Renovation of the Ancient art gallery
Museum of Santa Caterina
Treviso
Renovation of the Ancient art gallery
The collection, a selection of approximately 150 works dated from the XIIIth to the XVIIIth century, is exposed at the piano nobile of the southern wing of a sixteenth-century monastery. It consists of sculptures, detached frescoes and paintings, including exquisite works of Giovanni Bellini, Lorenzo Lotto, Tiziano and the Bassano family. The exhibition itinerary starts from the monumental staircase and develops along the so-called “manica lunga”, certainly the most enchanting space of this historical complex: a 60 meters of lenght and 3 meters of width vaulted room, lightened by four mullioned windows, flanked by 11 rooms, of various but mostly small size, originally serving as monk cells.
The permanent gallery set-up has been preceded by simple building refurbishments, aimed at reconfiguring some rooms and resetting the technical systems. In the manica lunga’s arrangement, where sculptures and paintings lie side by side, every work is exhibited in a unique environment, set up thanks to panels, tridimensional mountings, rotations and shifts, aimed at shading it from the complexity of the room dimensions, yet maintaining the dialogue with the architectural monumentality.
In the lateral rooms, instead, single masterpieces, significant events, or the coherence of the itinerary have been emphasized, exploiting the same devices as in the “manica lunga”. Unique exception is the wunderkammer, located at a nodal point of the itinerary, where lit glas cases shine out from a black steel elliptical framework, covered by an oak furniture heptagon from which paintings are hanging; a white marble sculpted head is placed on the axis of the southern wing room enfilade, being the cornerstone of the classical theme developing along its sides, Divine or Profane love.
The materials employed are: black steel sheets protected by transparent paint, rust-colored medium density panels, grey canvas cloths.
