The Mystery of Palladio’s Face
The Palladio Museum, of which Alessandro Scandurra is both designer and curator, was conceived as an open window onto the public: being unattached to a given collection, the museum is focused on an everlasting subject – Andrea Palladio – that is continuously re-read by in progress research.
This concept, together with the fact that visitors discover Palladio inside a building deigned by Palladio himself, is a key motif of the museum design.
The exhibition The Mystery of Palladio’s Face explores for the first time the complex story of the portrait of the mythical architect, the result of a tenacious research that evolved over five centuries into fakes, blunders and surprising twists. The installation designed by Alessandro Scandurra multiplies the faces discovered over time in a multitude of images. Reflections bring us into an itinerary of self-discovery. The face-to-face mirror panels draw a broken route. Corners multiply the reflections among the Renaissance palazzo, portraits and visitors. Investigating Palladio’s face means facing the question of why Palladio, unlike his colleagues, did not include his own image in his books, that are in fact the means of the circulation of his ideas: a democratic circulation of Palladio’s architectural system, transmittable like an assembly kit.
