The Accademia - Venice's greatest painting museum

In a nutshell: Venice's greatest painting museum - 24 rooms of Venetian Renaissance masterpieces from Titian and Giorgione to Veronese and Tintoretto, with practical tips on tickets and queues at the end. Nearby, the Guggenheim is a five-minute walk, La Salute and the other churches a few more, and the whole district is on the Dorsoduro overview.

The Gallerie dell'Accademia

For Venetian Renaissance painting, the Accademia is the finest museum anywhere, and a superb primer on the artists whose canvases you'll encounter all over town. Venetian art is undervalued and, to my mind, misjudged: it enjoys nothing like the renown of the Florentine school today, yet - with its historical glimpses of Venice, its ravishing nudes and its warmly human Madonnas - it is more vital, more colorful and simply more enjoyable. The collection originated in 1807, when Napoleon resolved to gather the vast trove of art amassed through the suppression of hundreds of churches and religious houses and place it at the service of the students of the Accademia di Belle Arti, then installed in the Santa Maria della Carità complex; the Gallerie opened in 1817, and the current arrangement of its 24 rooms is the work of Carlo Scarpa, who oversaw it between 1948 and 1949. The museum fronts the Grand Canal just beyond the wooden Accademia Bridge (vaporetto: Accademia), a 15-minute walk from St Mark's Square. Admission is €12, or €14 with an advance timed-entry ticket; hours are Tuesday to Sunday 8.15–19.15 and Monday until 14.00, with last entry one hour before closing. Only 400 visitors are admitted at a time, so at peak moments you may queue - a timed-entry ticket booked online lets you jump the line, though at this comparatively quiet museum it's rarely essential. Budget an hour for the visit; bulky bags must go into a paid locker; the shop sells its own printed catalogue for €10; and the €6 audioguide is one to skip. Contact: +39 041 522 2247, www.gallerieaccademia.it. For unremarkable food at steep prices but matchless Grand Canal views, Bar Foscarini sits right beside the Accademia Bridge; for a more authentically Venetian break, walk under five minutes to the charming Enoteca Cantine del Vino Già Schiavi cicchetti bar.

The rooms advance chronologically from the Middle Ages to the 1700s, but the smart route leaps ahead first: buy your ticket, stow your bag, disregard the signs steering you into the ground-floor galleries (17th- and 18th-century paintings), and climb the grand staircase beside the entrance to a spacious hall of gold-leaf altarpieces; at the top, step into the small Room 24 on the left. There you'll find Titian's Presentation of the Virgin (1534–38), the work Venetians fondly nickname the "Little Mary". A lively crowd clusters at the base of a stone staircase - a dog gnaws a bagel, a mother wrestles a squirming infant, an old woman hawks eggs, onlookers lean from windows - when suddenly every head turns to stare at an outsized high priest in a jeweled robe. Halfway up the monumental stairs, dwarfed by the columns, the tiny, luminous figure of the child Mary in a pale blue dress seems almost to float toward the startled priest: unnaturally small, easy to miss on a first glance, and all the more exquisite for it amid the clamor of the crowd, the hard stone and the epic scale. Titian painted the piece expressly for this room, composing it neatly around the doorway on the right; the door on the left was punched through later, slicing into the masterpiece. It is a sacred subject, yes, but really a pretext for secular display - brilliant, saturated color; grand formats; Renaissance architectural backdrops; vignettes of everyday Venetian life; and illusionistic depth: the five signatures of Venetian Renaissance painting you'll meet throughout this museum.

Return to Room 1 for the medieval prologue. Paolo Veneziano's Madonna and Child with Two Donors (c. 1325) is proudly flat: figure size mirrors spiritual rank - Mary, mother of Christ and of the Church, dominates, Jesus comes next, then the two angels crowning her, and in the corner two mere mortals kneel in prayer - and the gilded halos announce who is holy and who is not. Medieval Venetian artists, tightly linked to the East, lifted gold-leaf, frontal poses and "iconic" faces from the devotional icons of Constantinople. In the far-left corner, Jacobello del Fiore's Coronation of the Virgin in Paradise (1438) packs as much theology as possible into a single frame, color-coordinated saints stacked upward instead of receding into space, the balustrades of the wedding-cake structure literally glued on. Only a few decades later, in Room 2, the Renaissance arrives: Giovanni Bellini's Enthroned Madonna with Child - the San Giobbe Altarpiece, c. 1480 - seats Mary and the infant Jesus among saints beneath an arched half-dome, a sacra conversazione ("sacred conversation"), with a trio of angel musicians playing at her feet. In its original church, the painting's pillars and arches matched the real architecture around it, as if Bellini had knocked a hole through the wall and raised another chapel, letting mortals mingle with the saints. Left to right: St Francis, John the Baptist, Job, St Dominic, St Sebastian and St Louis. The picture's descending arches - a Roman arch above, a triangular canopy, then a pyramid of figures with Mary's head at the apex - conjure an air of calm, order and harmony; even Sebastian's arrows cannot trouble his peace. In the small Room 4, Andrea Mantegna's St. George (c. 1460) is essentially a Greek nude statue with armor painted on, weight shifted onto one leg in the classical contrapposto of Michelangelo's David; trained in the Tuscan tradition, Mantegna "carved" his figures with razor-sharp outlines and set them against distant backdrops, and when he married Giovanni Bellini's sister he carried Florentine realism and draughtsmanship into the family. Nearby, Bellini's Madonna and Child between St Catherine and Mary Magdalene (c. 1490) glows out of a black-velvet ground - soft, smoky, atmospheric faces lit as if by candlelight, rendered in warm golden flesh tones in the new oil medium (Mantegna still used tempera, pigments bound in egg yolk). Bellini, who taught both Titian and Giorgione, bequeathed Venetian Renaissance painting its signature "haze".

