Palazzo Labia
It is the members of the Labia family of the mid 18th century to whom the palazzo owes its notability today, it was inhabited by two brothers with their wives, children, and mother.
His younger brother Paolo, married conventionally into the old Venetian aristocracy, a class prepared to accept the Labia's money and hospitality if not equality.
It appears that it was their mother, Maria Labia, who was the intellectual driving force of the family, in her youth a great beauty, she was painted by Rosalba Carriera.
The French traveller and social commentator Charles de Brosses reported that in old age she had a lively wit, flirtatious nature, and possessed the finest collection of jewels in Europe.
While like many of the other larger palazzi in Venice the Palazzo Labia is rectangular in design built around an inner courtyard, the two architects Tremignon and Cominelli broke the architectural traditions of such architects as Longhena, by designing the facades of the Palazzo Labia to be more simple and less cluttered, than those of the earlier Venetian classical palazzi, while still maintaining a baroque richness achieved through the effect of light and shadow, a second break with Venetian architectural tradition was that the new palazzo had three facades, it was common practice in Venice for only the waterfront facade to have a richness of detail, while the rear elevations were often an evolved mismatch of asymmetrical windows and styles.
Hence this attention to detail of the less obvious parts of the palazzo's exterior, away from its principal water front facade, was able to provide further evidence of the Labia's vast wealth.
The fifth floor is a low mezzanine beneath the projecting hipped roof, here the small oval windows are divided by the heraldic eagles of the Labia family.
The double height palazzo ballroom (or Salone delle Feste) is entirely frescoed with scenes from the romantic encounters of Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra.
Through the illusionary elements we view the encounter of Anthony and the Egyptian queen at a banquet, while from the painted balconies and upper windows members of Cleopatra's court seem to look down.
In the scene, Cleopatra dissolves her priceless pearl in a goblet of wine, demonstrating to Anthony her wealth; Maria Labia would have seen this as a metaphor to her nouveau riche position in Venetian society.
In 1945 a munitions boat exploded close to the palazzo, shattering its already precarious foundations, and causing fragments of the ballroom frescoes to fall to the ground.
Cecil Beaton's photographs of the ball display an almost surreal society, reminiscent of the Venetian life immediately before the fall of the republic at the end of the 18th century.
Don Carlos had a series of strokes in the 1960s and retired to his French seat at Montfort l'Amaury, so he sold it to RAI, Italian State television, who used it as their regional headquarters.
Then during the press preview week of the 2019 Venice Biennale Dior and Venetian Heritage Foundation staged at the palazzo, the Tiepolo Ball in the spirit of Le Bal Oriental.
It was attended by many celebrity guests including Tilda Swinton, Sienna Miller, Karlie Kloss, Hamish Bowles, Dasha Zhukova, Monica Bellucci, and Sandro Kopp.
