Accademia Gallery, Venice, 1945–59
While the Second World War was still underway, Vittorio Moschini, the director of the Accademia Gallery, initially consulted with Carlo Scarpa, although the idea of constructing a large new building to house the museum's works had been raised before. This idea was set aside due to lack of funds, but the war damage and the poor condition of the eighteenth-century equipment made a thorough and immediate renovation of the Veneto region's principal art gallery imperative. Despite the constraints of space and resources, Scarpa began studying the project in 1945. Until then he had been involved in the installation of temporary exhibitions, so this project represented his first significant opportunity to work on a museum, and the beginning of his specialized practice in the field of museography. The essential restoration work — on windows, skylights, plasterwork, and new painting — provided the occasion to rethink the original appearance of the rooms and the arrangement of the displayed works. The first phase, completed just three years later in 1948, was a fundamental transformation of the gallery spaces according to modern exhibition criteria. The rooms' curtains, ornamentation, and dark paint were removed, and lighter colors were used in the decoration. The paintings, which had previously hung on the walls in a disordered and chaotic manner, were selected and hung in chronological and thematic order to create a more logical and harmonious arrangement. The placement of each work at the viewer's eye level demonstrates the architect's continual effort to establish a direct relationship between the artwork and its beholder. The dual necessity of maximizing the available exhibition surface while executing the work with the simplest solutions and materials was decisive, and at times constraining — for example, in upgrading the heating system, which consisted of old black radiators installed in the middle of the rooms and therefore difficult to conceal. The annex of the Chiesa della Carita was also
reopened in 1948. Scarpa designed four new skylights for it, their frames made of black pine wood lined with hemp on the interior. Here the arrangement had taken on the appearance of a temporary exhibition, which was more in keeping with the historical and architectural significance of its large space. In the first group of rooms, dating to 1950, Scarpa, through a careful study of the forms and materials to be used for the new doors and windows, employed iron on the exterior and wood for the interior and exhibition supports. Panels with gilded backgrounds were arranged on boards with wooden frames, metal supports, and sand-colored linings, and smaller works — such as the precious fifteenth-century Cross of Saint Theodore — were housed in cases of iron and glass. Moschini had also asked the architect to design a new and more practical entrance, but Scarpa did not begin this work until 1952. The gallery's new entrance, built in 1953, led from the center of a hall constructed of oak, iron, and glass into a reception area with a ticket counter and a lattice wall for displaying posters. Giorgione's painting The Tempest was relocated in 1955. Scarpa created a special space for this work, divided into two smaller areas. The floor was rebuilt with Venetian mosaic, the walls were coated with pale plaster, and the skylights were covered with silk curtains. All other works were hung against a fabric background in neutral colors, but the background for this painting was antique brown velvet. The architect's work at the Venice gallery concluded in 1959 with the sixth room, the most disproportionate of all; the limited budget permitted only the renewal of its plasterwork and the rearrangement of the artworks. Scarpa's design has since been altered in parts, not only because of the need to comply with regulatory requirements, but also due to the new uses of the Accademia Gallery and the need to display recently acquired works. Some of the interventions of a general and public nature
were carried out between 1961 and 1977; the original fabrics of the panels were replaced several times, and the ticket counter and lattice wall were removed from the entrance hall — the former in the 1970s and the latter in 1997.
CARLO SCARPA