National+gallery+of+modern+art

=The gallery of Modern Art=

The grandiose palazzo, now the seat of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, was built in the second half of the seventeenth century for the noble and wealthy Pesaro family, to a project by the greatest Venetian baroque architect, Baldassarre Longhena, who also designed the church of the Salute and Ca’ Rezzonico. In creating Ca’ Pesaro, a masterpiece of Venetian baroque civic architecture, Longhena was inspired by Sansovinian classicism, elaborating solutions and idioms capable of expressing a new and sumptuous harmony. This is exemplified in the Grand Canal façade, with its complex composition, powerful but well-balanced: above a plinth decorated with lion-faces and monstrous headsrises a severe diamond-pointed, rusticated facade with two rows of windows, opened in the middle by twin doorways surmounted by mascarons and statues.