Circular bas-relief sculpture in the style of baroque coats of arms. The work however, is radically contemporary and in the characteristic and personal style of the master Mario Eremita.
Dimensions of the artwork: diameter is 45 cm, thickness 7 cm.
These photos above are from two different architectural works, the first is the Palace they built specifically for the International Film Festival in occasion of the first edition in 1932. It is a building of evident modernist style harmoniously contrasting with the Lido’s architectures more tipically Art Nouveau or naturalistic-organic.
The second instead represents the Casinò Palace built the following year. This building despite being in the modernist tradition it has radically the aspect of the fascist architecture.
The redevelopment project is dedicated to the Palace that was the Casinò and that today has an accessory function to the International Film Festival and also for other international events. This is because the other building was already modified in 1952 when it was completely disguised making the original facade invisible. The facade was covered by a technical structure suitable for Film Festival temporary setups.
This concrete colossus covered in travertine stands facing the sea in its fascist historicize forms. Time has taken it over the architecture of the island of Lido; even if the other best have a completely different intention. Indeed this is one of the lands of the organic architecture from the early twentieth century, influenced by Art Nouveau.
The Palace that used to be the Casinò now it is a strong contrast insert and due to the abandonment of the adjacent square, it took on the appearance of a wreck adrift in a sea of degradation and indifference.
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| The square in front of the Palace of Casinò in desperate conditions due to the so-called “hole”, remained in total abandonment for several years. | The square in front of the Palace of Casinò as it was used during the past years, a banal car parcking lot. |
The restoration of the structure has begun but this work has to be the opportunity to introduce an element of contemporary art in Venezia. An insert able to give a present message about the socio-cultural rebirth of the town and in particular of the “golden island”, that everyone hopes for. Cleaning up or change some marble ties won’t be enough. For better or for worse make a public work in its substantial constituents, in the spirit of pure physiological necessity, cannot be within the scope of those who administer a reality like the Venetian one, with broad and universal perspectives, with the attention and interest of every people on the planet to his facts.
These kind of places have eminently to perform a guiding function, symbolic and ideal. They have to image a possible future and so the have to be yet a reference for the present into the everyone’s imagination. You cannot reach it simply maintaining or conserving what was but you need also to propose what it could be and mean. You therefore need something new, concrete and stable that creates other perspectives and possibilities for reflection. You need what will be a reference point for the community for a representation of a present time for the celebration of facts and moments that mark the wonderful place in which they take place ( Venezia and its Lido ), as every theory of architecture and urban planning teaches.
In this sense it is urgent to create something impressive, which is up to the grandeur of the Palace that once belonged to the Casinò. Something that is in dialogue and in contrast with the austere and authoritarian rhetoric of that one; something that exalts it and, at the same time, sweetens it by transferring it from distant times, whose memory should not be forgotten, to the present times which too often are forgotten that they too will, in the future, be the past.
A past that risks remaining without any valid memory, given the mentality that persists in limiting itself to ordinary maintenance and conservation ( when it goes well ), as if today we can no longer dare.
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| The Palace’s ghost that once belonged to the Casinò, surronded by the degradation of the “hole” of the Lido. | The Palace that once belonged to the Casinò after the arrangement of the square with the stone cladding. The redevelopment work has begun. |
A late summer evening I was looking at the Palace that once belonged to the Casinò and I saw the possibility of artistic redevelopment. These are the six wide windows in front of the central part of the structure. Today these are mere windows which for many days a year remain closed with frightening shutters.
These six openings offer great possibilities, they are much more stimulating and of public value and interest than the facing square. The square in fact is already used for predictable but discreet street furniture, namely the level fountain with vertical jets.
The square context give us the opportunity to the six openings to be the fundamental referring point, now it is neglected ignored and downgraded to simple rank of “window with shutter”.
Have also a look to the serious state of consumption and deterioration of the fixtures themselves and the presence of many broken glasses.
The windows have to be cleared!
In these openings the artist will project six special stained glass windows and he will make them in collaboration with the glass workshop. The result will be of high level and of dazzling evocative and symbolic power. It will no longer be the usual “sculpture in the square”; but a tribute to the history, the art, the cinema, the music, the light and the community of Venezia.
This artwork will transform the palace itself in a artistic example and will ideally build it again as a fluorescent and light symbol, visible from miles away at sea.
Have a look here above a possible suggestion of the restoration of the Palace that once belonged to the Casinò, it is an external point of view. Well, as elegant as it is, you can appreciate immediately how much is anonymous, impersonal and modest this idea that conceives openings only as such, occupying them with monastic tents.
We have the duty to imprint a strong and effective, personal intention, with powerful emotional qualities, because here we are in the presence of the arts, we are not frequenting a “furnished room for rent” here.
