Description
The National Archaeological Museum of Venice holds a collection of Greek and Roman antiquities overlooking Piazza San Marco, in the Procuratie Nuove. Sculptures, portraits, coins, gems: almost all of it comes from the collecting of Venetian noblemen.
It begins with a cardinal digging a vineyard in Rome, where he was building himself a house, and finding ancient statues. He was Domenico Grimani, and in 1523 he left his sculptures to the Republic of Venice.
His nephew Giovanni did more: in his palace at Santa Maria Formosa he arranged nearly two hundred Greek and Roman sculptures like a theater, and in 1587 he donated those too. Venice displayed them in a "public Statuary", next to the Biblioteca Marciana.
Over the centuries other gifts arrived: coins, gems, ancient vases. In the twentieth century everything found its place in the Procuratie Nuove, ordered by period and artistic trend.
Among the best-known works are the three Grimani Gauls, falling, kneeling and dead, Roman copies of originals from the Pergamon school. They are in a room devoted to copies of Hellenistic originals.
In the same room is a Greek muse from the second century BC, which in the Renaissance was retouched by the Lombardo workshop and turned into Cleopatra.
Other things not to miss: the long corridor of coins, over 9,000 specimens from the Greek to the Byzantine age, and the onyx Zulian Cameo, with Aegis-bearing Zeus.
Then the gallery of Roman portraits, with figures of the imperial family, from Augustus to Hadrian, and the sarcophagi, including one with the abduction of Proserpina. Two slabs of the so-called Throne of Saturn were brought here from the church of the Miracoli in 1812, thanks to Canova.
At the center of one room is also the Grimani Altar, decorated with satyrs and maenads, probably the base of a statue from the Augustan age. In 2016 the museum had almost 345,000 visitors, among the most visited state sites in Italy.
It begins with a cardinal digging a vineyard in Rome, where he was building himself a house, and finding ancient statues. He was Domenico Grimani, and in 1523 he left his sculptures to the Republic of Venice.
His nephew Giovanni did more: in his palace at Santa Maria Formosa he arranged nearly two hundred Greek and Roman sculptures like a theater, and in 1587 he donated those too. Venice displayed them in a "public Statuary", next to the Biblioteca Marciana.
Over the centuries other gifts arrived: coins, gems, ancient vases. In the twentieth century everything found its place in the Procuratie Nuove, ordered by period and artistic trend.
Among the best-known works are the three Grimani Gauls, falling, kneeling and dead, Roman copies of originals from the Pergamon school. They are in a room devoted to copies of Hellenistic originals.
In the same room is a Greek muse from the second century BC, which in the Renaissance was retouched by the Lombardo workshop and turned into Cleopatra.
Other things not to miss: the long corridor of coins, over 9,000 specimens from the Greek to the Byzantine age, and the onyx Zulian Cameo, with Aegis-bearing Zeus.
Then the gallery of Roman portraits, with figures of the imperial family, from Augustus to Hadrian, and the sarcophagi, including one with the abduction of Proserpina. Two slabs of the so-called Throne of Saturn were brought here from the church of the Miracoli in 1812, thanks to Canova.
At the center of one room is also the Grimani Altar, decorated with satyrs and maenads, probably the base of a statue from the Augustan age. In 2016 the museum had almost 345,000 visitors, among the most visited state sites in Italy.