Doge's Palace

The first ducal palace stood at Heraclia, where the Republic's first doge, Paolo Lucio Anafesto, settled around 700; nothing of it survives. After the murder of Orso Ipato in 737 the ducal office gave way to a magister militum elected each year, and when the dogeship was restored in 752 the new doge, Teodato Ipato, built a fresh seat in the town of Metamaucum. That seat moved again in 810 or 811, by order of Angelo Partecipazio, to Rivoaltus, the old Rialto, judged the safer place; a palatium duci, Latin for ducal palace, was raised there on ground the doge owned himself, on the site the palace still occupies, and it took the form of a castle. No trace of the ninth-century building remains. It was completed under Pietro IV Candiano, in office from 959 to 976, and the accounts of what happened next diverge: by one, the structure was solid enough to withstand the popular rising of 976; by another, citizens rebelling against Candiano set fire to it and partly destroyed it.

The palace was already receiving emperors. Otto III came to Venice in 998 to meet Doge Pietro II Orseolo and was lodged in the eastern tower, struck by the luxury of the interiors. Henry IV of Franconia was housed there in 1094, when he came to see the remains of Mark the Evangelist, and Henry V in 1116, after a rebuilding that followed two fires in the city in 1105 and that the chroniclers of the period do not attest.

The first great remodelling, in Byzantine style and perhaps the work of Nicolo Barattieri, who had raised the columns of San Marco and San Todaro and built an early form of the Rialto bridge, belongs to the dogeship of Sebastiano Ziani (1172-1178). Ziani was a reformer who changed the whole layout of St Mark's Square, and the work went with a wider reordering of that area between 1173 and 1177 intended to give the various magistracies a home. It probably involved building the wing facing the Rio di Palazzo on land bought from the nuns of San Zaccaria, and an enlargement at the margins that cut the quayside back considerably. The new palace was built out of fortresses, one facade to the Piazzetta, the other over the St Mark's Basin; little of it is left, though the Istrian stone wall base and some herringbone brick paving at ground level still carry Byzantine-Venetian character. When the works ended, Pope Alexander III and Frederick Barbarossa, who had signed a peace treaty through the doge's mediation, came to Venice, and the emperor stayed in the palace for two months.

The Venetian nobility became a caste through the closure of admissions to the Great Council in 1297. A measure of Doge Pietro Gradenigo drove the number of councillors sharply upward, from 317 in 1264 to 1,017 in 1311, and the room they met in could no longer hold them. Around 1301 the Great Council was moved into the hall now called the Senate Chamber, its refit possibly the work of Pietro Basejo or the architect Montagnana; by 1309, just after that work, the hall had already proved too small, and building sites opened in the southern wing, which was pulled down at once and restored by 1340. The economic prosperity of Giovanni Soranzo's dogeship pushed the site forward under Basejo, with Filippo Calendario assisting. In the same campaign the chapel of San Nicolo, built by Pietro Ziani as an ex voto of Enrico Dandolo, was enlarged and painted with the story of Alexander III; a lion cage and new cells were made at ground level, and the courtyard wells were set in place in 1332. The corners of the lagoon wing, the oldest part of the building, carry fourteenth-century sculpture thought to be by Calendario and by Lombard artists such as Matteo Raverti and Antonio Bregno.

In 1340 the order went out to finish the second floor of the southern wing, where Calendario and Basejo worked along the inner face of the Great Council chamber and built a staircase and its door. Around 1355 the work stopped, because several of the men on the site had joined the conspiracy plotted by Marin Falier and because plague had broken out. Lorenzo Celsi resumed it and was heavily criticised for the decision. Under Marco Corner the Great Council chamber was decorated by Guariento and Pisanello, but a run of wars weakened the Republic financially and the work was interrupted again until Michele Sten ordered it taken up once more. The balcony looking over the lagoon went up in 1404.

