garage BENTIVOGLIO

“Of course that big room is one of the rooms of the world,” says John Betjeman about Patrick Leigh Fermor's house in Kardamyli nel Mani. In fact, every home is a world, but few houses are the world, they manage to enclose it, to grasp its spirit, to foreshadow its future. Of everything that will be delivered to the future of the Palazzo Bentivoglio project, I would like the elusive desire for self-representation that underlies every collection, that particular device of vision that makes the eyes of two collectors coincide with the eyes of time, to survive history. If re-building the rooms of the building made it possible to grasp its primitive aspects and to hand it over to the future, building a collection meant imprinting one's passage in the world. \nTherefore, the choice to display in the BENTIVOGLIO garage an object that is not part of the collection, but that has been unique in the history of Italian museum exhibition: the piston designed by Franco Albini in 1950 as a support for the Elevatio animae, the fragments of the tomb of Margherita di Brabante created by Giovanni Pisano in 1313, is not jarring. \nThe troubled history of the funeral monument, disassembled and then dispersed, has given us only a group consisting of three figures, two angels and the Empress. Albini, engaged in the preparation of the White Palace, must therefore find a device that is respectful of the fragments, but that allows the visitor to be able to imagine the entire monument, without falling into false or arbitrary reconstructions. \nAdjustable in height and completely swivel, the piston allows the public to interact with the work, which stands out between the slate walls and the venetian blinds that screen the windows. Albini's work leads to a total reinterpretation of the Palazzo Bianco collections, which are thus redefined through his eyes; the architect manipulates and almost profanes ancient works, returning them to contemporaneity full of new meanings. \nDespite its limitations and its critical issues, the support piston for the Elevatio animae is thus the manifesto of a certain view of the world, of a given historical moment in which Italian architecture questions itself about the museum, its purposes and its spatial orders. \nIn 1969, with the redefinition of the Palazzo Bianco museum itinerary and the subsequent opening of the Sant'Agostino Museum, the fragments were rearranged on a new base and the piston was thus archived in the warehouses. \nWe thank the Museums of Genoa for the kind loan and the City of Genoa for the archive photos. \nThe base on which the piston is displayed was created by Valter Scelsi for the “Elevatio Animae” exhibition, set up at the Department of Architecture and Design of the University of Genoa, with the collaboration of Filippo Brignolo, Alessandro Levy, Giulia Scelsi and Margherita Squeo.