I return from New York, from the inauguration of the new Olnick-Spanu Magazzino Pavilion, with my eyes full of the wonderful collection of Carlo Scarpa crystals and the magnificent exhibition space built with light by Alberto Campo Baeza and Miguel Quismondo, In a synchronicity worthy of Carl Jung, ICON Design gives me the gift of writing about one of the most beautiful exhibition spaces of contemporary European architecture: the Gypsotheca Antonio Canova Museum in Possagno, built by Scarpa himself (1906-1978). A project that the Venetian realized with sculptures and, above all, light.
Very few artists have shaped the ideals of neoclassical art as clearly as Antonio Canova. The Venetian sculptor, born in Possagno and trained in Venice, found the field for his full development in Rome in the 18th century and even became the Pope's general inspector of antiquities. Canova was a member of a group of intellectuals and artists who explored the boundaries of classical artistic knowledge. He was not a copyist, but he knew the language and spirit of classical art in such a rational and intense way that he was able to create new works with the same spirit. His works still populate all major Western museums today.
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Working from preparatory drawings and sketches in terracotta and wax, Canova made life-size clay models from which his mold was made. The plaster casts of these were prepared so that their shape could be transferred to the marble block using a point technique, inserting bronze nails with which measurements were taken and later transferred. His assistants roughened the marble to an approximate shape, and he gave it the final shape and the wonderful polish that characterized his work, transforming the marble into real flesh.
After Canova's death in 1822, his half-brother and heir, Abbe Sartori, moved the contents of his Roman studio, including all of his plasters, to his hometown of Possagno. In 1832 he commissioned the Venetian architect Lazzari to create an exhibition space next to his birthplace. Lazzari conceived a white, top-lit basilica to install the pieces in a calm and timeless atmosphere.
In 1955, in view of the 200th anniversary of its founding in 1957, the collection was placed in the hands of Italy's best architect and museographer of the 20th century, Carlo Scarpa, who was commissioned to expand the Gypsotheca Museum.
At the Canova Museum, Scarpa engages with all scales of sculpture and architecture, including those that make museography an interface between the two. It realizes the grand opera, the entire work, the space that contains the pieces and us, the floors and walls that guide us, the supports on which the works rest, and the scenographic arrangement of all the works and their visitors at the same time. It plays with nature by creating volumes that articulate with the pre-existing buildings at the foot of the hills, opening the interior spaces to the green of the hills and the blue of the sky. It features water ponds that act as luminous mirrors, reflecting the colors of nature on the open skin of Canova's Three Graces plaster. Colors that vary with the day, with the sky, variations like life.
Reclining Naiad, by Antonio CanovaStefan Giffthaler
Each sculpture occupies a space designated by Scarpa, who also created the bases and display cases by Stefan Giffthaler
Light streams into the space through geometric skylightsStefan Giftthaler
Although in the two successive actions in Possagno, 1832 and 1955, the contents of the collection to be exhibited are known in advance, the project strategies are different. Lazzari, the basilica, is intended to create a container. A neutral space in which the museography, the installation of the pieces and the tour later create a new understanding. Scarpa, on the other hand, deals with architecture and museography at the same time. He thinks about how to place each piece and create significant space for it and the interrelationship between them, offering a wide range of lighting options, contrasting spaces, walls and proportions. For him, architecture and museography merge into a whole.
He creates a real camera of light, capturing it in all directions and in all possible ways to flood the pieces because, in his opinion, the sunlight should slide over them and enhance their beauty. With its expansion, it adds new spatial layers parallel to the wall of the Lazzari Basilica. Its wall becomes a chamber of light, illuminating the new adjacent trapezoidal space in thousands of ways. He designs it as a prosperous gallery in which the trapezoidal floor plan and the section of successive, descending rooms all point to the figure of the Three Graces, silhouetted against nature, in front of a glass window that rises to the sky Space, with no boundaries other than its transparent dihedral.
The entrance to the Scarpa Wing is via a transverse axis from the vestibule of the basilica, at the center of which is the sculpture of Adonis crowned by Venus, and leads into a high, beautiful, square room containing the sculpture of Washington and, above it, Canova's I -Portrait bust on the wall. It brings in light by breaking the four corners: two by two, with two triangular skylights that open to the sky and allow the space to escape, and with two skylights that powerfully penetrate and mark the main facade of this piece. He supports them on linear supports, similar to those used for sculptures, like sculptural pieces that cause the entry of grazing light that slides along the walls and marks the pieces.
Scarpa creates his spaces with light and allows it to burst in every way imaginable, from above, horizontally from behind lit from below in the forced perspective of the trapezoidal room that houses the Three Graces, silhouetted against the landscape and through the reflections in the Water is illuminated. from a pond at its feet and from the light that reflects from the walls of the basilica and penetrates through the points that mark the wall that delimits it. A wall that is a true poem and is made up of spaces with reliefs, glass transparencies or perforated surfaces with small openings that shine, serving at the same time as a background for the group of sculptures and ending as a blind wall that frames the Three Graces from the outside.
The works run on steps as polished as Canova's works. In some cases they act as a connection between two rooms, between two levels, and the beds he designed, supports for his reclining sculptures, sometimes have legs of different heights to support themselves on one level and the next.
Scarpa plays with all spatial scales. His wonderful showcases are small spaces within the room, supported by an axis on which the space defined by the floor plane and the four corners runs, so that the relationship between the glass walls and the ceiling forms a simple and transparent glass dihedral, on the same way he made that of the Venezuelan pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
He designs subtle supports that are anchored to the walls and carry skylights, busts and small sculptures, which form a frieze with them and allow their shadows, caused by the grazing light, to slide over the walls and articulate them. His work with the white plasters in contrast to the white walls is almost a neoclassical wash, the drawing technique with gradient gray inks that made it possible to modulate the white surface of the facades. A white-on-white study that allows you to build with only light and watch it move across the reliefs of its walls. The reclining figures stand on abstract beds and the large pieces on massive bases like Washington's, in which the base is refracted by the articulation of the volumes that compose it, so that its visual weight does not alter the mass balance of the sculpture. that crowns it.
Scarpa's work is a masterpiece of balance between the sculptures and the space that supports them. The sensitivity of his work is evident in the magnificent proportions and the delicate balance between the masses, in the perspectives created, in the way the works are surrounded, how they appear cut out or in dialogue with each other. In this interrelation of scales that builds a story and that serves to give greater depth and dimension to the entire ensemble, in the way it manages to create different sets and groups with the same parts by putting them in perpendicular or opposite direction. Scarpa plays with gravity, materializing and dematerializing the works thanks to light, reflections on walls and water, as he learned in his Venice. It is the king of size, texture and minimal detail that creates great architecture, be it with a simple edge on the floor, a step or the details of the profiles of a skylight.
When building a museum history with a collection, it is the pieces that define, those that make the journey exciting, those that take us and attract us. How we arrange them and bring them into dialogue changes the space, transforms it into another, makes it grow, modulates it and gives it a different intensity. In this work it is important to be rational, but also sensitive, to understand what the works say to you, to relate their proportions to the proportions of the space in which they are located, to let them expand and breathe , which they need. His respectful language is both timeless and extremely contemporary. It brings Canova's work into the present and allows the viewer to view the work from the perspective of now and feel connected to it, not distant because it belongs to a different time. Its simple and correct forms are mere spaces of light and express a delicate use of proportions that evoke great beauty.
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