No contemporary artwork here in Venezia will be able to match the synthesis between artistic need and integration with the urban social context and with the manifestations of international ambition that take place periodically in these places. We cannot ignore these aspects to produce a simple building restoration or decorative job!
That can work in any street in any country. Not here!
We are in the center of the world’s attention, we risk losing this same attention with many harmful behaviors of insensitivity and inattention and with the birth of new symbols and markets ( Dubai for example ).
Here in a few short lines i am exposing a possibility with very broad implications. This is not the usual work of the artist put in the square, often more in celebration of the author himself than a real vision of the world.
It is a material and ideal restoration of an architectural context which reuses some of its parts for a further and superior purpose while remaining unchanged in its lines. These will be not simple holes for light but themselves emissaries of light filtered by their own crafts and humanistic arts of our millenary culture. A material and ideal restoration!
In this case the artistic and artisanal intervention would not be simple aesthetic embellishment. Instead it would be a rethinking in scenographic terms and enrichment of symbols and meanings that would take the context beyond a banal austerity. This austerity has no logic in contemporary times and it is in contradiction with the way we use now this place: in particular for the “Venice International Film Festival” but also for the message aimed outside the lagoon itself towards the world.
Let’s imagine these windows, illuminated with the most technological systems so as to appear animated by their own light, an intense but not blinding light, moderated and colored by the artist’s drawings. This light floods the square and is dispersed towards the sea like a large projector dedicated to the imagination and the power of the arts to represent every reality until it goes beyond it by building other universes of pure fantasy.
This operation of redevelopment and symbolic reassignment is therefore capable of producing an interesting synergy, involving glass and linghting craftsmen in the creation, in a concrete undertaking dedicated precisely to that art which made light its driving force.
Proportions: the importance of the former Casinò Palace in the urban and naturalistic context of the Lido di Venezia can be appreciated in this aerial view.
The building is therefore equipped with a large ideal cinematographic projection of delicate and persistent light that amplifies its function and enriches, by motivating it, its presence.
This idea develops and gives shape and real meaning to the logical connection between ART GLASS LIGHT CINEMA, in a virtuous cyclical sense. Art deals with cinema which has as its material component the immateriality of light which has the concrete need of glass to represent itself in all its components.
This document introduces a possible and realistically feasible vision of the artistic redevelopment of the Palace that once belonged to the Casinò. Assuming that art, in its formal uselessness, has a profound and irreplaceable function and is a daily part of our existence.
Below we can appreciate the project of the master Mario Eremita. The guiding principle is complexity. It is the basis of our world, in which events follow one another in a whirlwind. Art cannot avoid and must assume multiple levels of reading and aesthetic-formal references to keep up and not become a place of small banal and opportunistic pseudo-militant slogans, penalizing the universality of language and reducing it to a mere storytelling exercise.
Here comes that artist who internalizes the symbolic vocation of places and elaborates with his own experience, with history, with the lesson of the infinite past-present ( art being a phenomenon trascendent to ordinary time ).
Unmistakable, emotional, unbearably light, ironic, where the crudeness of his apocalyptic painting can only be perceived in delicate distance, where the elastic and voluptuous sign prevails over the material of the colour, Eremita’s hand is suited to the principle of complexity that must characterise the work.
The idea that art should convey a message is poor and debilitating, insufficient. Art must provide lasting sensations and symbolic references, standing the test of time; it must provide aesthetic and cultural richness before any moralistic or celebratory intent.
Eremita, with his abstract process focused on human forms, evokes Greek civilization which is purified of its historical pose but relearned. The nine muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, rise again between the lines of this luminescent narration, they are in the world and in the universal human narration, beyond the shackles of time. The symbols of the Serenissima civilization merge with them, the lion of San Marco, the personification of Venezia, the gondola, the iron of the gondola. Let us therefore delve deeper into the iconographic reading of the individual stained glass windows.
We start in the literary sense of reading ( italian language ) from top left towards right.
Stained glass window number 1 “Dream and Fantasy”, the project is executed without the final color. The panel represents Terpsichore, muse of dance and choral lyric, Erato muse of love poetry, Polyhymnia muse of sacred song. Erato plays an imaginary string instrument while Polyhymnia strums it to the tune of song. The instrument in its shapes and dimensions is part of the original pictorial fantasy of the master Mario Eremita. Terpsichore, with a tambourine and a twirling stick, like today’s majorettes, dances up to the crescent moon, symbol of rebirth and fertility, in this context of the fertility of fantastic ideas. The composition is dedicated to the side of dream and fantasy. All the figures are floating.
Stained glass window number 1
“Dream and Fantasy”
Stained glass window number 2 “Leone Marciano and Venezia”, the project is executed without the final color. The panel represents the Lion of San Marco and the personification of Venezia.
