshops, meetings, concerts and exhibitions will complete the Foundation’s rich cultural offerings, and the third floor will be used for guest quarters, work areas and artistic residencies.

Ph.Credit Ugo Carmeni and Golden Tree Foundation

Venice, palazzo Vendramin Grimani opens to the public for the first time

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