The building

This magnificent palace, now the Museum of Eighteenth-Century Venice, was designed by the greatest Baroque architect of Venice, Baldassare Longhena for the aristocratic Bon family, and work began on it in 1649.
Longhena's death in 1682, almost at the same time as that of his noble client, together with the financial problems of the Bon family, brought work to a halt, leaving the palace incomplete.
In the meantime, the Rezzonico family - originally from Lombardy - had moved to Venice and in 1687 had purchased a title. Giambattista Rezzonico, merchant and banker, bought the palace in 1751 and appointed Giorgio Massari, one of the most highly esteemed and eclectic artists of the day, to complete it. Work proceeded rapidly and in 1756 the building was finished.
While the magnificent facade on the Grand Canal and the second piano nobile followed Longhena's original project, Massari was responsible for the audacious inventions towards the rear of the palace: the sumptuous land-entrance, the ceremonial staircase and the unusual grandiose ballroom obtained by eliminating the second-floor in this portion of the building.
As soon as the building was completed, the most important painters in Venice were called upon to decorate it: Giambattista Crosato, who painted the frescoes in the ballroom together with the trompe l'oeil painter Pietro Visconti; Giambattista Tiepolo, who painted two ceilings in celebration of the marriage between Ludovico Rezzonico and Faustina Savorgnan; the young Jacopo Guarana and Gaspare Diziani.
The building was fully complete by 1758, when Giambattista Rezzonico's younger brother, Carlo, Bishop of Padua, was elected Pope under the name Clement XIII: this was the peak of the family's fortunes and the palace at San Barnaba celebrated the event in grand style. But by 1810 - scarcely fifty years later - the family had died out. For the palace and its great heritage of art and history this was the beginning of a long, troubled period of sales and dispersions.
Stripped of its furnishings, which were subdivided among the heirs and then sold, the palace passed through the hands of various owners in the nineteenth century; purchased by the English painter, Robert Barrett ("Pen") Browning, it was chosen as a residence by his father, the writer Robert Browning, who died there. It was subsequently taken over by Count Lionello Hirschell de Minerbi, a Member of the Italian Parliament, who, after lengthy and complex negotiations, sold it to the Venice Town Council in 1935.

The Museum of Eighteenth-Century Culture
After some restoration work, the palace was adapted to serve as the Museum of Eighteenth-Century Venice and was opened to the public on 25th April 1936. The designers of the museum lay-out, Nino Barbantini and Giulio Lorenzetti, aimed to exploit the character of Ca' Rezzonico, arranging the works as if they were the palace's original furnishings. To achieve this result, numerous eighteenth-century works that belonged to the other civic museums of Venice were concentrated in Ca' Rezzonico, together with paintings, furniture and frescoes from other civic-owned buildings and many works purchased for the occasion on the antiques-market. The final effect was undeniably striking; despite one or two examples of straining for effect, the quality of the numerous works exhibited, together with the extraordinary quality of the architecture and the setting, made Ca' Rezzonico a veritable temple of the Venetian Settecento: an age of splendour, dissipation and decadence, but undoubtedly one of the most lively and fertile seasons of modern art in Europe.