Discover Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Palazzo Venier dei Leoni was designed by Lorenzo Boschetti in a restrained Neoclassical style, faced in white Istrian stone in a deliberate departure from the more ornate Gothic and Baroque palazzi lining the rest of the Grand Canal. Construction stopped after the ground floor was completed, reportedly when funding ran out or a rival Corner family palace nearby was judged impossible to overshadow -- either way, the single story that survives was never meant to be the finished building.

That truncation is what gives the palazzo its distinctive low, flat-roofed profile today, since the terrace now doubling as sculpture display space was originally meant to be a base for additional floors above. The building's modest scale, unusual for a Grand Canal palazzo, is precisely what makes its garden and canal-facing terrace function so well as exhibition space.