Tommaso Mocenigo pressed with difficulty for the front on the Piazzetta to be rebuilt as well. Work there began in 1424, once the Great Council had returned to its original place, and was carried through under Doge Francesco Foscari, whose dogeship ran from 1423 to 1457. That wing served as law courts, with a ground-floor arcade outside, open first-floor loggias along the facade and the inner courtyard side completed with the ceremonial entrance, the Porta della Carta. Under Pasquale Malipiero the Piazzetta front was completed and the stories of Pepin and a world map were painted; under Cristoforo Moro the Foscari Arch was raised, again by the Bon and again well behind time. In 1468 the hall later known as the Scrutinio Room was called the Library, because the books given by Cardinal Bessarione were placed there, along with manuscripts left to the Republic by Petrarch. In 1473 it was decided to replace paintings in the Great Council chamber that water infiltration had ruined, and that work ran on until 1495, employing Giovanni and Gentile Bellini among others. The Porta della Carta itself was built by Giovanni and Bartolomeo Bon, finished in 1442 by one account and, by another, not before 1452; its name probably comes either from the public scribes who set up their desks there, from the archives of state documents nearby, or from the custom of posting new laws and decrees on it.

In 1483 a violent fire broke out on the canal side of the palace, where the Doge's Apartments were. The reconstruction was commissioned from the sculptor and architect Antonio Rizzo, who brought a Renaissance language into the building: he ordered the burnt sections pulled down, built the portico and rebuilt the Giants' Staircase to give the palace a more uniform aspect. An entire new structure rose along the canal, running from the Ponte della Canonica to the Ponte della Paglia, its official rooms of government decorated with works commissioned from Vittore Carpaccio, Giorgione, Alvise Vivarini and Giovanni Bellini. When the site reopened in 1493 Rizzo, accused of stealing public money, fled, and the nearly finished work passed on an interim basis to Pietro Lombardo. The doge's apartments, in the north-east corner between the water entrance on the Rio della Canonica and the apse of St Mark's Basilica, were completed by 1510; a doge furnished the private rooms from his own house, and at his death the furniture was promptly removed to make way for that of his elected successor.

In 1485 the Great Council decided that a ceremonial staircase should be built in the courtyard, set on a straight axis with the rounded Foscari Arch in alternate bands of Istrian stone and red Verona marble, so that Piazza and building were joined by a single monumental approach. Designed by Rizzo, the Giants' Staircase was the place appointed for the ducal coronation, and it took its name from Sansovino's two colossal statues of Mars and Neptune, standing for Venice's power by land and by sea, which were set there in the 1560s. Senators gathered before government meetings in the Senators' Courtyard beside it. A second fire in 1574 was brought under control and did no serious structural harm, but it destroyed a great many works of art and rooms on the second floor. Antonio da Ponte was appointed director of the works, with Cristoforo Sorte, Andrea Palladio and Vincenzo Scamozzi; the job was expected to take three years and ran far beyond that, held up in part by plague.

The third great fire began on 20 December 1577 in the Scrutinio Room. It melted the lead roof and destroyed the Scrutinio Room and the Great Council Chamber together with works by Gentile da Fabriano, Pisanello, Alvise Vivarini, Vittore Carpaccio, Giovanni Bellini, Pordenone and Titian. Once the organs of government had found other quarters, the architects consulted, Palladio and Rusconi among them, faced a structural problem centred on the corner towards the Ponte della Paglia; their opinions conflicted and the rebuilding took four years, though the Great Council Chamber was back in use in 1578 and the structural repair, which respected the original layout, was finished in 1579-80. The Republic chose to keep the original Gothic despite the neo-classical alternatives Palladio submitted. Ceilings were designed by Sorte and da Ponte, and three scholars, Girolamo Bardi among them, set the programme for the new pictorial cycles: the faces of the doges and the story of Pope Alexander III on the walls, war, the deeds of citizens and allegory overhead. Veronese, Jacopo and Domenico Tintoretto, Palma il Giovane, Francesco Bassano and Antonio Aliense worked on them, Palma il Giovane's Triumph of Venice, Crowned by Victory dating from 1582 and Veronese's Apotheosis of Venice from 1585. Twelve wall paintings, facing each other in groups of six, show acts of valour or incidents of war from the city's history, and one long wall behind the doge's throne is filled by Il Paradiso, produced by Tintoretto and his workshop between 1588 and 1592 and said to be the widest canvas painting in the world.

