The story
Palazzo Chiericati faces a square that in 1550 was called Piazza dell'Isola, an open space beside the Bacchiglione and Retrone rivers, now Piazza Matteotti. That year Andrea Palladio, Vicenza's great architect, designed a palace there for the nobleman Girolamo Chiericati, with a double loggia of free-standing columns running across the whole front. Only the southern end was built in his lifetime. The rest stood unfinished until the end of the 17th century, when it was completed from the plans he had published in his Four Books of Architecture.
The city bought the palace from the Chiericati family in 1839 and opened it as its civic museum on 18 August 1855. On the ground floor the painted ceilings of the Hall of the Firmament, made in the late 1550s by the Veronese painter Domenico Brusasorzi and his team, belong to the original house. Upstairs the route starts with gold-ground panels by Paolo Veneziano, the 14th-century Venetian master, and reaches a Crucifixion by the Flemish painter Hans Memling, with its patron, the abbot Jan Crabbe, kneeling beside the cross.
The floor above is given to Venetian painting of the 16th and 17th centuries, with Saint Augustine Healing the Cripples by Tintoretto, painted around 1549, and The Four Ages of Man by Anthony van Dyck, the Flemish portraitist. In the 18th-century rooms hangs Time Unveiling Truth by the Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo, from around 1745, where winged Time draws back a veil from a woman holding the sun.
