Museo Vela - the Museum

THE MUSEUM

History
The building
The Museo Vela, an artist's home
Die Legate an die Eidgenossenschaft
The recent restoration
The Park

History

The Vela Museum (ill. 1) originates from a bequest made by the painter Spartaco Vela (1854-1895), son of the well-known sculptor Vincenzo Vela (1820-1891). In 1892 Spartaco donated to the Swiss Confederation the villa built by his father on a promontory north of the Ticinese village of Ligornetto, where the Vela family originally came from, together with all the works of art held in it.

	When Spartaco died the legacy was accepted by the Federal Council, thus becoming the first private collection to be acquired by the Confederation, which in 1898 opened the villa to the public as the «Museo Vela». It was the first museum to be established in the Ticino, and the second in the Federation after the National Swiss Museum in Zurich. The Vela Museum is today administered by the Federal Department of Culture.
ill. 1 Museo Vela

The building

The villa was rebuilt in 1862-65 by Vincenzo Vela, one of the leading European sculptors of the nineteenth century, and a prominent exponent of the realist movement in sculpture.Designed by Cipriano Ajmetti (ill. 2), architect to the Savoy Court in Turin, it was to serve as a private residence (ill. 3), as the artist's studio (ill. 4), and as a museum for the original plaster casts of Vincenzo's own works.


ill.2 Cipriano Ajmetti	ill. 3 Mantlepiece mirror	ill. 4 Studio Vela

Thus the Vela Museum was a typical nineteenth-century artist's home-cum-museum, along the lines of Canova's museum of casts and shrine at Possagno or of the Thorwaldsen Museum in Copenhagen. By comparison, though, it represented a further and perhaps more marked development, so keen was the artist's personal involvement (at the time of its building he was still a young man) in the realisation of an ideal focused on the glorification and sanctification of his own art, presented to the public in his own «private museum».

The Museo Vela, an artist's home

It is not therefore out of place to put the Villa Vela among the most spectacular and important museum-homes of the nineteenth century. The artist, with his wife and son, came to live there permanently after leaving Turin in 1867. From then on, the villa was frequently visited and described, for the most part in glowing terms.
Especially admired was its central octagon, known as the «plaster-cast hall», where Vincenzo's copious output was displayed and in particular his monumental portraits of heroes of the Unification of Italy (ill. 5 and ill. 6).

		It was soon nicknamed the «pantheon», with allusions to the sacredness of art and the artist, but also to the sculptural representation of many illustrious Italian politicians and cultural figures.
ill. 5 Vittorio Emanuele II	ill. 6 C. Cavour

Die Legate an die Eidgenossenschaft

On the death of Vincenzo's son, Spartaco, likewise an artist and painter, and of his elder brother Lorenzo (1812-1897), a gifted and unfortunately still little-known sculptor-decorator and animal-painter-sculptor who lived in Milan, the works of these artists also became part ofthe bequest and hence of the villa, as did their own private collections of paintings by contemporary Lombard and Piedmont artists. These, added to Vincenzo's personal collection, make up a picture-gallery of nineteenth-century northern Italian paintings of considerable value. Along with the monumental plaster-cast collection, they form the second most important group of works to be seen at the Vela Museum.

The recent restoration

The villa underwent several alterations, particularly in the second decade of the twentieth century.

	During its latest restoration, the architect Mario Botta converted the artist's nineteenth-century residence into a modern museum-home, equipped with all the indispensable requisites of today's museums. He also restored the octagonal hall (ill. 8) to its former centrality, and created a new type of display system for Vincenzo Vela's monumental works.
ill. 8 Octagonal hall

The Park

The villa is surrounded by a fine park, which can be enjoyed by the public during the months in which the Museum is open. The original features of the park have been re-created, notably the formal part in the Italian style towards the village of Ligornetto (ill. 9), the broad sloping English lawn (ill. 10), and the chestnut copse north of the villa, near the natural pond (ill. 11) which in the artist's day was actually a small lake. The park today also has an interesting camellia shrubbery (ill. 12), many of whose specimens are botanical and thus little-known, plus a citrus grove with very rare species of lemon-trees.


ill. 9 Villa with garden	ill. 10 Drive with cypresses	ill. 12 Camellia	ill. 68 Citrus groves	ill. 69 Citrus medica « Digitata »