Palazzi Barbaro Site Features

The ballroom

Gaspari's room of 1694-98 survives with its stuccowork and its ceiling canvases in place, including Sebastiano Ricci's Rape of the Sabine Women and work by Piazzetta. Complete Venetian Baroque interiors are far rarer than Baroque facades -- most were stripped when their families fell -- and this one was not.

An Interior in Venice

Sargent painted the Curtis family in the salon in 1898: four people, low light, and the room itself doing most of the work. Ariana Curtis disliked it and refused the gift, so it went to the Royal Academy in London instead, where it still is. It remains the best record of what the palace was like when it was full of people.

The rooms Henry James used twice

James finished The Aspern Papers here in 1888, then wrote the ballroom into The Wings of the Dove as Milly Theale's Palazzo Leporelli -- a real room turned into a fictional one, and then filmed in the real room again for the 1997 adaptation.

The ceiling that left

Tiepolo's Glorification of the Barbaro Family was painted for the third-floor library ceiling and is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Its absence is part of the building's history rather than a footnote to it: the Barbaro is one of the palaces whose contents are better travelled than its visitors.