Bevilacqua Palace: A Renaissance Palace in Verona
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.1
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Italy
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Venetian
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Elite Residence
On this page11 sections
History
Bevilacqua Palace is a Renaissance palace in Verona, Italy, commissioned by the Bevilacqua family and generally attributed to the Veronese architect Michele Sanmicheli around 1530. Its construction belongs to the third decade of the sixteenth century, although the precise dates of its beginning and completion are uncertain. The building reflects the ambitions of one of Verona’s oldest families and occupies an important historic route between Castelvecchio and Porta Borsari.
The Bevilacqua family in medieval Verona
The Bevilacqua family appears in Verona’s records from 1146. Its members initially traded timber and worked as raftsmen, maintaining commercial connections with Trentino. During the rule of the Della Scala, or Scaliger, family, the medieval dynasty that governed Verona, the Bevilacqua supported the city’s lords and rose into the urban military nobility known as the milites, while continuing their timber business.
Francesco Bevilacqua served the Scaligers as an ambassador, envoy, and procurator. The family also acquired patronage of the chapel of Saints Teuteria and Tosca, attached to the Church of the Holy Apostles. Monumental Bevilacqua tombs were placed there, linking the family’s political standing with a prominent religious foundation near their later palace.
Construction and the uncompleted plan
In the early sixteenth century, the family reorganized its properties along the route between the Churches of the Holy Apostles and Santa Maria della Fratta. Existing structures were demolished and rebuilt as part of this transformation. The work may have been encouraged by the arrival of the Canossa family, which was constructing a monumental palace less than 100 metres away.
The Bevilacqua commissioned Michele Sanmicheli, a sixteenth-century Veronese architect known for Renaissance and Mannerist buildings as well as fortified architecture. Ludovico di Canossa, Bishop of Bayeux, reportedly helped arrange the commission. His niece Giulia had married Gregorio Bevilacqua. A property described as a residential house in Bevilacqua papers from 1508 or earlier was called a residential palace in 1534, suggesting that the transformation was then complete or nearly so.
Sanmicheli’s intended design was considerably larger than the palace that was built. After the family sought to acquire houses belonging to the Lodron family, the project was apparently meant to continue as far as Piazza dei Santi Apostoli. The finished facade would have been approximately twice its present length and would have created a direct relationship between the palace, the piazza, and the family chapel.
In 1564, the Bevilacqua purchased the Lodron property for 3,500 ducats and received permission from Verona’s civic council to continue the work. The extension was never begun. Mario Bevilacqua was spending heavily on work at Bevilacqua Castle and on collecting, while the deaths of Antonio and Gregorio Bevilacqua and their eldest sons, Giovanni and Giulio, may also have affected the project. The abrupt end of the present building preserves the scale of a design that was only partly executed.
A palace of collections and cultural life
Mario Bevilacqua assigned the unfinished upper loggia, an open-sided gallery, to his sculpture collection and established a music salon in the palace. In 1782, the Veronese scholar Scipione Maffei described the antiquities gallery as containing 46 sculptures. The palace also housed a substantial library and a painting collection formed with the advice of the painter Orlando Flacco, who was associated with the family from the time of Count Antonio.
Maffei’s bequest helped preserve part of the library. More than 50 codices, including three illuminated Renaissance manuscripts of Livy, passed to Verona’s Capitular Library, the library associated with a cathedral or collegiate chapter. The sculpture collection had a less unified fate. In 1803, Count Ernesto Bevilacqua offered Verona 30,074 Venetian lire for 30 principal works, but the city council rejected the purchase. Private buyers later acquired the sculptures and sold them in 1811 to Ludwig I of Bavaria. Most are now in Munich’s Glyptothek, a museum devoted chiefly to sculpture.
The paintings were also dispersed among Italian and foreign collections. They included Giovanni Francesco Caroto’s La Pietà della lacrima, now in the Castelvecchio Museum; works associated with Domenico Brusasorzi, including Saint William and Saint Francis; Tintoretto’s Paradise; a Veronese portrait of a young woman with a child and a dog; and Felice Brusasorzi’s Holy Family with Saint Ursula. The latter three works are in the Louvre. A portrait of a noblewoman by Veronese, taken to Paris and declared returned in 1815, is now missing.
