The palace was born as a patrician residence in the typical forms of flowery Gothic, of which traces remain in the column with capital of the atrium and in the windows of the facade overlooking the courtyard. In 1689 the bishop of Torcello, Marco Giustinian, moved his seat here and then bought the building to donate it to the diocese. It was then radically renovated, based on a project by the architect Antonio Gaspari. From those years, on the first noble floor, the ceiling of the central hall remains, frescoed by Francesco Zugno (1709-1787), with quadrature (architectural motifs) by Francesco Zanchi (1734-1772), depicting the Triumph of San Lorenzo Giustiniani, ancestor of the family and first patriarch of Venice. The building remained the seat of the diocese of Torcello until it was suppressed in 1805; it then passed to the Patriarchate of Venice, which sold it in 1840 to the Municipality of Murano, of which it became the headquarters. In 1861 the first nucleus of the island's museum-archive found space here, in the central hall, then gradually extended to the entire building. In 1923 Murano became part of the Municipality of Venice, which therefore also acquired the palace and the museum.