Gallerie dell'Accademia

No collection anywhere holds Venetian painting from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century in greater depth than the Gallerie dell'Accademia. Its rooms trace the city's school from gold-ground altarpieces through Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese to Tiepolo and Canaletto. Among the best-known works are Giorgione's The Tempest, Titian's late Pietà, Carpaccio's Legend of Saint Ursula cycle and Veronese's vast Feast in the House of Levi, which the painter retitled after questioning by the Inquisition.

The galleries occupy three linked historic buildings at the foot of the Accademia bridge on the Grand Canal: the former Scuola della Carità, the church of Santa Maria della Carità and a monastery designed by Palladio. In the Scuola's old meeting hall, Titian's Presentation of the Virgin still hangs in the room it was painted for, beneath a carved and gilded ceiling. The collection was formed in the early nineteenth century under Napoleonic rule, largely from Venice's suppressed churches and convents.