Museo dell'Accademia

For my final post on our short trip to Venice, I focus on our visit to the Museo dell'Accademia.  It was a bit of an afterthought on our agenda.  We weren't sure how long the lines would be at the Basilica and Doge's Palace, and how long we would spend inside each one, so we hadn't planned anything else for the day.  When we finished early, we found ourselves with much of an afternoon free.  We had walked past the Museo a couple of times, and I was curious.  I had been to Venice twice before and had not visited.  

It turned out to have a vast and impressive collection of Italian Renaissance paintings, and we had no trouble using up the rest of our afternoon.

There were many beautiful and interesting paintings, most but not all with religious themes.  Below is a detail of a painting of a gathering of officials of the Republic of Venice.  It caught my eye because the left guy in the red robe looked exactly like the man who checked us into our Venice hotel.  Distinctive facial hair seemed to be pretty popular among all of those officials.  Below that is a display of three architectural paintings.  Given their similarity in many respects, I thought it was interesting that they were done by three different artists and interesting also that the curator juxtaposed them like that.

As always, I took a few photos of the way that fabrics were handled in the paintings, noticing, in particular, how different sheens or textures of fabrics were accomplished through the different ways that highlights were handled.

And I was amused by what looked like a baseball cap with Hebrew writing under the brim in one painting.

Finally, I think my favorite painting was one of St. Sebastian immediately after he was shot with arrows.  A bishop attending to him was, remarkably, wearing a vestment (see the detail below) decorated with St. Sebastian shot with arrows.  As impressively predictive as his vestment was, however, it did seem to get the exact location of the arrows wrong.  (It's a little hard to tell from my photo, but in person it was clear.)  It seems petty to nit-pick, though, when I've never had an article of clothing come close to predicting any event ever.