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Brave new world

Roderick Conway Morris

Wednesday, 7th May 2008

Rome and the Barbarians

Between 1983 and 2005 Palazzo Grassi was Fiat’s cultural flagship on the Grand Canal. It regularly featured ambitious shows on ancient civilisations: the Celts, Etruscans, Mayas, and so on. The French businessman François Pinault, owner of a luxury-goods empire that includes Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, took over the Palazzo nearly three years ago. He has employed it to show parts of his collection of modern and contemporary art, but has signally failed to attract the crowds that flocked to the Fiat events. Meanwhile Pinault has secured from the Venice municipality a long lease of the Dogana, or old customs house buildings at the mouth of the Grand Canal, which, when restored, will exhibit some of his modern collection longer term.

Rome and the Barbarians is therefore Pinault’s first excursion into the territory of ancient civilisations once fruitfully cultivated by Fiat. The Turin-based motor-car manufacturer recognised its limitations when it came to interpreting archaeological remains and ancient history and called in international teams of first-class scholars, whose contributions were expertly co-ordinated by the cultural director Paolo Viti. Pinault, on the other hand, has entrusted both the intellectual and organisational input to his managerial deputies.

Jean-Jacques Aillagon is a career fonctionnaire, a former culture minister under Chirac and executive director of Palazzo Grassi (his latest appointment is as president of Versailles museum). He is the curator of the exhibition and editor of the main catalogue and of a small exhibition guide. The catalogue has nearly 700 pages, essays by 120 authors and weighs over 7lbs (3.25 kilos). The essays cover a wide range of Roman and barbarian topics, some figuring in the show, some not. There is no overall table of contents, no consecutive descriptions of the exhibits, and matching them to the text and illustrations is difficult, sometimes impossible. The much shorter exhibition guide has texts by Aillagon but provides only patchy information on the themes and artefacts.