Wednesday 26 June 2013

Notes From Venice: The Natural History Museum

Annabel Dover, our Garageland Venice Correspondent, continues her guided tour of this year's Venice Biennale. Today we enjoy a very educational trip to the Natural History Museum. Click here for previous Notes From Venice (Manet Returns to Venice & Bedwyr Williams' The Starry Messenger).

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. 

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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