Hall of the Scrutinio
Jacopo Palma il Giovane, Andrea Vicentino, Antonio Vassilacchi and others (Palma il Giovane 1548 to 1628) · 1580s to 1690s
This long hall next to the Great Council chamber is where the votes were counted. The Venetian system for electing a Doge was famously complicated, a sequence of lotteries and ballots designed so that no family could fix the result, and the scrutiny of those ballots gave the room its name. It was also used for the election of magistrates and, before the great fire, it had housed the library that Petrarch and Cardinal Bessarion had given to the city. Today it is one of the most spectacular rooms on the route, with every wall covered in vast canvases of Venetian naval victories.
The paintings were commissioned after 1577 and celebrate the wars of the Republic from the early Middle Ages to the battle of Lepanto, painted here by Andrea Vicentino as a chaos of galleys, smoke and oars. Look up at the ceiling, where Palma il Giovane and his colleagues painted allegories of Venice triumphant in heavy gilded frames. On the end wall is the Last Judgement by Palma il Giovane, a swirling composition clearly indebted to Tintoretto's Paradise next door. Notice the frieze of Doge portraits that runs along the top of the walls, continuing the sequence begun in the Great Council chamber.
The most unusual feature is the great triumphal arch at the far end, erected in 1694 in honour of Doge Francesco Morosini, the general who had recaptured the Peloponnese from the Ottomans. It is the only monument of its kind inside the palace and shows how the Republic, by then in decline, still celebrated its heroes with Roman grandeur. A memorable detail is the sequence of the last Doges in the frieze; the portraits stop at Ludovico Manin, who surrendered the Republic to Napoleon in 1797, and the space beyond him is empty.
Did You Know? The election of a Doge involved ten rounds of lots and votes, and the counting was done in this room.
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