From the major Carpaccio exhibition to the new picture gallery at the Doge's Palace, here is the 2020 program of Venice's museums

The Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia has unveiled its 2020 program of exhibitions and activities. The idea behind the program is to reflect the vibrancy and changeability of Venice: the museums, which guard the city’s past and dialogue with the present, intend to trace the nature of the city, and with this in mind, the program aims to bring up-to-date the great Venice of the past.

2020 at the Doge’s Palace opens with melodrama, told in Opera. The protagonists of melodrama (from April 9 to August 30, 2020), an exhibition organized by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in collaboration with the MUVE Foundation and declined by tracing the Venetian history of opera, which in the lagoon was born four centuries ago in Monteverdi’s scores and in the first theaters open to the paying public. Music, painting, sculpture, architecture, opera brings together different languages of art and is a multisensory experience. Its history is influenced by historical, social, political, and economic factors, and its construction goes through many stages and involves different actors: patrons, impresarios, composers, singers, costume designers, set designers, and finally the audience. The exhibition is meant to be a tribute to Venice as the birthplace of melodrama and to Italy as the birthplace of the most important names in the history of opera.

Also at the Doge’s Palace in the fall will be Vittore Carpaccio. Paintings and Drawings (Oct. 10, 2020 to Jan. 24, 2021). Most famous for his cycles of narrative and religious paintings, Vittore Carpaccio (Venice, 1460/66 - Koper?, 1525/26) depicts the grandeur and splendor of Venice by transporting sacred stories into everyday life, in settings rich in detail, combining the observation of the urban scene with the poetic and the fantastic. The subject of a reborn interest in historiography, thanks in part to recent discoveries, attributions and restorations, Carpaccio has not been the subject of a monographic exhibition since 1963, since the historic exhibition at the Doge’s Palace, where he now returns. The exhibition is being built in co-production with The National Gallery in Washington and will trace, in both thematic and chronological terms, the development of Carpaccio’s painting through religious cycles and genre paintings and a substantial nucleus of drawings, revealing his fervid imagination, the rigor of his technique and his interest in nature, perspective and the effects of light, with important loans from European and U.S. museum collections and private collections, reassembling narrative cycles now dispersed and referring back to city itineraries for those in the lagoon. The exhibition will follow in Washington, and it will be the first American exhibition for Carpaccio: works commissioned by the confraternities, preserved in Venice and presented after recent revelatory restorations, will be exceptionally offered.

Three albums of drawings by great masters of the Venetian eighteenth century, donated in the nineteenth century by their former owners are instead protagonists at Ca’ Rezzonico - Museo del Settecento Veneziano for the exhibition Disegnare dal vero. Tiepolo, Longhi, Guardi (from February 13, 2020), which sees them on display after a long restoration supported by Save Venice. The challenging and painstaking restoration of the Correr Museum’s Sale Reali was also made possible thanks to the Comité Français pour la Sauvegarde de Venise and its generous private sponsors. And also at the Museo del Settecento Veneziano, the exhibition Ippolito Caffi. Travel Notebooks (from June 19, 2020) features notebooks with drawings that Ippolito Caffi brought back on his 19th-century travels between Rome and Naples, Malta and Athens, Smyrna and Constantinople: their restoration was made possible thanks to Venice in Peril.

In the summer, at Ca’ Pesaro - International Gallery of Modern Art, there will be a major exhibition dedicated to an internationally renowned Venetian artist: in Fabrizio Plessi. The Golden Age (May 16 to October 25, 2020) historical installations and new works will be on display. It will also be a great tribute to Venice by the artist, inspired by the theme of gold, a highly symbolic material closely linked to the city. Gold shaped and declined in different forms will accompany visitors in the discovery of Plessi’s extraordinary artistic production through the decades, up to the great creations of recent years. The Ca’ Pesaro exhibition will be joined by the windows of the Correr Museum in St. Mark’s Square, where digital rivers of gold will flow to confront the sumptuous mosaics of the Basilica. Also Ca’ Pesaro will then host an exhibition on Frida Kahlo entitled Frida Kahlo. An Intimate Portrait (Dec. 12, 2020 to March 14, 2021): an exceptional nucleus of more than one hundred photographs, never before exhibited in Italy or in Europe, depicting the painter throughout her life, side by side with paper dresses by Belgian artist Isabelle de Borchgrave, to offer a new perspective on Frida Kahlo by emphasizing her importance as a woman, performer, rebellious genius and inexhaustible source of inspiration for twentieth-century fashion and style. These will then be joined by the exhibition The Panza di Biumo Donation and American Conceptual Painting (from June 26, 2020), which will bring together in the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro a significant nucleus of more than twenty works donated from the prestigious collection, putting them in dialogue with a number of authors from the contemporary U.S. scene, thus ideally bringing to fruition the research on American conceptual production conducted for more than fifty years by Giuseppe Panza di Biumo. The collection of the Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro, with nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting, is also one of the themes of the first volumes of the series dedicated to the General Scientific Catalogues of the collections of the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, with Italian Renaissance majolica and miniature portraits from the Correr and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting.

