We will not bore you with the history of museums from their origins to how we know them today. Rather, we want to reflect with you on the museums of tomorrow, the post COVID-19 museums.
We have decided to do this in these strange days, where the past is less interesting than the uncertainties that the future holds for us. We do this in these days marked by something that younger generations like ours have never experienced. Something that forces us to stay at home, does not allow us to meet, greet each other, and keeps us apart.
Containment measures for the COVID-19 epidemiological emergency in the so-called red zones and throughout the national territory
Is it really important to go to the museum?
Museums without visitors, empty halls populated by mute artworks. They make us reflect on the role that the museum plays for the community.
We cannot shake off the image of deserted museums (and we do not hide that we would love to take advantage of it for a solitary stroll), yet we continue to ask ourselves: Is it really important to go to the museum?
The imagination races to relive the suggestions created by the ancient futurist invectives, from the times when art itself repudiated the past and its exhibition. The Past guilty of hindering a Progress that looked solely to the Future.
Tommaso Marinetti wrote in the Manifesto:
“We want to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every kind…
Museums: cemeteries!… Identical, truly, for the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies that do not know each other.
…That one goes on pilgrimage, once a year, as one goes to the cemetery on the day of the dead…. I concede that. That once a year a tribute of flowers be laid before the Mona Lisa, I concede that…. But I do not admit that our sadness, our fragile courage, our morbid unease be taken for a walk daily through the museums. Why poison ourselves? Why want to rot?…
Do you want to waste all your best energies in this eternal and useless admiration of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, diminished, and trampled?”
A few years later, the Great War.
An opportunity not to be missed
During this global lockdown, the most reflective individuals, scientists, philosophers, scholars, were the first to spread a thought now shared by many. This violent slowdown can represent an opportunity to rethink ourselves and the world we inhabit, the mechanisms of the economy and the fragility of the system we have created, our relationship with the environment, social relations among people, and the work we do.
Let us not miss the chance to learn, even from a tragedy like this. Let us not resign ourselves to the worst wish we can make for the near future: that when all this is over, the virus will disappear, and everything will return to how it was before.
Do we really want everything to go back to how it was before?
The distance has forced us to communicate differently, to be more aware of the means of communication at our disposal. A phenomenon of digitalization is underway that in the “short” period of the pandemic has covered the distances of years of work, recovering the lost time of the past. #culturedoesnotstop! (along with COVID-19) The digital revolution has begun.
But is the future of museums post COVID-19 only more digital?
A new form of beauty
Perhaps the museums of tomorrow will be different, not just online.
After all, even the war devastations of the post-World War II period left a “tabula rasa” that allowed for thinking about the “new” with revolutionary vigor.
The Museo di Brera and the Civic Museums of Genoa were rebuilt, Carlo Scarpa redesigned the Galleries of the Academy in Venice with innovative criteria. This task was undertaken by courageous superintendents and astute patrons, involving the greatest architects, from Franco Albini to Ignazio Gardella, to Scarpa himself.
Franco Albini, Civic Galleries of Palazzo Bianco Genoa, 1949-1951 ©Franco Albini Foundation
Exhibition design by Carlo Scarpa for the Gallerie dell’Accademia under the direction of Vittorio Moschini, 1943-1963
Thanks to the efforts of many, a new form of beauty was born: artworks transformed into living subjects, no longer neutral objects of the actions of past men.
In just over a decade, celebrated museum models and exhibition designs emerged worldwide, such as the exhibition “Antonello da Messina and 15th Century Painting in Sicily” (1953) at the Galleria Regionale della Sicilia in Palermo.
“Antonello da Messina and 15th Century Painting in Sicily” Carlo Scarpa and Roberto Calandra, 1953
And again: the reinstallation of the first rooms of the Uffizi (still visible); the Gypsotheca of Possagno and the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona; Capodimonte (now profoundly altered); the Sforza Castle Museum in Milan, not to mention the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia and Rome, in its dual role as a home for ancient collections and a new center for contemporary art (National Gallery of Modern Art). Modern Art museums in Milan, Turin, and Rome were entrusted with the task of shaping modern taste and refreshing knowledge of foreign art.
On the left: Carlo Scarpa, expansion of the Canova Gypsotheca 1955 -1957; On the right: Ignazio Gardella, Giovanni Michelucci, Carlo Scarpa – Rooms of the Primitives, Uffizi 1953 – 1957
Castelvecchio Museum, Carlo Scarpa 1957-1975
The post COVID-19 museums
Tomorrow, a new form of beauty will also be born. Perhaps museums, in building it, will start from what they have been deprived of, the irreplaceable value of being together, of sharing with the public the beauty they safeguard. It will be creativity that brings us all together in their currently empty halls, allowing us to know and reconnect.
As for us, we are also working with a new spirit, so that Artsupp is no longer as it was before. We only hope that the path ahead of us will change us for the better.
Festina lente!
