Discover Ca' Pesaro

Baldassare Longhena designed Ca' Pesaro as an exercise in shadow, and it is one of the most sculptural facades on the Grand Canal. The ground floor is faced in bugnato a punta di diamante -- rusticated blocks cut to a projecting point -- which under low sun breaks the whole base into a field of small hard shadows before the eye reaches the upper storeys.

Above it sit two loggias of paired colossal columns framing arched windows, standing well clear of the wall behind them, so each opening is a deep recess rather than a window in a flat plane. The effect reads almost as a stack of triumphal arches rather than a conventional palace front. Where a Gothic palace of the same width presents a screen of tracery, this presents alternating solid and void, and the facade changes substantially as the sun crosses it.

The columns are colossal in the technical sense -- each order rises the full height of its storey -- and the arrangement borrows from Roman palace fronts rather than from anything Venetian. It is the same argument Longhena made at Ca' Rezzonico and, on a much larger scale, at Santa Maria della Salute.

Behind the facade is a proper courtyard with a monumental well-head, finished by 1676 -- decades before the front was. The building went up back to front over fifty years and two architects, and Gian Antonio Gaspari's completion in 1710 followed Longhena's drawings closely enough that the join is not visible from the canal.