In the Museum of Palazzo Mocenigo, Center for the Study of the History of Textiles, Costume and Perfume, the relationship between artists and the sense of smell will be dedicated to Es/Senza (from April 25 to October 25, 2020), with a group of artists who were protagonists of the creative season between the birth of the new millennium and today and who identify perfume and the sense of smell as a source of inspiration for their creations. The Lace Museum, on the other hand, will be the venue for the 3rd Lace Biennial from June 14 to 28, 2020.

2020 will then be a year of major transformations for Venetian museums. The Correr Museum ’s exhibition space will expand with the opening of the Sale Reali, the apartments reserved until 1866 for the Habsburgs and then, until 1920, for the Savoys, royalty of Italy, which after a decade of work will be opened to the public for the first time (from October 2020). Eleven rooms, in addition to the Napoleonic Wing and the Procuratie Nuove and the nine already recovered and open to the public, which were inhabited by Empress Sissi, with painted and stucco decorations, marmorini and tapestries, furniture, chandeliers and furnishing accessories created by the ingenuity and mastery of Venetian artists and artisans, in an extraordinary anthology ranging from the Empire Style to the last “Umbertine” nineteenth century, in a long enfilade of rooms overlooking the Giardini Reali and the basin of San Marco. At the Doge’s Palace, the ancient rooms of the Quadreria, which are undergoing a major restyling, will host masterpieces from the Palace and a nucleus of valuable canvases and panels granted on long-term deposit from a private collection (from November 2020). Paintings such as Carpaccio’s Il Leone marciano andante, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Venice and Neptune, Giovanni Bellini ’s Pietà, and works by Flemish authors such as Quentin Metys’s Christ Mocked or Herri met de Bles’sInferno known as Civetta will acquire new life thanks to the staging by world-renowned master architect and set designer Pier Luigi Pizzi. Also new for Palazzo Fortuny, which will be transformed into a permanent museum space with the Genius Loci initiative (from June 12, 2020). An atelier and workshop of the arts, from set design to photography, from textile printing to lighting, and even the celebrated Delphos dresses, in this palace the permanent collection is reborn 55 years after the death of Henriette Fortuny, Mariano’s wife and muse and companion. Still, on the island of Murano, the Glass Museum will unveil its future new spaces in the adjacent former Conterie, which will be devoted primarily to contemporary artistic offerings of Murano glass production, including donations from recent years to the MUVE Foundation. A new and unprecedented space of great interest, destined to tell the story of today and outline the tomorrow of an art as precious and fragile as its material.

The Museum of Natural History of Venice “Giancarlo Ligabue” with its scientific activity in 2020 will particularly involve the inhabitants of Venice, the mainland and the lagoon, for the updating of the Ornithological Atlas and the monitoring of species through the interesting citizen science project Birds in the City, will open its doors for various activities of popularization also in collaboration with other scientific societies, confirming its nature as a space that is always hospitable and proactive, will continue in the work of monitoring the flora and fauna of the territory, with Sea Turle Day and M’ammalia, projects dedicated to turtles and squirrels, will continue to explore the relationships between science, art and society.

As for Mestre, there will be the Contemporary Opera Project in the Bissuola Park (from June 15 to August 30, 2020), in the Candiani Cultural Center will be exhibited the works selected in the second edition of the competition for young artists Artefici del nostro tempo (from May 9 to July 26, 2020), wanted by the City of Venice and coordinated by the MUVE Foundation, and of the historic Mestre Painting Prize, as well as the exhibition Mestre and the Art of the 1900s (from November 20, 2020 to February 28, 2021), which restores the presence of the city in the cultural and artistic landscape of the last century through the collection of the Ca’ Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art. And then there will be Daan Roosegarde’s installation Waterlicht, one of the most spectacular and poetic site-specific works of recent years, experienced and loved by thousands of people in the places around the world where it has already been installed, appearing for the first time in Italy, in the spaces of Forte Marghera (from May 29 to October 11, 2020). The work set up by the Dutch Studio Roosegaarde will be a powerful and poetic experience with at its center a reflection on water, the most important element that distinguishes Venice and its territory and a topic of stringent topicality not only for the lagoon city.

For all info on the projects and exhibitions you can visit the MUVE Foundation website.

In the photo: Royal Halls of the Correr Museum. Ph. Credit Joan Porcel

From the major Carpaccio exhibition to the new picture gallery at the Doge's Palace, here is the 2020 program of Venice's museums

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