Venice 2016: Santa Croce - Ca'Pesaro

For the first five of our twelve days stay in Venice, Rich and I were accompanied by our friends Yim and Murray.  Since they only had limited time for their visit, we set an aggressive pace to ensure that we covered all the tourist sights and Venetian experiences that were on their agenda.  In those five days, we walked all around our home district of Cannaregio, toured the Islands, took two amazing walking tours in San Polo and San Marco, and saw the highlights in Dorsoduro. We had a wonderful time with them, but by the time they left us to continue their journeys, we were ready to take a much more leisurely pace.  So it was quite the luxury for us to plan just a quick visit to the Santa Croce district for a couple of hours before heading home to put our feet up for the rest of the day.

We would explore Ca'Pesaro, the palazzo that has been turned into Venice's Museum of Modern Art.  The beautiful, Baroque, marble palace was built in the 17th Century for the wealthy Pesaro family (whose tomb we saw on our walking tour of the Santa Maria dei Frari church).  The architect was Baldassarre Longhena, who also designed the Salute church and Ca'Rezzonico, which we saw in Dorsoduro.  The museum houses 19th and 20th century paintings and sculptures, but very few of the original collection of the Pesaro family, since most of this was auctioned off by the time the last Pesaro passed away.  It is interesting to me how these palazzos all seem to have an entrance by land and by water.  We learned on our city walking tour that the nobility usually entered by water so that they did not have to walk on what was then dirt roads.

The works are displayed in 15 rooms with each having a different theme, exploring artists and their changing styles, impacted by social and political trends and influences through the decades of the 19th and 20th Century.  The works in Ca'Pesaro were much more to my taste than the Punta Della Dogana Contemporary Art Museum that we visited in Dorsoduro and we still spent a good chunk of time exploring this modern art museum. 

We first encountered a couple of iconic sculptures by Auguste Rodin, "The Burghers of Calais" and the "Thinker", which we have seen different versions of in Paris, Washington D.C. and Toronto.  Being so familiar with Rodin's work, it was more exciting to discover new Italian sculptors who we had never heard of before.  One of my favourites was Adolfo Wildt, whose expressive marble busts were compelling to look at.  These included representations of real people that he knew including his benefactor Franz Rose and landscape architect Johann Larass, as well as works of Classic Romanticism such as the pair of sculptures titled "Fiery Character/Gentile Character".  It was interesting to look at the bust of Franz Rose from the side, since it appears as if the tips of his massive mustache have broken off.  But since both sides of the mustache have the same appearance, it must have been intentional?

Other sculptors that we encountered in this collection included Giacomo Manzu, who created the large statue of a Cardinal, Arturo Martini whose styles varied as he worked in various mediums including terracotta ("The Prostitute") and bronze ("The Sprinter"), and Leonardi Leoncillo who created brightly painted polychrome earthenware sculptures ("The Venetian Partisan").  The most strikingly positioned work is that by Napoleone Martinuzzi, whose seated bronze boxer with his arms flexed on his thighs, can be spotted from down a long hallway.  It was also fun to be able to walk all the way around this sculpture and look at it from different viewpoints.

There were works by well-known masters whose distinctive styles could be easily identified.  These included Marc Chagall, Gustav Klimt, Joan Miró, and Wassily Kandinsky.  I mistook a Surrealist painting by Yves Tanguy (who made the earrings for Peggy Guggenheim that are on display in her museum) for Salvador Dali, since their dream-like styles seem quite similar to me.

Just like for the sculptures, I admired paintings by Italian artists that I had never heard of before.  I was drawn to the vibrant colours of "A Ghost Crossing Europe" by Armando Pizzinato, which is said to be an "allegory of the alliance between the working class and peasantry", created to commemorate the hundred year anniversary of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto.  I liked Plinio Nomellini's "Symphony of the Moon" as much for its unusual polyptych framing as I did its dark and moody atmosphere.  I'm not sure who the artist was, but I was amused by what appeared to be a painting of a series of outhouses because of the legs that seem to be sticking out from the one on the right.

Making our way through all the rooms of the modern art museum was thoroughly enjoyable, as there were so many works that we found delightful and intriguing.  But there was more!  As an added bonus, the upper floor of Ca'Pesaro housed a very interesting Oriental Art Museum with over 30,000 objects (mostly from Japan) that were donated by the Count of Bardi in the 19th Century.  We saw an array of weapons including spears with heads of all shapes and sizes, some with Chinese characters carved into them.  In one room was an enormous litter or sedan chair that was probably used to transport royalty.  It had a long pole that stretched out on each end so that multiple people could support the weight of the chair, which appeared to be extremely heavy.

I was fascinated by the detailed diagram of the 18-step process required to put on all the various components of a Japanese armour.  Each step even had a name to indicate which component was next, from the shorts to the gloves to the boots and so forth.  Unlike the Medieval European metal armour, the Japanese version was designed to be light-weight for easy movement and was better for defending against projectile objects like arrows than it was for shielding against direct thrusts from swords or spears.  Earlier versions used small rectangular plates of lamellar armour made from leather and then later, from iron and steel.

Always fond of chess sets, Rich was transfixed by the beautiful 18th Century Chinese chessboard whose pieces are made from white and red-tinted ivory and sit on intricately carved spheres. Both the sides of the chess board and the table that it rests upon are decorated with ornate floral inlays.  Each pawn, representing a soldier on horseback, is carved from a single piece of ivory.

We ended a great day at the museum with what we considered to be one of our best Aperol Spritz experiences–a gorgeous view of the Grand Canal in the museum café, a cool breeze in the air, an ice cold, perfectly mixed drink with the prerequisite ice cubes, olive and orange slice, and a free bowl of potato chips to top it off.  And following what was a relatively short day, we were able to return home for our first afternoon nap of the trip.  Life was good.