Sixty-one boards by Noemi Scarabelli, hung at the height she worked at. She cut her grounds with a palette knife and then filled the cut with sand. The last room is the eleven she refused to sell.
Everything the 1926 dig under Via dei Serpi turned up, together for the first time since the crates were nailed shut: the apse fragment, 212 loose tesserae swept off the church floor, two wall sections lifted whole, and the site notebook of the foreman who found them.
Sala I — II · ticketed separately, €8
Teodoro Branca stopped painting faces in 1931 and painted hands instead. Twenty-two canvases, nine of them never shown, borrowed back from the families who commissioned them.
Sala III · included in the €14 ticketTwo from the store, one borrowed, one from a living artist. We have kept to it since the board set it down in 1958, and the catalogues are all in the study room.
A keeper proposes. The board asks what it costs and what comes off the wall to make room. Three in four proposals stop here.
Every work gets a condition report. Anything that cannot take 50 lux for four months stays in the store and is shown as a photograph instead.
The whole show stands on the floor for a week in the order we think it reads. It almost never survives that week unchanged.
Beside the work, not under it, at 152 centimetres, 60 words at most. If a label needs more than 60 words the hang is wrong.
Two from the store, one borrowed, one from somebody still working. Dates are set two years ahead and we have never moved one.