Room 8 holds the museum's most baffling picture: Giorgione's The Tempest (c. 1505). The mood is heavy, luminous yet forbidding - the stillness before the storm. Why is a woman nursing a baby in open countryside? Is the soldier leering at her or shielding her? Will the lightning strike? The armed man is set against the naked mother, the stark ruined columns against Nature's lushness, and above all the placid foreground against the gathering menace behind. The landscape itself is the true subject, generating a mood whatever the scene is "about"; the actual center of the composition is the jagged bolt about to fracture the fragile quiet. Giorgione, as elusive as his handful of paintings, studied under Bellini and died at 33, leaving an outsized legacy. Ascend five steps into the vast Room 10 for Paolo Veronese's epic Feast in the House of Levi (1573): stand about ten yards back, where the enormous canvas fills your entire field of vision - and hey, you're on the guest list. A palatial room with a sweeping view of Venice, everyone dressed to the nines in shimmering silk and velvet, conversation at full roar, servants ferrying food and drink. Believe it or not, this is a religious commission painted for a convent, originally titled The Last Supper, with Jesus and his disciples at the heart of all the mayhem. The Church was not amused, and in the Counter-Reformation's backlash Veronese was summoned before the Inquisition. What did he mean by such a bawdy Last Supper? With dwarf jesters? Apostles picking their teeth? Dogs and cats? A Black man, heaven forbid? And worst of all, some German soldiers - possibly Protestants! - at the far right? Veronese pleaded artistic license, so they demanded to see it - it had lapsed. But the remedy was simple: rather than repaint the picture, merely retitle it. Veronese took up his brush, and The Last Supper became the Feast in the House of Levi, the new inscription spelled out in Latin on the railing at the left: "FECIT D. COVI. MAGNV. LEVI".

In Room 11, Tintoretto's The Removal of St. Mark's Body (1562–66) arrests the founding episode of Venetian glory at its most theatrical instant: Muslim zealots in Alexandria are on the point of burning St Mark's corpse - the smoke of the pyre rises at center - when a sudden hailstorm sends them scattering for cover, cherubic faces blowing across the infidels (squint, on the left-hand side), while Venetian merchants spirit the body away. The courtyard's square paving recedes straight before you, an extension of your own space, as though you could step into the scene. Tintoretto was himself a man of the people, largely self-taught, who apprenticed only briefly with Titian before striking out alone, sold paintings at the market as a youth, and insisted on living in the poor quarter even after fame found him. Watch for his trademarks - amplified drama and raw emotion, elongated figures twisting into contorted poses, fierce chiaroscuro, vivid hues, diagonal designs - all of which became stock devices of the Mannerist and Baroque painting that followed. (Tintoretto devotees will also want his "Sistine Chapel", the Scuola Grande di San Rocco.) Beside it hangs Titian's Pietà (c. 1573), painted to preside over his own tomb. Titian was the most celebrated painter of his age - possibly more famous than Michelangelo - a master of every genre, cultured and witty, a fine musician and businessman, the complete Renaissance man. But he was old when he made this, and the canvas is dark, the tone more somber: the massive stones of the Renaissance arch dwarf the frail figures, the lion statues are frankly unsettling, and the rough, urgent brushwork anticipates the Impressionists by three centuries. A sweeping diagonal of movement runs from the lion at lower right up along the figures to the grieving Mary Magdalene, who turns away, arm flung out, crying aloud. The kneeling old bald man is a self-portrait of the aging Titian ministering to the body of Christ - who embodies the once-mighty, now-moribund Renaissance Man; at lower right, a painting within the painting shows Titian and his son kneeling to beg the Virgin to spare them from the plague of 1576 - the very plague that would ultimately claim his son.

The museum's climax is past; two final rooms remain. Room 20 holds Gentile Bellini's Procession in St. Mark's Square (1496), a panoramic view - wider than any single human gaze could take in - that proves how little Venice has altered over the centuries: there is St Mark's agleam with gold and mosaic, the four bronze horses, the three flagpoles out front, the old Campanile and the Doge's Palace, even the fellow selling postcards. But the Clock Tower with its two bronze Moors has yet to appear, the paving differs, and no café orchestras are playing. Every element is in sharp focus regardless of its distance. The room also preserves the celebrated cycle of the Miracles of the Holy Cross, and opposite the great procession a Carpaccio captures a slice of Venetian life circa 1500 - the old wooden drawbridge version of the Rialto, nobles in private gondolas with their dandified gondoliers, refined faces of the citizenry - and it is a man's world, as an old Venetian rhyme confirms: "A woman is to be silent, good looking, and stay at home with children." In Room 21, Vittore Carpaccio's Legend of Saint Ursula (c. 1490) recounts, in nine panels arranged clockwise around the room, the story of the patron saint of girls in need of husbands (and dowries): she hopes to escape marriage to a pagan, her father the king dispatches her and her suitor from Brittany to Rome to see the pope in hopes the young man will convert (note that the artist had no idea what Brittany looked like), somehow she encounters Attila and his Huns, she and her 11,000 ladies-in-waiting are slaughtered, and it all concludes with her funeral and ascent to heaven. Hard to follow, but the scenes showcase Venice's architecture, shipping and textiles beautifully - a marvelous time machine, a chance to visit the city as it was 500 years ago. The closing rooms, devoted to the 18th century, present the great view-painters Canaletto and Francesco Guardi along with Giambattista Tiepolo. Once you've absorbed the Accademia's highlights, you've absorbed the essence of the Venetian Renaissance - now you're free to return to the extraordinary city that inspired all of it.