The Natural History Museum of Venice is a fantastic place to visit with or without Biennale art. A long thin room with bottle-glass windows houses ceiling high cabinets of flayed geese, legions of finches, herbariums and rocks. It also houses the least successful artwork, a twee paper cut out of plant silhouettes, draped over a botanical album.
The museum is so incredibly opulent it's hard to create something that can match the feather, beak, wort, wart, horn encrusted, fabergé-basilisks egg nature of it all, but Maurizio Cattelan manages it in the most sumptuous room of all. It is a bluebeard's chamber splattered with different skin, fur and pelt. There is a huge leather desk that has hooves for feet, a gorilla crucified on scarlet silk walls, giraffe necks, ostrich eggs, rearing pythons and elephants ears. Cattelan's piece is a huge Aesop's Fable stack of worried looking animals, an inside-out Roman banquet.
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| Maurizio Cattelan, Loves saves life (I musicanti di Brema), 1995 |
It's fun to visit the show here, because some of the permanent exhibits are so striking so bizarre and so shocking, it's a hard act for the artists to follow. Visit for Cattelan's sculpture and for the museum as a whole, especially the old less interactive parts untampered with by educational curators.
When you've finished you can sit in the basement having a cake and watching the gondolas float past the window.
Annabel Dover
The Brothers Grimm version of The Bremen Town Musicians
Contemporary Bestiary:
Between art and science, Italian artists from the ACACIA collection
Natural History Museum, Venice
Until 24 October
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