Espace Louis Vuitton and MUVE’s Presentation of the Restored Wooden Models of the 18th Century

Espace Louis Vuitton and MUVE renew their collaboration which, thanks to a focused and enthralling programme of local sponsorship and cultural actions, leads Louis Vuitton to support the restoration of works of art from the collections of the MUVEs museums.

For the exhibition entitled “The Fondation Louis Vuitton Building in Paris by Frank Gehry with the participation of Daniel Buren”, Louis Vuitton has restored a series of wooden architectural scale models from the 18th century: the models were made as studies for a large Venetian palace (probably Palazzo Corner della Regina, subsequently built to a different design) and for Palazzo Venier dei Leoni (never completed) and also include a series of models of Villa Pisani at Strà.

The results of this major restoration project will be the protagonists of a small but significant exhibition opening on 14 October 2016 at the Sala delle Quattro Porte in the Correr Museum in Piazza San Marco and in the drawing room on the piano mobile of Palazzo Fortuny, which will also be the venue for the large model of the project for the “Doge’s” Villa Pisani at Strà..

The presentation of the restored wooden models echoes the exhibition hosted by the Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia, open to the public from 27 May 2016 and prolonged to 26 February 2017 for the occasion. The exhibition showcases a selection of scale models tracing the study of various aspects of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s building. It enables a close exploration of the creative and design world underlying the origins of a building that has already become a symbol for Paris.

The eighteenth-century architectural scale models belonging to the MUVE collections are truly outstanding examples – among the few to have survived – of architectural practice between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century, especially as regards particularly complex and large buildings. In such demanding projects, which always required several years to conclude, the presence of a perfect scale model on site, revealing every structural and decorative detail both inside and outside (which is why they can always be disassembled and observed in every part) was essential. The model provided a tangible reference (far more than paper diagrams) for the vast array of workmen contributing to the construction (bricklayers, stonemasons, wood and iron carpenters, decorators, etc.) in such a varied activities as to require an alternation of the workers and their supervisors on site. The making of such amazing wooden artefacts, displaying painstaking expertise and of the finest quality, must presumably have been undertaken by specialised craftsmen in Venice.

The conservative restoration needed to preserve the artefacts and allow them to be displayed to best effect, concerns the models of two great Venetian palaces, as well as three smaller buildings for the famous garden of the Villa dei Pisani at Strà. As a group, they are a perfect evocation of the bountiful period of Venetian architecture in the eighteenth century, based on a serene classicism derived from Palladio but which, following the example of Baldassarre Longhena, was also able to modify the showy Baroque into a wholly Venetian pictorial and luminous key.