Palazzo Cappello Layard

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.

[4] 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.

Ca Cappello was purchased, at a date given variously as 1874 and 1878 by sources, by the English archeologist, diplomat and politician Austen Henry Layard, with the help of the doyen of the British community in Venice, the historian Rawdon Brown.

[6] Layard, who had shipped his great collection of Italian Renaissance paintings to Venice in 1875, inhabited the palazzo stably following his withdrawal from the diplomatic career after political debacle in Istanbul and deep disagreement with Gladstone until his death by cancer, on the occasion of a rare visit to London, in 1894.

Assyrian reliefs from Nineveh and a Hellenistic funerary piece from Samos were installed into the staircase wall, though these were in 1892 donated to the Museo Civico Correr, and replaced with floral paintings by Neapolitan artist Francesco Lavagna.

Because of Layard’s particular standing, the palazzo quickly became a meeting place for “the greatest representatives of British and international cultural, political and diplomatic intelligentsia between the final quarter of the 19th century and the first decade of the XXth”.