While Scarpa’s name remains associated with authenticity, his teachings in the field of museography are slowly being erased
Carlo Scarpa (1906–1978) ‘had the power to give the form of a work of art to even the most banal things’, wrote engineer Carlo Maschietto, Scarpa’s collaborator on the Venezuelan Pavilion and Olivetti Showroom. Scarpa’s interdisciplinary background, spanning the arts, philosophy and poetry, allowed him to make ‘improbable’ connections.
Relying on practices inherited from the 19th century, Scarpa collaborated closely with craft workshops. Here he is portrayed with glassmaker Arturo Biasutto in the Venini factory in Murano
Credit: Istituto Luce / Cinecittà Historical Archive
Born in Venice, the ‘Byzantine’ Scarpa – as he liked to call himself – grew up in Vicenza, the city of Palladio. His father was a school teacher passionate about literature and the arts, while his mother had a dressmaker’s workshop; it was likely there that he became acquainted with the qualities of fabrics, the importance of shapes and details refined to perfection, the expressive power of colours. The future architect would conceive projects as tailor‑made ‘garments’ that ‘enveloped’ clients when he worked on their homes, or the works of art in the case of exhibitions.
Skylights are also used at the the Gypsotheca Antonio Canova in Possagno. The architect’s love of painting and sculpture is manifest in the careful design of bespoke easels, cabinets and pivoting panels
Credit: Museo Gypsotheca Antonio Canova, Possagno (Trevisio), Italy
At the age of about eight, Scarpa discovered his vocation for drawing. For architects like him, born at the beginning of the 20th century, architecture took shape slowly, through dozens of studies on paper. ‘I want to see things, I only trust this,’ he said. ‘I put things here in front of me, on paper, so I can see them. I want to see, and this is why I draw.’ His drawings – some 23,000 are held at the MAXXI in Rome – show, sheet by sheet, the solutions he developed, the precedents he used, and the goals he achieved (or didn’t). For those who wish to understand the history of a project or learn how to design, these drawings are a lesson in method. Education is key in Scarpa’s work; in his view, to educate means to give everyone the opportunity to know, understand and love, not only architecture but anything with meaning – even a small thing, such as a colour, a shape, a material.
In Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, pieces by Francesco Laurana stand tall on high plinths
Credit: Galleria Regionale Della Sicilia di Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo
Having returned to Venice in 1919, after the death of his mother, Scarpa enrolled at the Regia Accademia di Belle Arti to become a painter. Three years into the course, he felt driven to architecture. His studies provided the art historical knowledge that soon became his main working tool, as well as a network of relationships that helped him obtain his first professional assignments. Upon graduating, Scarpa joined the Scuola Superiore di Architettura in Venice (IUAV since the 1940s) as an assistant to Guido Cirilli, his former design tutor. Known as a ‘master of living stones’, Cirilli taught him to appreciate traditional materials such as stone, marble, brick and wood. The architect used these widely in his projects, finding workshops to satisfy his every request: timber at Anfodillo and Capovilla, Zanon for metal, De Luigi’s marmorino plaster. The excellence of Scarpa’s work can largely be explained by these collaborations; each element is designed as a unique piece, highly expressive, and co-ordinated with the others and with the peculiarities of the context in which the work is placed.
The Antonello da Messina room features wooden panelling. Walter Gropius said Abatellis was ‘the best museum I have ever come across in my life’
Credit: Stefano Graziani 2018
An eloquent example is the atrium of Fondazione Querini Stampalia (1963), where precious materials (marble, marmorini, brass), traditional ones (Istrian stone, brick) and purely functional ones (coconut matting) interact with light and water, periodically flooding the interior. Scarpa interprets and conveys a sense of place to those who walk through his spaces. But his stories have a correct order of reading – a beginning, an unfolding, an end – that must be respected in order to understand the work as a whole; alterations inevitably entail a loss of value. A few years ago, the Fondazione’s entrance was moved – Scarpa’s bridge no longer met safety requirements for the public – to introduce a ticket office, reversing the original sequence of spaces. Visitors may not realise how much this compromises the sense of the project, but for those who do, the effect is alienating.
Scarpa’s spaces are sequential, as demonstrated in the Fondazione Querini Stampalia plan, with corners, steps and thresholds guiding the visitor along
Scarpa was interested in reinforced concrete, one of the main Querini Stampalia materials, since the late 1920s; at the time, the reading of Vers une Architecture and the discovery of Le Corbusier caused a ‘cultural reaction’ in him, which is evident in his 1937 renovation of Ca’ Foscari on the Grand Canal. In the following years, it was Wright, Aalto and Kahn who inspired his reflections, along with the artists he loved: Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Fontana, Burri and others. ‘If you don’t know, copy,’ he used to tell his students, urging them to find their own language through the masters’ example. To him, copying did not mean imitating, but understanding; following the lessons of others supported his practice of a profession that was – and remains – difficult. While for an artist, the exercise of copying still has a formative value today, the same cannot be said for an architect, at least not in Italy.
The museum reform carried out in Italy between the postwar years and the 1960s required an unprecedented amount of thought. Together with Franco Albini, BBPR, Ezio Bruno De Felice, Franco Minissi and many others, and joined by learned curators including Costantino Baroni, Licisco Magagnato and Caterina Marcenaro, Scarpa transformed 19th-century museums into musées vivants, as defined by Henri Focillon in 1921: familiar places that are flooded with natural light and welcome all visitors. At a time when there was a lack of resources to rebuild homes, Italy’s public institutions invested in museums as tools for cultural, democratic and social growth.
