Palazzo Cappello Layard

The Palazzo or Ca' Cappello Layard is a palace situated in the sestiere of San Polo of Venice, Italy, overlooking the Grand Canal at the confluence between this and the smaller Rio di San Polo and Rio delle Erbe. On the Grand canal, it is located between Palazzo Barbarigo della Terrazza and Palazzo Grimani Marcello. It is particularly noteworthy for having been the residence of Austen Henry Layard, discoverer of Niniveh.

Located on the confluence of three canals, it is thus an unusual structure in that it presents three facades rather than the customary one.

Ca' Cappello is a grand palace of Gothic origin, but substantially restructured during the course of the sixteenth century under the direction of its owner, the procurator of Saint Mark Antonio Cappello, who had supervised some of the most important projects of construction and renovation in sixteenth century Venice, in particular the commencement of work on Rialto bridge, the edification of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana and the supervision of the construction of the Golden staircase at Ducal Palace or the redecoration of the room of the Council of Ten within the palace.

For these important works Antonio had frequently commissioned painters Paolo Veronese and Giovanni Battista Zelotti, to who he had ties through common friend Michele Sanmicheli. Veronese and Zelotti were thus commissioned to decorate with frescoes the renovated Renaissance palace. The fresco cycle was noted by Giorgio Vasari as one of Veronese’s notable works “who painted with the same [Zelotti] the façade of the palace of M. Antonio Cappello that is in Venice overlooking the Grand Canal”. The frescoes were more extensively described by erudite Carlo Ridolfi in his 1648 Le Meraviglie dell’arte, “over the Grand Canal in the house of the Cappelli Veronese coloured some figures of Cerere, Pomona, Pallas and other deities. The figures above were painted by his friend Zelotti”. The cycle did not survive long. In his 1674 Miniere della Pittura Veneziana the erudite Marco Boschini noted surviving but damaged work by Zelotti, and wrote that much had already been lost in a fire. The deities painted by Zelotti were however still visible in 1760 when Anton Maria Zanetti printed his Varie Pitture a Fresco de principali maestri Veneziani, and reproduced in engravings the four surviving figures. It is not certain when these remaining and worn out frescoes were finally lost, but by the nineteenth century they were certainly no longer visible.

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