Yesterday’s blog, https://theoldmortuary.design/2023/11/28/734-theoldmortuary-ponders/ , was all about an exhibition squeezed into our journey to a railway station that was absolutely the sort of thing we love to visit.

Todays blog subject is almost the complete opposite. Easy Jet decided at fairly late notice to cancel our flight home, giving us additional time in Venice until an alternative flight with a different carrier. Next door but one to our hotel there was an exhibition that would probably never be on a ‘must-visit’ list.

A replication of a 19th Century Venetian Portrait exhibition last curated together in 1920. Proximity to our hotel was key as we had agreed to meet some fellow abandoned travellers to share a water taxi when we discovered we were all on the same alternative flight. So we walked around Fondazione Prada the central bigger building in the picture above and visited Ca’ Pesaro the smaller white palazzo.

We could easily have filled our time in the Modern Art galleries but the deeply pigmented colours of the walls of the portrait exhibition lured us in.

Who wouldn’t be lured in?

What a revelation. The vibrant wall colours absolutely focussed the mind on the gloriousness of traditional portraiture. The anonymity, to us, of the subjects somehow made the whole exhibition easier to view. We even noticed an anomaly.

Real credit to the curators for making unknown portraits interesting. Just one room differed in layout from the 1920 exhibition. Maurizio Pelegrin, an installation artist born in Venice created a space with a very different feel. Like a squirt of lemon on a rich and unctuous meal. Just perfect.