Content provided in partnership with
Corporate Colors: Bonifacio and Tintoretto at the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi in Venice
Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 2000 by Philip Cottrell
Of all the testaments to the golden age of Venetian painting, perhaps the most ignored--and least understood--is the extensive decoration of the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi, originally the site of the Venetian Treasury. Gracefully anchored at the foot of the Rialto Bridge, the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi is one of Venice's most imposing and attractive landmarks (Fig. 1). [1] This striking example of Renaissance architecture was originally the site of one of the largest decorative schemes ever assembled in the city--a program of nearly two hundred pictures, many of them large-scale, encompassing work by a plethora of artists, their names reading like a "who's who" of Venetian Renaissance painting. Both the building and the bulk of the decoration have been preserved, yet the significance of the Camerlenghi scheme to the development of Venetian Renaissance art remains largely unrecognized. [2]
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
The program was dispersed after Napoleon brought the Venetian Republic to its knees in 1797. Although many works went astray or were left to deteriorate, about one hundred paintings still survive, most of them retained in the city as part of the collection of the Gallerie dell'Accademia. [3] Of these, a few pictures, such as Carpaccio's Lion of Saint Mark (Fig. 23) and Tintoretto's Madonna of the Treasurers (Fig. 24), have attained widespread recognition and are part of a small corpus of paintings from the Camerlenghi that are on public display within Venice. This selection represents merely a fraction of a huge collection of paintings from the Camerlenghi distributed throughout the city at a variety of locations. [4] As a result of the present writer's research, the first comprehensive reconstructions of the decoration as it appeared in numerous rooms within the palace can now be presented. [5] These demonstrate the immense size and scope of the largest official decorative commission outside the Doge's Pala ce.
The aim of this article is not to present the results of the author's findings in their entirety but to reintroduce the scheme to critical consciousness and to outline those aspects of the Camerlenghi project that cast light on state-sponsored art in the lagoon. [6] In particular, by dealing with the work of those artists who made the greatest contribution, Bonifacio Veronese and Jacopo Tintoretto, I intend to focus on how the state was able to manipulate the actual process of commissioning works of art as a way of engendering, and strengthening, the corporate ethos of Venetian society.
The Decoration of the Old and New Sections of the Palace
In many ways something of a showpiece, both physically and historically, it occupies a prominent position as one of the first in a series of important Venetian landmarks (including the Loggetta, the Sansovino Library, and the Rialto Bridge itself) that grew out of the program of urban reform initiated by Doge Andrea Gritti in the early sixteenth century.
Owing to its dramatic location next to the Rialto Bridge, the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi succeeds in making a strong impression on the visitor. In its Venetian context, the building is extremely unusual in that it is a freestanding, self-contained structure, which manages to divorce itself from the surrounding buildings by virtue of its gleaming facade--composed entirely of expensive Istrian stone--and its pitched lead roof.
The Palazzo dei Camerlenghi is actually two buildings in one. The larger, rectangular section of the palace, that nearest the bridge, owes its final appearance to a building campaign carried out between 1525 and 1528, while the smaller, triangular part to which it was joined was already complete by 1488. [7] The juncture at which these two structures meet can still be discerned both inside and out along an axis of division definitively analyzed in 1983 by the architectural historian Paul Hamilton (Fig. 2), who was also one of the few writers to directly address the problem of the building's still unresolved authorship. [8] The original, older section of the palace was one of the few buildings to survive a disastrous fire that consumed Venice's financial district in January 1514, at a particularly bleak moment in the city's history. [9]
At this point Venice was still deeply embroiled in the wars of the League of Cambrai and found itself the enemy of nearly all the major powers of Europe. Given the Rialto's role as Venice's business district, vital to the sustenance of the Venetian state, the fire prompted a pressing need for a rehabilitation of the entire area. The Palazzo dei Camerlenghi and its decoration became a focal point of this process of rejuvenation and reorganization, with the newly refurbished building becoming home to over eighteen official departments responsible for the supervision of state finance and mercantile activity within the city. The most important department, the Treasury itself, officially known as the Camerlenghi di Comun (from which the building derives its name), was only one of many bureaucratic departments eager to find quarters after the fire.
