Peggy Guggenheim Collection Site Features

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.

The collection

The galleries hold major works by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Ernst, Constantin Brâncuși, and Jackson Pollock, among others, spanning Cubism, Surrealism, and early Abstract Expressionism.

The sculpture garden

An outdoor garden along the Grand Canal displays sculpture in the open air, including Marino Marini's "The Angel of the City" -- a bronze horse and rider whose detachable phallus, removable for occasions like church processions passing on the water, has made it one of the collection's most talked-about pieces.

The palazzo sits directly on the Grand Canal in the Dorsoduro district, its low, single-story profile a visible contrast to the tall palazzi surrounding it -- a direct result of construction that stopped after only the ground floor was completed.

The garden opens onto the canal itself, giving the sculpture displayed there a genuine waterfront setting rather than an enclosed courtyard.