Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Venezia

The museum, with a strong character collector, is mainly made up of material from private collections of famous Venetian families, donated to the city in the sixteenth century. The origins of the museum, in fact, date back to the bequest of Domenico Grimani and the donation of his nephew Giovanni, respectively of 1523 and 1587, under which came the Venetian state much of their ancient sculptures (over two hundred), who went to form the Public Statuary. Typical expression of Renaissance taste, Statuary was set up in 1596 in the Antechamber of the San Marco Library; additional donations enriched it over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, until, in 1812, all the marbles were transferred to the Doge's Palace by edict of Eugene de Beauharnais. In its present form, the museum reflects the setting created by Carlo Anti between 1923 and 1926. The sculptures, private largely due to the additions of Renaissance restorations, were arranged in twelve rooms divided by ages, artistic schools and subjects, offering an overview of classical sculpture from the fifth century. B.C. the third century. A.D., in which particular attention was paid to the large group of Greek originals, already reported in 1898 in an essay of Adolf Furtwängler. Some additions were made between the '50s and' 60s, following the lodging of the archaeological collections of the Civic Museums and definitive allocation of part of the collections of the Museum of San Donato of Zara. Finally it should be remembered the donation of Giancarlo Ligabue of 1982, which consists of an interesting group of prehistoric bronzes. Since 1997 some works are exhibited in the Vestibule of the Library Sansoviniana in a reconstruction of two of the ancient statuary walls, realized with the help of the drawings of Anton Catalog Maria Zanetti the Younger (1736).