Gallerie dell'Accademia

• 1. Introduction

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  The Gallerie dell'Accademia sits on the south bank of the Grand Canal in Venice, inside a complex of buildings that includes a former church, a convent, and a scuola that dates to 1343. For most visitors it is a treasure house of Venetian painting. But it holds one object that stands entirely apart from the rest of the collection: a drawing on paper so fragile it can only be shown to the public for a few weeks every six years. That drawing is Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.

  How did a museum in Venice come to hold one of the most celebrated drawings in the world? And why does that museum exist at all? The answers run back to a Napoleonic decree, a disbanded church, and an art academy founded on the 24th of September 1750.

• 2. An Academy Is Born

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  On the 24th of September 1750, the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia opened its doors. Its first director was Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, one of the painters whose own work would eventually hang in the gallery he helped found. After Piazzetta, Gianbattista Tiepolo became the first president, taking up that role after his return from Würzburg.

  The institution was a place not only for making art but for studying how to preserve it. As early as 1777, the academy began working on art restoration under Pietro Edwards, making it one of the first institutions in Europe to take that discipline seriously. By 1819, restoration had been formalised as a course of study.

  The academy's original name was the Veneta Academia di Pittura, Scultura e Architettura. In 1807 a Napoleonic decree re-founded the institution and renamed it the Accademia Reale di Belle Arti, meaning royal academy of fine arts. That same decree moved the academy to the Palladian complex of the Scuola della Carità, the building where the Gallerie dell'Accademia still stand today.

• 3. A Complex of Repurposed Spaces

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  The buildings the Napoleonic administration handed to the academy were not built as a museum. They were seized from religious institutions that had been disbanded. The Scuola della Carità was the oldest of Venice's six Scuole Grandi; the scuola itself was formed in 1260, and the building dates to 1343. The convent alongside it, the Convento dei Canonici Lateranensi, was begun in 1561 by Andrea Palladio, though it was never fully completed. The facade of the church of Santa Maria della Carità was finished in 1441 by Bartolomeo Bon.

  These three structures, repurposed and merged, became the Accademia's home. The collections were opened to the public for the first time on the 10th of August 1817. For nearly two more centuries, the art school and the gallery shared the same building, an arrangement that only ended in 2004, when the school relocated to the Ospedale degli Incurabili.

• 4. A Gallery Finds Its Own Identity

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  In 1879, the Gallerie dell'Accademia formally separated from the art academy and became an independent institution. That independence did not sever the name: the nearby bridge, the Ponte dell'Accademia, and the vaporetto water bus landing station both still carry the academy's name.

  As a state museum, the gallery falls under the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Italy's Ministry of Culture and Heritage. Its collection runs from medieval Venetian painting through to the 19th century, arranged broadly in chronological order, though the curators have also placed some works in thematic groupings. The roster of artists represented reads like a survey of Italian and northern European painting across several centuries, from Paolo Veneziano and Lorenzo Veneziano in the medieval period through to Canaletto, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and Francesco Hayez in later centuries.

• 5. The Vitruvian Man's Rare Appearances

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  Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is part of the Gallerie's collection, but its presence in any public display is brief and infrequent. Because the work is on paper, it is fragile and sensitive to light. The museum allows it to be shown for only a few weeks every six years.

  In 2019, the Louvre in Paris asked to borrow the drawing for an exhibition of works by Leonardo. A cultural heritage group refused the request. The case went to a court tribunal in Venice, which ruled that the work could be shipped safely if handled with great care and displayed under controlled conditions. The drawing was sent to Paris and shown at the Louvre from the 24th of October 2019 to the 24th of February 2020, a rare and closely watched loan that drew attention to just how tightly the museum guards Leonardo's paper work. The six-year cycle means that most people who visit the Gallerie will leave without ever seeing the Vitruvian Man on the wall.