The Golden Staircase was built to separate the doge's private lodging, to the north, from the halls of justice to the south. Jacopo Sansovino's design dates from 1555, after Michele Sanmicheli and Andrea Palladio had also been consulted, and it was completed in two stages under the doges Lorenzo and Girolamo Priuli, who reigned between 1556 and 1567, first by Scarpagnino in 1559 and then under Sebastiano Venier; Alessandro Vittoria's white stucco and gold leaf on the vault was begun in 1557. Justice ran through the whole height of the palace. The Council of Ten, set up after the conspiracy of 1310 in which Bajamonte Tiepolo and other noblemen tried to overthrow the institutions of the state, met under a gilded ceiling of twenty-five compartments by Gian Battista Ponchino, assisted by a young Veronese and Gian Battista Zelotti, whose allegories set out the Council's power to punish the guilty and free the innocent. The Compass Room next to it took its name from the large wooden compass, surmounted by a statue of Justice, that conceals the entrance to the rooms of the Three Heads of the Council of Ten and the State Inquisitors; those summoned by these magistrates waited here, and the sixteenth-century decoration was meant to underline the solemnity of the Republic's legal machinery. The Quarantia, originally a single forty-man council with substantial political and legislative power, was split into three separate councils during the fifteenth century, and the Quarantia Criminal, set up in the same century to deal with criminal law, had legislative powers of its own.

The Senate met in the chamber also called the Sala dei Pregadi, because the doge asked its members to take part in the meetings held there. Founded in the thirteenth century, it had become by the sixteenth the body chiefly responsible for manufacturing, trade, finance and foreign policy, while the Full College coordinated its work, read the dispatches of ambassadors and city governors and received foreign delegations; ambassadors waited to be admitted in an antechamber whose ceiling fresco by Veronese shows Venice distributing honours and rewards. The State Censors were created in 1517 by Marco Giovanni di Giovanni, a cousin of Doge Andrea Gritti and a nephew of Francesco Foscari; they were not judges but something closer to moral consultants, charged above all with suppressing electoral fraud and protecting the state's public institutions. The Magistrato alle Leggi, created in 1553 and headed by three of the city's patricians, saw that the regulations governing the practice of law were observed. The three Avogadori di Comun, elected by the Great Council, safeguarded the principle of legality and checked the legitimacy of the marriages and births entered in the Golden Book; that book and the Silver Book, which registered the families of full Venetian citizens who supplied the manpower of the state bureaucracy, were kept in a chest in the Scrigno Room with the documents proving the claims inscribed in them. The Milizia da Mar, some twenty members of the Senate and Great Council first established in the mid-sixteenth century, recruited the crews for Venice's war galleys, while the Provveditori all'Armar fitted and supplied the fleet. From the end of the sixteenth century, denunciations of crime or embezzlement could be posted through the lions' mouths set into the walls of the loggia floor, the paper falling into a wooden box that opened on the far side of the wall, in the office the accusation was meant for.

The Great Council Chamber, 53 metres long and 25 wide, is the largest room in the palace and one of the largest in Europe. The Great Council itself took in every male member of a patrician Venetian family over 25 years old, whatever his individual standing, merit or wealth, and for that reason, despite the restrictions the Senate placed on its powers over the centuries, it continued to be seen as a bastion of republican equality. Below the ceiling runs a frieze with portraits of the first 76 doges, commissioned from Tintoretto though most of them painted by his son; each holds a scroll naming his chief achievement, and Marino Faliero, who attempted a coup in 1355, is represented by a black cloth as a traitor to the Republic. Beneath the palace, holding cells existed before the twelfth century, and during the thirteenth and fourteenth more prison space was made until it filled the whole ground floor of the southern wing. The layout changed again around 1540, when a compound was built on the ground floor of the eastern wing; dark, damp and cut off, these cells became known as the Pozzi, the wells. In 1591 further cells were built in the upper eastern wing, directly under the lead roof, and were called the Piombi. Silvio Pellico and Giacomo Casanova were held here, and Casanova described in his own account escaping through the roof, re-entering the palace and leaving by the Porta della Carta.

