Verona, Maffei Palace opens its second floor: new rooms, new works and a small theater

A year and a half after its first opening, the Palazzo Maffei House Museum in Verona reopens its doors to the public by inaugurating the second floor of the palace: thus, eight more rooms and a project room are added to the exhibition itinerary, new works and art installations, cultural spaces for activities and meetings, such as the Palazzo Maffei Theater with an audience of more than one hundred seats and its signature curtains, and a specialized library.

“The pandemic, the lockdown, and the uncertainties about reopenings were not easy for a newly established institution like ours to deal with,” explains Vanessa Carlon director of Palazzo Maffei, “but they did not dampen our enthusiasm and motivated us to seize the forced closure as an opportunity to complete the museum project we had in mind.” With the conservative restoration of stuccoes, floors, frescoes and wall paintings on the upper floor of the palace and the installation of the new museum spaces, the Carlon family has continued its efforts to enhance the Baroque building, thanks in part to the involvement of Daan Roosegaarde, Dutch architect, designer and innovative artist.

The exhibition itinerary on the second floor is intended to invite reflection. The rooms, conceived by Gabriella Belli, who curated the museographic project in relation to the choices and taste of collector Luigi Carlon, do not follow a chronological and thematic flow as on the lower floor, but each represents a separate entity that interweaves ancient and present, vision and aspiration, reality and dream; each independent from the other in content, but all part of a single design idea, entrusted to empathy and meditation. Nine meditations, nine individual rooms intended to offer unprecedented critical insights to unveil a different side of the Carlon Collection: eternal or stringently topical themes such as the relationship between man and the cosmos, nature and the infinite, and environmental sustainability. In the first room and related showcase, the Antiquarium, a tribute to Roman Verona whose heart was today’s Piazza delle Erbe, alongside sculptures, architectural friezes and artifacts dating between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD. from different parts of the Empire, there is a small basalt bust of Serapis, a god of oriental origin whose cult spread throughout the Empire, understood as a lord of the cosmos, space and time; a larger-than-life-sized virile head of white marble, probably depicting Marcus Aurelius, also stands out. While The Gladiators in the Room, a work by Giorgio de Chirico from 1928 - 1929, recalls the protagonists of the fights that animated the arenas, the astonished reflection of contemporary man is represented by Mimmo Paladino’s Witness (1991), a petrified and enigmatic figure between archaism and Byzantinism, who bears on his chest three faces, perhaps the three ages of man.

The second room is dedicated to the metamorphosis of landscape and “beautiful nature,” thanks to the short-circuit created by the site-specific intervention of Chiara Dynys, who has been called to confront Arcadian frescoes of 18th-century landscapes on the walls. Two aphorisms on nature by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe are re-proposed by Dynys in an installation with a poetic rendering, Over Nature, to give new value to the ancient views of the room, made participants in the encounter between the great interpreter of German Romanticism and Antonio Canova, to whom we owe the Cupid in the center of the room, a work that belonged to the Falier collection: a precious plaster cast of one of Canova’s most famous subjects. On the one hand is the romantic inspiration of Goethe in which Dynys participates with its gilded grates and iridescent reflections of glass affixed to the paintings in the rooms, and on the other the calm and balanced “beautiful nature” of Canova. The landscape theme also returns in the third room “Views” to give rise to another meditation, where from the nineteenth century the landscape begins to relate to the changed conditions of life and the urban dimension, and the man-landscape relationship enters the everyday. Verona is the protagonist: portrayed, interpreted, analyzed from various perspectives, painters capture its relationship with everyday life, and in this context Piazza delle Erbe becomes a privileged subject. Among the various artists are Carlo Ferrari known as the Ferrarin, Carlo Canella with an unusual view of Piazza Bra with the Palazzo della Gran Guardia and with I Mulini sull’Adige in sant’Anastasia, but above all the Veronese Renato Di Bosso, who realizes a Verona with a futurist flavor. Of great impact appears the room entitled On the Perimeter of the World and its Limits, which through the display of fine period frames. In the room On universal knowledge and the transience of things, the dialogue is between a positivist and controlled view of nature and knowledge and the modern threat of the mortification of landscape and nature through technology. On the one hand, the authors of seventeenth-century still lifes are in dialogue with the unabridged edition of Diderot and d’Alambert’sEncyclopedie, a summa of universal knowledge in the eighteenth century and a manifesto of progressive faith; on the other hand, a masterpiece from the early 1970s by Mario Schifano, Untitled, which defiles the landscape. The second-floor itinerary also offers the collector’s salon, almost an auteur interlude in which ancient and modern meet according to the passions and eclectic taste that animated Luigi Carlon’s collecting research. Among precious furnishings, such as 18th-century Venetian lacquers and 17th- to 18th-century commodes of Florentine and Venetian manufactures, here is Pietro Rotari with two paintings with biblical and mythological subjects or again painting from the Netherlands, with a wooded landscape datable between the second and third decade of the 17th century, alongside a sculpture by Gino De Domincis and Robert Indiana’s iconic Hope.

The room entitled On the Nature of Space and Matter, with Fausto Melotti’s Simple Counterpoint (1971), brings together Lucio Fontana, Pietro Manzoni, Alberto Burri, Fausto Melotti and Carla Accardi. The penultimate room, Sul cosmo e i suoi satelliti (On the cosmos and its satellites), features the illusionistic circular movement created by Alberto Biasi in Dinamica ’62, Fontana’s Teatrino, but it is Eliseo Mattiacci’s work Tempo globale (1991) that leads us back to the dialogue between the individual and the world around him, between the self and the cosmos. Finally, Daan Roosegaarde and one of his projects that fuses interactive light technology, art and environmental sustainability - LOTUS - is entrusted with the task of concluding the second floor path, destined as a project room with ever new proposals. In his installations, as in “LOTUS Maffei” made for the Veronese museum - intelligent, light- and heat-sensitive flowers that move their shapes based on their contact with humans - he combines technology and poetry inspired by the idea of organic architecture.

Image: Hall On the perimeter of the world and its limits. Ph.Credit Luca Rotondo

Verona, Maffei Palace opens its second floor: new rooms, new works and a small theater

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