![]() ![]() By 2012, it was deserted and on the market for twenty million euros: a crumbling fixer-upper with faded frescoes and a courtyard that, if not quite filled with mud and shit, was prone to frequent flooding. By the end of the twentieth century, the building was serving as a convent for a community of nuns, who had converted its upper floors into monastic cells. ![]() Thereafter, the palazzo changed hands repeatedly, and eventually fell into dilapidation. Manfrin’s art was sold off in the late nineteenth century, with many works going to Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia. Three decades later, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote that “the collection is in every respect magnificent, and deserves many visits.” Manfrin boasted of acquiring masterpieces “without paying any attention to the expense involved,” and his expenditures had the desired result: the palazzo became a required destination for any cultivated visitor to Venice, and remained so after his death, in 1801. Manfrin wanted to decorate his new home with “pictures of the highest quality,” but, not being a connoisseur, he had advisers find him paintings by such masters as Mantegna, Giorgione, and Tiepolo. He bought the palazzo, which featured a ballroom with a thirty-foot-high frescoed ceiling, in the late seventeen-eighties. Manfrin was an outsider from Dalmatia-born “in the midst of mud and shit,” as one detractor put it-who amassed a fortune in the tobacco trade. It was constructed in the sixteenth century for the aristocratic Priuli family, but it is thanks to the efforts of a later owner, Girolamo Manfrin, that the palazzo has its storied place in Venetian art history. The Palazzo Priuli Manfrin, in Venice, was bought four years ago by the artist Anish Kapoor. ![]()
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