Museo Gypsotheca Antonio Canova Site Features

The museum is two buildings with opposite intentions, and seeing them in sequence is most of the experience.

The nineteenth-century gallery is a long hall on a basilica plan, lit from above along its length. It is conventional and it works: the large plasters stand in even daylight in a space that does not compete with them.

Carlo Scarpa's 1957 wing is the opposite. It is small, white and precisely engineered, and nothing in it is symmetrical. Light enters through glazing set into the corners and through narrow slots cut exactly where wall meets ceiling, so the plasters are lit from angles that reveal modelling rather than flattening it. Floor levels step, sightlines are cut deliberately from room to room, and a shallow water basin sits outside the glass.

The effect is that the sculpture is lit the way a sculptor would light it — raking, from above and to the side — rather than the way a gallery usually does. Scarpa was solving a specific problem, and the wing is studied because he solved it.

Canova's birthplace alongside is a modest village house kept as a museum, and the contrast with both galleries is deliberate.

Scarpa's wing

Light cut in at the corners and along the join between wall and ceiling. It is a lesson in how to light sculpture, and architects visit 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 clay sketches

Bozzetti: small, rapid, and completely unlike the finished marbles. The best evidence anywhere of how Canova actually worked out a composition.

The large groups

The full-size plasters of works whose marbles are now in the Louvre, the Hermitage and the Vatican. In several cases the plaster is the only version you can see up close.

Canova's birthplace

Included in the ticket: the house, his tools, and the plain room a stonecutter's son grew up in.