Installation as a work of art
For Carlo Scarpa, the exhibition is never a neutral or purely functional operation. On the contrary, it is a complex design act, an autonomous art form that transforms the work and the space into an experience. Scarpa conceives the museum not as a container, but as a narrative device, in which architecture guides the gaze, directs movement, and builds emotions.
This vision has deep roots. In the 20th century, museography progressively freed itself from the 19th-century model, made up of crowded rooms and didactic paths, to experiment with new exhibition languages. Scarpa's work fits into this context. He reinterprets the Venetian tradition of "seeing through" – filters, openings, glimpses – and brings it into a contemporary dimension. The exhibition thus becomes an art of montage, similar to that of cinema: selection, rhythm, pause, framing.
In his projects, each work is placed in a space designed for it. There are no anonymous rooms or repetitive panels: each environment is built as an essential setting, where materials, light, sounds and silence contribute to the creation of an atmosphere. This can be seen in the Paul Klee Exhibition at the 1961 Biennale, where mobile panels, lecterns, and filtered light build a poetic and immersive story. Another example is the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, where Antonello da Messina's "Annunciata" is isolated in a transparent case suspended in space, as if it were a sacred icon.
Every support, every window, and every platform is designed with extraordinary care. Scarpa often designs real micro-architectures: structures that raise, protect, and enhance. In Castelvecchio, the medieval statues are suspended on minimal supports in concrete and steel, as if poised between time and space. At the Gypsoteca di Possagno, Canova's plaster casts emerge from luminous platforms in a theatrical chiaroscuro.
At the Correr Museum, each painting has its own environment, its own light, and its own rhythm. For Scarpa, the exhibition is a way to question the work, to bring it back to the present without betraying it. It is a language that speaks without words, but with materials, proportions, and silences. A language that does not impose, but accompanies. That does not explain, but suggests.In this sense, the exhibition becomes a work of art: a work that does not seek the scene, but that creates the conditions for art to appear, reveal itself, let itself be encountered.