The Lion of San Marco is seen in frontal section with its wings symmetrically spread. It is not represented ad in the “moeca” but as in the classic flag even if from a different and original point of view. Yet here, with this absolute symmetry and this pose completely similar to that of a Kouros from archaic Greece, it symbolizes the balance of the Venetian institutions. Below the Lion on the left are the personification of Venezia and on the right the book resting on a capital and the dove. This is because Venezia and the values of peace are subjected to the symbol of Marco the Evangelist, protector and spiritual guide.
This stained glass window has a central and apical position to remember in ceremonial order, the territory, the institutions, the values and the identity of the people.
Stained glass window number 2
“Leone Marciano and Venezia”
Stained glass window number 3 “Action and imagination”, the project is executed without the final color. The table represents the gondola, the rower, the musician, the muse Urania who supports the celestial globe on which a goose and a motorcycle fly by without wheels and with two figures on board.
The fulcrum of the scene is Urania, represented by the female figure holding the celestial globe. She is the muse of astronomy and didactic poetry. In this sense she embodies literature and cinematography that narrate science with imagination, therefore science fiction. The figures in the globe are a formal reference to Spielberg’s genius but they also have their own meaning. The goose is an animal related to the goddess Juno and symbolizes curiosity and attention, the centaurs on the motorbike that flies without wheels intepret the epic spirit of adventure, the ideal instinct of discovery, the love for the search for unknown destinations.
Gondola rower and musician accompany guide and support the scene and it seems that everything that happens above is without their knowledge; in fact it is so because they represent the conscious action which is the minor part of the human essence, they are what is known, the rest is all that is imagined.
Stained glass winwod number 3
“Action and imagination”
Stained glass window number 4 “the Cinema and the Music”, the project is executed without the final color. The panel represents the muse Calliope, two puttos with theatrical masks and a goose, a violinist. Calliope and the puttos are on a horn of plenty. This muse inspires the epic poem, the narration of the deeds of heroes and heroines, the adventures of corsairs, merchants, discovereres, the brave men who face life and difficulties in search of their ideal dream or of fame, glory, power, success, love, wealth. Here she has a camera turned to the east where the sun rises and, also a metaphorical sense, where the narratives arise. Calliope is sensual, indeed, glamorous, dressed only in veils in the manner of Salomé, just as sensual and glamorous is the show. Next to her are two puttos.
The first on the left has a horse-head mask in his hand: this is wit, the force that elevates the intellect. The second on the right wears a bizarre hat, laughs and has a goose in his arms: this is irony, which embraces the symbol of attention ( goose ) that he claims especially for himself.
The horn of plenty is the wish of abundance for these values. The violinist is a tribute to the music that always accompanies the deeds but also a tribute to Marc Chagall who saw in that instrument the great secrets of life and death.
Stained glass window number 4
“The Cinema and the Music”
Stained glass window number 5 “Comic Mask and Tragic Mask”, the project is executed with some suggestions of color finishing and lead. The panel represents the Muses Thalia and Melpomene on board a dreamlike gondola whose rower has abstract traits and, under an immense, almost fluid iron, a joyful putto hovers who seems to want to play, mockingly, with the whole scene. Thalia is the comic or comedy mask. She is smiling and in an upright pose, the mask has rounded shapes that recall a rosebud that is about to open.
She is the joke, the misunderstanding, the plot, the stereotyped figures of the masks of the Comedia de l’Arte, the good fortune of lovers. She dispenses optimistic promises like those of the bud that will be a flower.
Melpomene is the tragic or dramatic mask. She is contrite and in a relaxed pose, the mask has angular shapes that recall the symbol of femininity. She is the most real human story, studded with suffering, broken dreams, desperate impossible tormented loves, plots, dark omens, conflicts. She prefers the thriller, the unpredictability and imponderability of the future, luck. She dispenses uncertainties and mysteries, she is the charm that disturbs the female, the embrace does not allow laughter.
The putto is the innocence of childhood that, for that very brief period of man, lives unaware and indifferent to both muses, intent only on seeing the world.
Stained glass window number 5
“Comic Mask Tragic Mask”
Stained glass window number 6 “Acting and Mime”, the project is executed without the color finishing. The panel represents Clio, the muse of history and epic song together with the putto with a puppet, both on a capital. At the bottom is Euterpe, the muse of lyric poetry. The muses in this panel are primary inspirers of the actor’s craft. Euterpe patronizes lyric poetry and therefore the ability to sing and dramatize poetic compositions or prose. She plays the classical flute. Clio holds a large parchment in her hands and is the one who makes famous, transforms the good actor, the good director, the good artist, the one who demonstrates the “know-how” into the great personality who, in time, will become a semi-divine creature, courted and loved by his audience, identified as a familiar figure.
The putto with the puppet reminds us all that, between the profession and the celebrity, between the merits and the honors, there is always the ambiguous role of the mime, that figure blurred between reality and fiction, which makes the artist capable of identifying himself, the artist in fact is also the one who is able to empathetically “feel” the world around him.
