Art on Display 1949-69
Museo Correr, Venice, 1957-60
Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) began working in the retail glass industry, designing stands and promotional booths for Venini, and also made a name for himself as a designer of family tombs. Scarpa had already worked on partial remodelling within museums such as the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice (1949) when he was invited to take on the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, his first full museum project. Here he immediately encountered the difficulties and opportunities offered by a pre-existing historic building, especially when it was heavily damaged, and readily used commercial and commemorative vocabularies in a museum setting.
The Correr project was a little different, in that the building, later in date, was in much better condition. Although the opportunities for intervention are thus reduced, Scarpa nonetheless makes subtle use of the site. Scarpa deals with the problem of historic walls by taking paintings away from the wall. He creates stands for them which are an interesting amalgam of ecclesiastical and secular solutions. Scarpa makes choices among the artworks of any given collection. Rather than treating paintings and sculptures equally, he singles out a small number for special treatment. The architect reads the collection like a score, with variations and repetitions, highpoints and low. The fact that the repertoire with which he is working tends to be religious provides an additional emotional narrative. Scarpa's selectivity helps to alleviate monotony, even if the choices may well be largely design-based, rather than art-historical, but it also tends ultimately towards the same, fixed readings of the collection itself.
The single object which most characterises Scarpa's museum projects is the easel. Hardly an innovation, nonetheless Scarpa's easel is significant, both in its highly crafted detail, and in its usage. Often pulled out from the wall and set at right angles to the window, Scarpa here seems to echo the artist's positioning and use of the easel, set in relation to another motif in front of it. The placement of one, or two, easels within a gallery gives us the sense that the artist is at work, that the collection is living, or being looked at, again. The example of the Antonello room (fig. 64) in the Museo Correr is an excellent example of the way in which Scarpa allows one work to fill a room. The long narrow wings of the Procuratie Nuove also help Scarpa to make the most of the natural light, and of the sequence of small, almost domestic rooms.
Scarpa gives paintings - a few, not many - substance and three-dimensionality. Inevitably we as viewers address most readily the works he has selected for us, and in this he behaves more like the designer of an exhibition with a point to make, than that of a museum. We also take away with us much more easily the image of a room, or a gallery, in which one or two punctuation points resonate against their backdrop. While it is usually all but impossible to remember the hang of a picture gallery in spatial terms, Scarpa creates a range of distances, hallow and deep, and thus an image which positions itself in our memory. Although Scarpa is best known now for the Italian museum projects which have stood the test of time, contemporary artists were important to him, as to others in our study. He was not exclusively devoted to historic art, and Paul Klee is often cited as a key influence, as on Mies and on Van Eyck. His association with the Venice Biennale, over time, also allowed him varied opportunities to stage contemporary art.
Text Penelope Curtis. First published in the catalogue accompanying the Art on Display exhibition.