Giulio Manieri Elia will lead the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice for another four years

Giulio Manieri Elia has been confirmed as director of the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. His first term began in May 2019 and he will now lead the Venetian museum for another four years. “The prospect we have in front of us of four more years of intense activity in the museum,” said the director, “makes us happy and optimistic about the concrete feasibility of finally seeing completed the major works, begun in the early 2000s, to renovate, expand and update the exhibition itinerary of this extraordinary museum, unique in the world.”

The institute has been renovated in recent years: the reception space equipped with a video wall provides initial orientation information and updates on current activities. The space designated for the cafeteria, for which new glass windows have recently been made to separate it from the museum route, will also soon be made accessible.

Great energies have been invested in continuing the overall refurbishment of the museum, going so far as to return to visitation as many as 2,000 square meters of new rooms, which have already undergone major architectural and plant engineering works directed by the MIC Regional Secretariat, according to a project called “Great Galleries.” Upon completion of the work, expected by spring 2024, there will be a new scientific arrangement of the entire complex with an exhibition itinerary that will run along an area of more than 5,000 square meters.

An ample sample of this great work, carried out in the previous term, is offered by rooms VI-XI rearranged on the second floor, where masterpieces by Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese can be seen within airy and welcoming spaces, with the support of educational apparatus. By the end of the year, the layout of the Palladian wing, also on the second floor, will be completed: the rooms, which have already undergone restoration work, will be used for the exhibition of significant pictorial testimonies of the sixteenth century divided by territorial areas, among which the section dedicated to Jacopo Bassano and his sons and the part destined for the reconstruction of the Vasarian ceiling of Palazzo Corner Spinelli will stand out. For the first time in the history of the museum, there is also a section devoted to graphics, where drawings and prints from the rich collection of the Cabinet of Drawings, one of the most important in Italy as evidenced by the presence of twenty precious drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci, will be displayed in rotation.

An important milestone, reached at the end of August 2021, consisted in the opening to the public, for the first time, of the monumental Selva-Lazzari salons on the ground floor of the museum, set up with an unprecedented exhibition itinerary dedicated to painting in Venice and the Veneto region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including some works never exhibited before and restored for the occasion, among which Giambattista Tiepolo’s Chastisement of the Serpents, a canvas more than 13 meters long, stands out. The opening of this wing restored circularity to the ground-floor itinerary, previously separated into two sections, and marked the completion of the museum’s artistic itinerary with two sections. The opening of the halls of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was also an opportunity to hold an international conference last February aimed at deepening the study and knowledge about the works and artists of those two centuries, represented in the collection.

New works have also been acquired in the past three years, such as two panels by Antonio Vivarini and three by Bartolomeo Vivarini; an important canvas by Sebastiano Mazzoni; a painting by Bonifacio de’ Pitati and one by Fontebasso; a still life by De Pisis; and a drawing by Georg Baselitz.

Photo by Matteo De Fina

Giulio Manieri Elia will lead the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice for another four years

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