Euterpe is under the capital while the putto and Clio are on the capital; this is because, in order, the “know-how” would come first and then the honor of celebrity.
Stained glass window number 6
“Action and Mime”
Stained glass window number 7 “Verbal Culture”, the project is executed without the color finishing. The panel represents a large basket on the shoulders of a girl. The basket is full of loose sheets of paper that the wind lifts and scatters in the sky, above it floats a putto with a kite.
It is the symbolic personification of culture transmitted verbally. A fundamental aspect of civilization that has spanned millennia, structuring the imagination of all the peoples of the world. The girl wears a headdress in the shape of a gondola iron, an original idea of the artist to pay homage to the first woman in the world to graduate, who was the Venetian Elena Lucrezia Cornaro. The kite is an important detail because it indicates that the desire to soar in complete freedom in the universe of knowledge has no meaning if this desire is not supported by good; moreover, it was the Venetian Marco Polo who brought to the west the news of this playful custom born in the Far East.
Stained glass window number 7
“Verbal Culture”
Stained glass window number 8 “Vivaldi and Casanova”, the project is executed without the color finishing. Placed centrally here is a double portrait-monument dedicated to these immense Venetian personalities who today have great influence in the collective imagination and who will have it perhaps forever, being their artistic commitment aimed at a universal modernity.
Vivaldi, risked oblivion and was forgotten for over 200 years. Thanks to Alberto Gentili and Faustino Curlo, Vivaldi’s work was not completely lost. Venezia, still, lacks a monument to this fundamental composer.
Casanova had many merits, literary and political, he was a complex and multifaceted personality and is, together with the red priest, inextricably linked to the image of Venezia itself ( and fortunately so! ). There is also a lack of memorial recognition for him in Venezia. Both of these figures, so complex and also controversial, according to the artist Mario Eremita, fully embody the spirit of the universal arts and here, in particular, of the cinematographic arts.
Casanova: artist, anti-hero, shrewd, carefree, crafty, resourceful, with a thousand daring adventures and a profound intensity and nobility of soul. Vivaldi, an artist of powerful talent, a precursor and reference for many other greats, creator of immortal symphonies, envied and opposed by many mediocre people, almost lost in the abysses of time. They are two perfect subjects for the cinema!
Below them two baute ( death masks ), celebrate the victory of the two artists against oblivion. In particular the second one, playing the trumpet, recalls a sort of divine judgment that restores balance. Above them a crescent moon supported by two girls and a kitten. The moon symbolized fertility, in this context fertility in the artworks. The crescent moon, not facing east or west, is an omen of eternity. The moon is supported by girls, who were an important part of the life of both artists, these are Emancipation, who is in front of the moon and shows a breast and Verecondia, who is a symbol of vitality and joy.
Stained glass window number 8
“Vivaldi and Casanova”
Stained grass window number 9 “Written Culture”, the project is executed without the color finishing but with the traces of the hypothetical lead seals. The panel represents a large basket on the shoulders of a young girl. The basket is full of open books, above it floats a putto holding balloons. This is the symbolic personification of culture handed down in writing. A tribute to all the anonymous scholars who allowed the knowledge of the past not to be lost in the folds of history. The girl wears a headdress in the shape of a gondola iron, an original idea of the artist to pay homage to Hypatia of Alexandria, martyr of freedom of thought.
Balloons remind us how tenuous the boundary of memory is and how only a very thin thread holds together the conquests of codified knowledge; the little boy holding those balloons reminds us that childhood curiosity is needed to investigate the world.
Stained glass window number 9
“Written Culture”
Below are two suggestions of the result of the redevelopment of the facade of the Palace that once belonged to the Casinò of Lido di Venezia, today used for events of public interest including the Venice International Film Festival. The artworks, rich in symbolic, cultural and aesthetic references from the past to the present and executed with a hand of evolved sensitivity, do not occupy any urban space, indeed, they are part of a functional device such as the windows of the building itself ( therefore also having the prosaic “use value”, always appreciated by pragmatists ).
They are placed in a position of complete enjoyment even though they are not in the geometric center of the three-dimensional spaces. The opportunity to make them luminescent allows them to assume an indicative meaning and a formidable emotional capacity.
With this solution we can introduce the work of art of our time into a context in which the spaces are already intended for essential practical needs ( the prefabricated cinema hall in the free part of the square ), valorising a building of historical significance without any distortion of the building itself or its facade ( for example by imposing sculptural works on the space in front of it ) and indeed, enriching it with a characheristic that, in the celebratory intentions, it had expressed only on a potential level.
In fact, the monumentality of the central facade was substantially annihilated by the banality of the simple windows, leaving the celebratory role limited to the load-bearing structures alone.