Industrial, educational, and civic uses
The palace’s cultural and social spaces later accommodated other activities. The building was converted first into the lithographic workshop of Angelo Guelmi and later into that of Fioravante Penuti. In 1899, Felicita Bevilacqua, the family’s last duchess, bequeathed the palace to the Municipality of Verona. She intended it to become an institute with conference rooms, a library, and an art gallery.
After adaptation works, the palace became the seat of the Royal Anton Maria Lorgna Technical Institute in 1905. Felicita’s wish for a commemorative plaque on the facade was not fulfilled, and a proposal to rename the institute Bevilacqua La Masa, in memory of Felicita and her husband, General Giuseppe La Masa, was rejected.
The present educational complex includes the palace and several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century structures. During the first decades of the twentieth century, these buildings were modified to provide classrooms, internal connections, and services. A new building with gymnasiums and underground parking was added in the 1970s. The complex now houses the Lorgna-Pindemonte Commercial Technical Institute.
A major conservation campaign in 1984 cleaned, repointed, and consolidated the stone facade and its decorated cornice. Aggressive substances from vehicle traffic had corroded the surfaces. The work also repaired the wooden frames, window grilles, and monumental staircase leading to the loggia. Similar deterioration led to a further facade restoration in 2005. The palace remains in institutional use as a school and is recognized as a Renaissance building attributed to Sanmicheli.
Remains
Bevilacqua Palace survives as an incompletely realized monumental design along the historic route between Castelvecchio and Porta Borsari. This stretch was formerly an extra-mural section of the Roman Via Postumia, a road linking settlements in northern Italy. The building’s solid-brick structure is covered throughout its height with finely worked stone. Quinzano tuff or Avesa stone forms the facade, balcony, and decorative divisions, while the basal plinth uses Prun stone.
Facade and exterior sculpture
Lower order
The facade is divided into two architectural orders. The lower order is heavier and more massive. Its ground floor is faced with rustication, masonry treated with pronounced joints or projecting surfaces, and separated by pilasters. Four narrower bays alternate with three wider arched bays. One of the wider bays contains the entrance, while the arched windows have kneeling surrounds. Their sills rest on griffins holding the family arms and carry a Greek-key pattern. Busts of Roman emperors occupy the keystones of the lower arches, expressing the family’s claims to noble origins and grandeur.
Upper order
The upper order is more vertical and refined. On the principal residential floor, or piano nobile, three large arched windows alternate with four smaller openings. Semi-columns on high plinths separate the openings, and their shafts have either vertical or spiral fluting. Their Corinthian capitals are decorated with acanthus leaves.
A continuous balcony runs across the facade on supports shaped as triglyphs, three-part decorative elements derived from the classical Doric order. Above it, the planned upper level was intended to remain an open loggia rather than being closed by the wooden screens now associated with it. The balcony and continuous gallery suggest that one passage connected two corner rooms. The gallery was reached from the courtyard by a monumental two-flight staircase and served as the palace’s antechamber within the intended ceremonial approach.
Decorated cornice
The facade ends in a massive, richly decorated cornice. An eagle’s wing, the family emblem, appears in the frieze among tritons and acanthus scrolls. Lion heads on the keystones of the upper arches refer to the family’s loyalty to Venetian rule. River deities in the spandrels of the upper arch aligned with the entrance allude to the Bevilacqua name.
Evidence of the unfinished scheme
The surviving structure reveals the partial execution of Sanmicheli’s plan. The original scheme probably included two symmetrical wings and two pincer-like stair flights. The surviving stair wing is attached to a later building structure. The asymmetrical entrance portal, the abrupt termination of the balustrade and entablature, and the incomplete upper loggia all show where the larger conception came to an end.
Some keystones originally prepared for the unbuilt extension were reused in the ground-floor salon. Other prepared materials included stones intended for the base, brackets, and capitals. These reused elements preserve physical evidence of the proposed continuation even though the extension toward Piazza dei Santi Apostoli was never constructed.
Nearby sites
