Palazzo Venier dei Leoni – so called thanks to the lions’ heads decorating the base of the façade or, according to popular tradition, on account of a lion that used to be kept in a cage in the garden – is an unfinished one-storey building.

Work stopped owing to financial problems in the Venier family for whom the palace was being built. The Correr Museum contains a scale model dated 1749 of the original project by Boschetti.
The palace – also known as the “maifinìo” (never completed) by the Venetians – was bought in 1949 by the rich eccentric American collector Peggy Guggenheim, a muse for many of her contemporary artists, such as Jackson Pollock and the German Max Ernst, her second husband.
The collection today contains more than 200 works, including paintings and sculptures, by many of the most important artists from the 1900s: Picasso, De Chirico, Kandinsky, Magritte, Malevich, Mirò, Mondrian, Brancusi and Marini, etc.

The private collection is now a museum, run by the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation.

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