The Museum
The building that encloses the far end of the Piazza San Marco is known as the Napoleonic Wing. The design and early building works date from the period when Venice was part of the Kingdom of Italy (1806–1814), in which Napoleon was represented by the vice-regent Eugene de Beauharnais. The two long wings that run the length of the Square are the Procuratie Vecchie and the Procuratie Nuove, which had housed the offices and residences of some of the main individuals of the Venetian Republic. When the city came under Napoleonic rule, the French emperor and his court realized that public representation of imerial power posed certain logistical and political problems. Having rejected the Doge's Palace because of its complex and evocative past, these turned to the Procuratie Nuove, the former residence of the Procuratori di San Marco, along the southern edge of the Square. Designed in 1582 by Vicenzo Scamozzi, this structure itself had at the time been intended to complete the vast project for the reorganization of the Pizza San Marco, which had begun with Sansovino in the mid-16th century. From 1586 to 1596, works were complete on the ten arcades that extended beyond Sansovino's Library, and then, around 1640, the rest of the Procuratie Nuove was completed by Baldassarre Longhena. And this was the building which, by January 1807, Napoleon decreed should become the Imperial Palace. All the interiors within the Procuratie Nuove were changed with the re-decoration reflecting the current taste for Neoclassicism, together with the Napoleonic Wing – which now stands opposite the St. Mark's Basilica –, which was designed by Giuseppe Soli and Lorenzo Santi and incorporated to the palace. When Venice moved under Austrian dominion in 1814, the palace served as the House of Habsburg and emperor Franz I would stay there until 1815. In 1866, after Venice became part of unified Italy, the palace passed to the House of Savoy. In 1919, Vittorio Emanuele III, king of Italy, handed it over to the State for use by the Ministry of Education. Hence, in 1920, part of the building was used to house the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, and then in 1922 another area became home to the Museo Correr.
Read more about this topic: Museo Correr
Famous quotes containing the word museum:
“To look at and properly appreciate the British Museum is the work of a lifetime.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“It is the space inside that gives the drum its sound.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 1189, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)