Legislative, judicial and custodial functions had shared the palace from the Republic's early years, but the space proved too narrow for the number of prisoners crowding the cells, and the risk of an outbreak of disease grew. At the end of the fifteenth century the Great Council decided to use as a prison a building near the Ponte della Paglia, which did not improve conditions, since the old house was in still worse sanitary state. The Prigion Nova was replaced in turn by the Prigion Novissima, a site that ran on for roughly a century through continual enlargement; the purchase of further adjoining lots was made effective only in 1574. Antonio da Ponte and Zanmaria de Piombi were both consulted, and da Ponte's design was chosen, with a portico and an upper floor for the Sala dei Signori di Notte and the Camera del Tormento reached by a ceremonial stair, and three storeys of cells behind linked by patrol corridors. A second, L-shaped courtyard was made by demolishing a building used by the Inquisition. Each cell was lined, in keeping with earlier practice, with overlapping planks of larch nailed into place; the building was meant to give prisoners larger, lighter and airier cells, though certain sections fell short of that, and it is held to have been the first building in Europe used solely for detention rather than sharing the legislative functions the palace itself carried. Da Ponte died in 1597 and the Contin carried the work on. The two buildings were joined across the Rio di Palazzo by the Bridge of Sighs, built shortly after 1600 by one account and in 1614 by another; enclosed and covered on every side, it contains two parallel corridors, one linking the prisons to the chambers of the Magistrato alle Leggi and the Quarantia Criminal, the other to the State Advocacy rooms and the Parlatorio, both connected to the service staircase running from the Pozzi to the Piombi.

The palace housed the political institutions of the Republic until the Napoleonic occupation of the city in 1797, and its role changed with the Republic's end. The coat of arms shown in the Scudo Room, the largest room of the ducal apartments and the hall in which the doge granted audiences and received guests, is that of Ludovico Manin, the doge reigning when the Republic of St Mark came to an end; the sculpted portrait of Francesco Foscari kneeling before the lion of St Mark on the Porta della Carta is a nineteenth-century work by Luigi Ferrari, made to replace the original destroyed by the French in 1797. Venice passed first to French rule, then to Austrian, and in 1866 became part of Italy. Stripped of many of its works of art, the palace turned into an administrative seat: from 1807 it held the Court of Appeal, and in 1811 the Libreria Marciana moved in along with the archaeological statuary. The offices left in 1821, the library in 1904 and the museum collection in 1918.

By the end of the nineteenth century the fabric was visibly decaying, and after the middle of the century the palace seemed in such a state that its survival was in question. The Italian government set aside substantial funds and a major restoration plan was launched in the mid-1870s, covering the two facades and the capitals of the ground-floor arcade and upper loggia. Forty-two of these, in a particularly dilapidated state, were removed and replaced with copies; the originals, some of them masterpieces of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Venetian sculpture, were carefully restored and set aside in the Museo dell'Opera, named for the technical office that had handled the palace's maintenance since the Middle Ages, where they now stand on their original columns in six rooms crossed by an ancient wall of great stone blocks left from an earlier version of the building. All public offices were moved elsewhere, with the exception of the State Office for the Protection of Historical Monuments, still housed on the loggia floor. The Bridge of Sighs acquired its name in the Romantic era, for the sighs of prisoners who, taken from the courtroom to the cell where they would serve their sentence, glimpsed the lagoon and San Giorgio Maggiore through the barred windows and took a last look at freedom. In 1903 the remains of the fresco Guariento had painted around 1365 for the back wall of the Great Council, and which the 1577 fire had almost entirely destroyed, were rediscovered above the doge's throne beneath Il Paradiso. The New Prisons, used in their turn by the French and the Austrians, stopped working only in 1919, no longer fit for modern standards of hygiene.

In 1923 the Italian state, the owner of the building, entrusted its management to the Venetian municipality to be run as a museum. On 9 October 1991 the palace suffered its only art theft: Vincenzo Pipino lagged behind a tour group, hid in one of the cells in the New Prisons and crossed the Bridge of Sighs in the middle of the night to the Censors' Chamber, taking the Madonna col bambino, painted in the early 1500s by a member of the Vivarini school and described as symbolic of the power of the Venetian state. By the next morning it was in the hands of the Mala del Brenta; the police recovered it on 7 November 1991. The Doge's Palace has been part of the Venetian museums network since 1996 and under the management of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia since 2008, one of eleven museums the foundation runs, and it carries Italian national heritage designation. Visitors now enter by the Porta del Frumento on the waterfront side. In 2022 it received 1,118,443 visitors, making it the third most visited museum in Italy. Between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 a wall and a small early medieval tower were uncovered, which it cannot be ruled out were the seat of political power on the site at that date.