Like other state museums in Italy, it falls under the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, the Italian Ministry of Culture and Heritage.

The Gallerie dell’Accademia contains masterpieces of Venetian painting up to the 19th century, generally arranged chronologically though some thematic displays are evident.

Artists represented include: Giovanni d'Alemagna, Jacopo and Leandro Bassano, Lazzaro Bastiani, Jacopo, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, Bernardo Bellotto, Paris Bordone, Hieronymus Bosch, Canaletto, Antonio Canova, Vittore Carpaccio, Giulio Carpioni, Rosalba Carriera, Cima da Conegliano, Pietro da Cortona, Domenico Fetti, Jacobello del Fiore, Fra Galgario, Pietro Gaspari, Luca Giordano, Giovanni Antonio and Francesco Guardi, Giorgione, Francesco Hayez, Giulia Lama, Charles Le Brun, Johann Liss, Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro and Alessandro Longhi, Lorenzo Veneziano, Johann Carl Loth, Lorenzo Lotto, Francesco Maffei, Giovanni Mansueti, Andrea Mantegna, Rocco Marconi, Michele Marieschi, Hans Memling, Michele di Matteo da Bologna, Palma Vecchio and Giovane, Paolo Veneziano, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Piero della Francesca, Bonifacio de' Pitati, Giambattista Pittoni, Mattia Preti, Sebastiano and Marco Ricci, Benedetto Rusconi, Carlo Saraceni, Giovanni Battista and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Jacopo and Domenico Tintoretto, Titian, Cosmè Tura, Paolo Veronese, Giorgio Vasari, Antonio, Bartolomeo and Alvise Vivarini, Giuseppe Zais, Francesco Zuccarelli.

The collection includes Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of the Vitruvian Man, which is displayed only rarely as the work, being on paper, is fragile and sensitive to light.

A court tribunal in Venice, however, decided that the work would suffer no ill effects if shipped with great care and displayed under controlled conditions.