The entrance to the Olivetti Showroom
Credit: Image Professionals / Jalag / Regina Recht
Scarpa approached exhibition design through his collaboration with the Murano glass companies Cappellin & C and Venini, for whom he had designed fabulous glass objects and curated rooms at the Monza Biennale (1927, 1930) and Milan Triennale (1936, 1940). The design of Galleria del Cavallino, which opened in 1942, and of the Arturo Martini exhibition, presented in the same year at the 23rd Venice Biennale, had strengthened his reputation as a designer. So, in 1944, Vittorio Moschini did not hesitate to choose Scarpa for redeveloping the Gallerie dell’Accademia, one of the first museums to adopt the new criteria: a rigorous selection of artworks, removal of any elements deemed ‘fake’ (in particular the frames of paintings), use of serial devices and panels made with modern materials (iron, textiles, wood, etc), enhancement of natural light, and clear display plans to encourage the public to discover, room after room, the exhibited pieces.
‘Scarpa transformed 19th-century museums into musées vivants: familiar places that are flooded with natural light and welcome all visitors’
Four years later, he began collaborating with the Venice Biennale, for which he designed installations and architecture until 1972. This was followed by commissions for the Sezioni Storiche in 1952, Palermo’s Palazzo Abatellis in 1953, the Gypsotheca (‘plaster cast gallery’) Antonio Canova in Possagno in 1955, the Quadreria of the Correr Museum in 1957, and the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona in 1958. The exceptional quality of these museums is due to Scarpa’s ability to interpret the meaning of the works of art and to convey it to the public through the display. As Bruno Zevi observes: ‘Scarpa loves painting and sculpture. He places the works in space or arranges them on the walls according to their aesthetic and human message,’ while for other museographers, ‘a painting is a simple rectangle, a hole in the wall; whether it is beautiful or ugly does not matter’.
Doorways take on sculptural qualities and show the architect’s intricate detailing. The ones at the Olivetti Showroom and the Querini Stampalia, for instance, are united in their composition of reinforced concrete and brass
Credit: Fondazione Beic
Over the past decade, the importance of postwar museography has been the subject of numerous studies. Yet, in the same years, most of the surviving displays have been dismantled to ‘modernise’ museums and adapt them to the taste of an increasingly ‘distracted’ public. The Pietà Rondanini at Milan’s Castello Sforzesco was removed in 2015, and no trace is left of Scarpa’s display at the Gallerie dell’Accademia. The Gypsotheca, with the most fragile of his postwar displays, has also undergone major changes since 2012: in some sculptures, chosen by the architect precisely because they were incomplete, ‘missing’ parts have been added, while other pieces have been removed entirely. Yet the Gypsotheca is still presented as an ‘original work’ by Scarpa. Conversely, the museums of Palazzo Abatellis and Castelvecchio are almost intact, and I hope they will preserve their identity as Scarpa’s work in the future.
Scarpa was meticulous about the placement of artworks, sketching dimensions and plinths for the mise en scène of sculptures at the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, but he also acknowledged that things would change over time
Credit: Archivo Carlo Scarpa - Museo di Castelvecchio / Musei Civici de Verona
Like other museographers, Scarpa was aware that changes are inevitable during the life of a museum. In 1976, describing one of the solutions for Castelvecchio to his students, he observed: ‘In ten years’ time something will get damaged, and the new director will give it a different colour: it doesn’t matter ... because tastes change, epochs pass.’ He was right: museums must adapt to new educational goals. Until the early 2000s, these updates were respectful of the methodological and art historical value of the displays, but this has changed. While interest is growing for works such as the Olivetti Showroom or the Brion Tomb (where the sequel to Dune was filmed), Scarpa’s installations are disappearing.
What remains then, in today’s museums, of the masters of postwar museography and their lessons? My answer, as a scholar who has studied these issues for over two decades, is: nothing. Nothing remains, for two reasons. Works of art are no longer the ‘inhabitants’ of museums, witnesses to a past that had something to say to the present; learning about history is no longer seen as the foundation for building the future of a society. Since we are living in ‘a time without history’ – in the words of historian Adriano Prosperi – it is inevitable that exhibits by Scarpa, and others, are erased to make way for something profoundly different.
The Castelvecchio Museum in Verona
Credit: Federico Puggioni
In the renovated rooms of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan and the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, both reopened in 2022, paintings are hung like ‘simple rectangles’, sometimes by the dozens, on walls painted with puzzling colours. Scarpa, too, often used colour, but as a way to create a dialogue between the works and display: he would choose a certain hue of green, blue or red painted by Antonello da Messina, Bellini or Tiepolo to colour the panel behind the painting. He did this with a purely educational purpose: visitors would be attracted by the colour of the backdrop and, as they approached, would find it inside the painting. This would encourage them to observe the artwork more closely.
Although he was aware of the need to preserve the structural integrity of the exhibits, Scarpa still believed that ‘there is nothing like powerful sunlight to make works of art look wonderful’. Natural light – the backbone of museographic reform in Europe since the 1930s – provided a perfect view of the works and reproduced the environmental conditions of the home, offering visitors a familiar setting in the museum. Exhibited pieces were transformed from ‘elitist’, distant objects into a friendly presence. Now sculptures and paintings live in dark rooms, pierced by merciless beams of artificial lighting.
Scarpa worked on the Brion Tomb for nearly a decade and is buried nearby, wrapped, as per his instructions, in simple white linen sheets
Credit: Leonl / Flickr
Scarpa’s teachings remain relevant today, providing useful guidance on how to create ‘places of the Muses’ that are pleasant to visit and where people can learn the value of art and history. Building a museum remains an ethical challenge, which should be addressed with the same honesty Scarpa showed when he admitted: ‘I was not a museum specialist. I was an architect, that is my job: I had to work on museums and I tried to learn.’ Translated by Elisabetta Zoni
