Restoration and Restyling of the Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca’d’Oro, Venice

The Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca’ d’Oro is undergoing a general intervention with a restyling of the interior rooms and an updated installation funded by Venetian Heritage.

The museum’s displays date back to the 1970s-80s when a scientific reordering of the collections was determined in order to confer a unified thread to the exhibition spaces, connecting the pieces of an extremely varied and stratified museum collection. It was initially arranged according to the aesthetic criteria of the old Museo d’ambientazione created between the 1920s and 30s.

The changes to the consistency of the collections began in the early 80s through today. Individual renovations, including the addition of air-conditioning in the rooms, gave the individual environments less uniformity and coherence. Hence the need for a completive revision of the spaces and a comprehensive rethinking of the museum’s organizing principles to be carried out in conjunction with the operational and structural projects that have also become necessary.

The object of this display project will establish new narrative nexuses among the sections of the permanent collection and render the artworks more accessible. With the perspective of an overall and up–to–date enhancement of the entire monumental complex and its itineraries comes the capability to retrieve, in part and in an evocative key, suggestions that derive from the Galleria’s original setup inaugurated in 1927.

To reach this goal, it is also necessary to undertake architectural renovations – for what concerns the main historical building housing the museum – by redoing a part of the internal plasterwork, the maintenance of the wooden ceilings of the rooms, the decorative marble apparatus of the loggias, the Venetian floors, the restoration of the window frames, the creation of new display windows, and the improvement of the air-conditioning and lighting systems.

Restoration and conservation maintenance have been subdivided into phases to guarantee the continual opening of the museum during construction. Starting from the interventions on the first floor, continuing on to the second floor, and finishing with the creation of the museum’s new entrance hall and reception services worthy of the extraordinary monumental complex and its prestigious collections.

Temporary displays are planned for the areas open to the public during the first phases of the work. These displays will provide an opportunity to understand better the museum’s collection through the exposure of artworks usually kept in storage presented alongside new acquisitions and the collection’s best-known masterpieces.