Corporate Colors: Bonifacio and Tintoretto at the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi in Venice

Of all the testaments to the of gold age of Venetian painting, perhaps the greatest in quantity ignored--and least understood--is the extensive decoration of the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi, originally the site of the Venetian Treasury. Gracefully anchored at the lower extremity of the Rialto Bridge, the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi is single of Venice's most imposing and attractive landmarks (Fig. 1) [1] This striking example of Renaissance architecture was originally the site of single of the largest decorative schemes at any time assembled in the city--a program of nearly sum of two units hundred pictures, many of them large-scale, encompassing work by the agency of a plethora of artists, their names reading like a "who's who" of Venetian Renaissance painting. the two the building and the magnitude of the decoration have been preserv notwithstanding the significance of the Camerlenghi scheme to the unravelling of Venetian Renaissance art remains largely unrecognized. [2]

The program was dispersed after Napoleon brought the Venetian Republic to its knee in 1797 Although many works went astray or were left to deteriorate, about single hundred paintings still survive, greatest in quantity of them retained in the city as part of the collection of the Gallerie dell'Accademia. [3] Of these, a not many 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 upon public display within Venice. This selection shows merely a fraction of a herculean collection of paintings from the Camerlenghi distributed quite through the city at a variety of locations. [4] As a originate of the present writer's research, the first comprehensive reconstructions of the decoration as it appeared in numerous plays within the palace can now be neared [5] These demonstrate the immense size and end of the largest official decorative commission outside the Doge's Pala ce

The aim of this article is not to not absent the results of the author's findings in their entirety on the other hand to reintroduce the scheme to critical consciousness and to outline those aspects of the Camerlenghi throw that cast light on state-sponsored art in the lagoon. [6] In particular, by the agency of dealing with the work of those artists who made the greatest contribution, Bonifacio Veronese and Jacopo Tintoretto, I intend to focus upon how the state was able to manipulate the actual proces of commissioning works of art as a way of engendering, and strengthening, the corporate etho of Venetian society.

The Decoration of the aged and New Sections of the Palace

In many ways something of a showpiece, one as well as the other physically and historically, it occupies a prominent position as individual of the first in a series of important Venetian landmarks (including the Loggetta, the Sansovino Library, and the Rialto Bridge itself) that grew without of the program of urban reform initiated by the agency of Doge Andrea Gritti in the early sixteenth century

Owing to its dramatic location nearest to the Rialto Bridge, the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi be subsequent tos in making a strong impression upon the visitor. In its Venetian words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following the building is extremely unusual in that it is a freestanding, self-contained construction which manages to divorce itself from the surrounding buildings by means of virtue of its gleaming facade--composed entirely of expensive Istrian stone--and its pitched lead roof

The Palazzo dei Camerlenghi is actually sum of two units buildings in one. The larger, rectangular section of the palace, that nearest the bridge, owes its final appearance to a building campaign carried on the outside between 1525 and 1528, while the smaller, triangular part to which it was joined was already perfect by 1488. [7] The junction at which these two arrangements meet can still be discerned one as well as the other inside and out along an axis of division definitively analyzed in 1983 by dint of the architectural historian Paul Hamilton (Fig. 2) who was also single of the few writers to directly address the puzzle of the building's still unresolv authorship. [8] The original, older section of the palace was individual of the few buildings to survive a disastrous fire that consum Venice's financial district in January 1514 at a particularly bleak point of time in the city's history. [9]

At this point Venice was still far down embroiled in the wars of the League of Cambrai and place itself the enemy of nearly all the major powers of Europe Given the Rialto's character as Venice's business district, vital to the sustenance of the Venetian state, the fire activeed a pressing need for a rehabilitation of the entire area. The Palazzo dei Camerlenghi and its decoration became a focal point of this proces of rejuvenation and reorganization, with the newly refurbished building becoming place of abode to over eighteen official departments responsible for the supervision of state finance and mercantile activity within the city. The greatest in quantity important department, the Treasury itself, officially known as the Camerlenghi di Comun (from which the building derives its name), was sole one of many bureaucratic departments eager to find quarters after the fire.