Description
The Castelvecchio Museum is Verona's great art museum, inside the Scaliger fortress on the Adige. It gathers sculpture, painting and weapons from the Middle Ages to the 18th century in about thirty rooms, and the route is as famous as the works: it was redesigned by the architect Carlo Scarpa.
Scarpa worked here from the late 1950s and considered castle and museum a single organism. He set medieval materials, tuff, pebbles and brick, beside exposed reinforced concrete and iron, and left the marks of earlier eras visible.
Every work got a place designed to fit it: tuff brackets for the polyptychs, small tuff cubes for the crosses, new frames on colored backgrounds in place of the 19th-century ones.
At the start you meet sculpture: crucifixes in tuff, bas-reliefs and the statues of the Master of Sant'Anastasia, often from collapsed or destroyed churches. Among the boldest rooms is the one with sculptures that are not famous but very expressive: a basin, a sarcophagus, a mutilated fragment.
The coup de théâtre is the equestrian statue of Cangrande della Scala, brought here from the Scaliger Tombs and placed on a raised support, at the most important point of the route. Cangrande smiles in the saddle of his horse. The museum also holds his sword, found in the sarcophagus.
In the residential wing is Gothic and Veneto painting: Pisanello's Madonna of the Quail, Michelino da Besozzo's Madonna of the Rose Garden, Jacopo Bellini's large crucifix. Then the Renaissance, with a Madonna by Giovanni Bellini, Filippo Lippi's Pietà, a Madonna by Crivelli and Andrea Mantegna's Holy Family.
The Young Man with a Drawing of a Puppet by Giovan Francesco Caroto is a famous portrait that plays with the gaze of whoever looks at it. Then come the 16th and 17th centuries, with early works by Veronese, Tintoretto, Farinati, and Tiepolo with Heliodorus Plundering the Temple.
Before the entrance there is a simple but carefully kept garden: a rectangular lawn between two hedges, with two shallow pools of water that at certain hours of the day reflect the castle. Scarpa thought of it looking at two puddles formed on nylon sheets at the building site.
On the evening of November 19, 2015 three robbers stole 17 works, including Mantegna, Rubens and five Tintorettos. A few months later the Carabinieri arrested 12 people and the paintings were found in Ukraine, in the Odessa region, as they were about to cross into Moldova.
Don't miss
• Cangrande's equestrian statue.
• Pisanello's Madonna of the Quail.
• Caroto's Young Man with a Drawing of a Puppet.
• The garden with the pools.
Did you know?
• In 1974 the museum bought all 662 of Scarpa's project drawings: today the archive holds the complete documentation of the work.
• The castle was damaged by the bombings of January 4, 1945, and a few months later the fleeing Germans blew up the bridge.
Scarpa worked here from the late 1950s and considered castle and museum a single organism. He set medieval materials, tuff, pebbles and brick, beside exposed reinforced concrete and iron, and left the marks of earlier eras visible.
Every work got a place designed to fit it: tuff brackets for the polyptychs, small tuff cubes for the crosses, new frames on colored backgrounds in place of the 19th-century ones.
At the start you meet sculpture: crucifixes in tuff, bas-reliefs and the statues of the Master of Sant'Anastasia, often from collapsed or destroyed churches. Among the boldest rooms is the one with sculptures that are not famous but very expressive: a basin, a sarcophagus, a mutilated fragment.
The coup de théâtre is the equestrian statue of Cangrande della Scala, brought here from the Scaliger Tombs and placed on a raised support, at the most important point of the route. Cangrande smiles in the saddle of his horse. The museum also holds his sword, found in the sarcophagus.
In the residential wing is Gothic and Veneto painting: Pisanello's Madonna of the Quail, Michelino da Besozzo's Madonna of the Rose Garden, Jacopo Bellini's large crucifix. Then the Renaissance, with a Madonna by Giovanni Bellini, Filippo Lippi's Pietà, a Madonna by Crivelli and Andrea Mantegna's Holy Family.
The Young Man with a Drawing of a Puppet by Giovan Francesco Caroto is a famous portrait that plays with the gaze of whoever looks at it. Then come the 16th and 17th centuries, with early works by Veronese, Tintoretto, Farinati, and Tiepolo with Heliodorus Plundering the Temple.
Before the entrance there is a simple but carefully kept garden: a rectangular lawn between two hedges, with two shallow pools of water that at certain hours of the day reflect the castle. Scarpa thought of it looking at two puddles formed on nylon sheets at the building site.
On the evening of November 19, 2015 three robbers stole 17 works, including Mantegna, Rubens and five Tintorettos. A few months later the Carabinieri arrested 12 people and the paintings were found in Ukraine, in the Odessa region, as they were about to cross into Moldova.
Don't miss
• Cangrande's equestrian statue.
• Pisanello's Madonna of the Quail.
• Caroto's Young Man with a Drawing of a Puppet.
• The garden with the pools.
Did you know?
• In 1974 the museum bought all 662 of Scarpa's project drawings: today the archive holds the complete documentation of the work.
• The castle was damaged by the bombings of January 4, 1945, and a few months later the fleeing Germans blew up the bridge.