★★★★☆
“Let the sun in. Didn’t he just. Try to see Canaletto’s Venice Revisited at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich on a sunny day. You want the light on the Thames, a haze on the docks.”
The Times
The exhibition
Canaletto’s Venice Revisited was a temporary exhibition that took place at National Maritime Museum in London between April 1, 2022 and September 25, 2022. The works, from the world famous collection at Woburn Abbey, form the largest single commission the Italian artist ever received.
The exhibition displays 24 Canaletto’s paintings of Venice, and it’s divided into 5 sections: each one showing different interpretive aspects that help to understand Canaletto’s universe.
The last section is dedicated to Venice today and its problems due to mass tourism and climate change.
Design overview
The exhibition design supports the curatorial purpose of guiding visitors through the details important to notice in Canaletto’s paintings.
Due to the nature of gallery artwork, digital displays could be out of place with all the paintings. The digital content has to be integrated into the environment without creating distraction from the paintings. For this reason, it was decided to mimic the paintings by creating animated digital images using videomapping.
To show how the floods have affected Venice in recent years, an interactive was created based on the data collected over the last 150 years.
A data visualization system was created based on a touch screen with a handler that allows browsing through the years on a graph that visually shows how the floods have been increasing in severity and frequency over the years. Touch screen interaction is translated into a video wall located behind the touch screen. This videowall contains a map of Venice showing the areas flooded each year and a table with all the data and images. The video wall has a transparent perspex that covers it with the printed map of Venice, giving a sense of depth to the map and allowing the flooded areas to be seen more clearly.
★★★☆☆
“The show ends with a salutary video of the city’s recent floods and a powerful interactive tool that lets you see, from year to year, how the worst flooding in Venice’s history has hit in just the last few years.”
Jonathan Jones, The Guardian
The exhibition ends with a video installation showing the testimonies of three Venetian inhabitants. The video projection integrates with the vinyl printed elements on the wall, creating a consistent and immersive experience.
