On Possession Esther Wong

Carlo Scarpa’s Museo Canoviano exhibits the close task of holding possession of both the architecture and the art.

Scarpas’s relentless pursuit of the detail went further than just the architectural properties of the building. The layout of the artwork and its selection he also considered part of his mandate. This innovation establishes a very specific museum, one that is an exhibition of the work of the sculpture Canoviano, but also Scarpa’s conversation with the artefacts of the collection. Across this conversation it establishes Scarpa’s attitude towards the museum within his design thinking and not outside of it.

Scarpa precisely unfolds from the existing building to his extension moments where the architecture and sculpture share, enfold, intersect and reflect the intimacy of Scarpa’s own imagined conversation with Canoviano. This is demonstrated through the sculpture of the three graces that he positioned with their back to a window and rotate them in such a way that the viewer is able to revel in the contrapposto embrace of the three figures. Another illustration can be seen when the figurement sculpture is being placed laying down horizontally which matches the threshold of the steps, mimicking and foreshadowing an intimate bond between the architecture.

Scarpa’s possession of both the architecture and the artefacts contained within establishes the potential difficulty of any future amendment to the collection or the architecture, given that they now take ownership of holding one another intimately, therefore one can not live without the other.

Once it becomes fixtuated between the two. When a new edition is added in, one will need to sacrifice and enforce its own extension to hold the other without transposing the already dense curation that upholds its manifestation, the purposeful bond created between the two can not be unbind.