Possagno: Tempio Canoviano and Gipsoteca Site Features

The Tempio is three buildings reconciled. Its portico is Greek Doric, copied closely from the Parthenon; the body is a rotunda derived from the Pantheon; and behind that is a Christian apse. Canova was designing from archaeology, and the joins are visible on purpose.

It stands on a terrace above the village, at the top of a long approach, so that it reads as a temple on a hill rather than a parish church on a street.

The Gipsoteca is the opposite kind of building. The original nineteenth-century basilica-plan gallery holds the large plasters in a long top-lit hall.

Scarpa's 1957 wing is small, white and precisely engineered: light enters through corner glazing and narrow slots cut at the junction of wall and ceiling, so that the plasters are lit from angles that reveal modelling rather than flattening it. Nothing is symmetrical, and every sightline is deliberate.

Canova's birthplace alongside is a modest village house, kept as a museum.

Scarpa's wing

Light cut in at corners and along the join between wall and ceiling. It is a lesson in how to light sculpture, and is visited by architects who have no particular interest in Canova.

The plaster models

Full-size originals with the metal reference pins still set in them -- the points a carver measured from to cut the marble. Seeing the method is the reason to come.

The Tempio

Parthenon portico, Pantheon rotunda, Christian apse, designed by a sculptor. Canova is buried inside.

The clay sketches

Small, rapid and completely unlike the finished marbles -- the best evidence of how he actually worked.