Venice
Palazzo Grimani
More than a quarter-century after its acquisition by the Italian government, Palazzo Grimani is at long last open to the public. 
The renovation of this jewel of Venetian Renaissance architecture, which includes state-of-the-art innovations necessary to protect it from Venice's capricious canals, as well as a painstaking restoration of its original surfaces, took an astonishing twenty-seven years to complete.
The Venetian doge Antonio Grimani began construction of the original residence in the early sixteenth century. His brother, Vettore Grimani, the republic's general prosecutor, and his son Giovanni Grimani, cardinal and patriarch of Aquileia, remodeled it between 1532 and 1569 with the help of some of the finest architects of the time. The overall structure is attributed to Michele Sanmicheli; the graceful spiral staircase, to Andrea Palladio. Giovanni Antonio Rusconi completed the palace in 1575. Its polychrome marble floors and marble architectural elements frame richly ornamented frescoes and stuccowork by Francesco Salviati, Federico Zuccaro, Camillo Mantovano di Cappelli, and Giovanni da Udine.
The palace is especially noted for its courtyard (unique in Venice) and tribuna (gallery), created as a showplace for the Grimani family's extensive collection of Greek and Roman antiquities. Paintings by Venetian masters such as Titian, Jacopo Bassano, and Jacopo Tintoretto as well as by Hieronymus Bosch now adorn the palace's walls in tribute to the arts patronage of its owners.
Palazzo Grimani, Venice · www.palazzogrimani.org
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Sitzmaschine, model #670, Designed by Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956), Manufactured by J.& J. Kohn, Austria, ca. 1905.Bent beech wood, steel; height 39
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