There is a scene in Brideshead Revisited when the two young men visit Lord Marchmain in Venice. When asked who is his favourite painter, Charles Ryder replies, ‘Bellini’. The old man asks ‘which one?’ deflated, the young man has to admit he thought there was only one.
There was, of course, a whole clan of talented Bellinis and I wouldn’t be surprised if Mario Bellini, the architect, is a descendent of those brilliant Venetians. He has designed very sophisticated, beautiful alterations to Roy Grounds’ National Gallery of Victoria (NGV).
Bellini trained as an architect and became famous for his chairs—used in the gallery—and for the styling of industrial products. Bellini evolved into an architectural force over the last ten years, mostly for buildings in Japan. Italians are masters at exhibitions and altering old buildings to display works of art—after all, they have so many of both, and displaying things well is part of their architectural bella figura.
Carlo Scarpa was the master who started a museum trend continued by Bellini at St Kilda Road. Scarpa didn’t design spaces just to provide generalised good conditions for viewing any sort of artworks, he designed them with particular works of art in mind and their precise placement, display and lighting within the space.
The best Italian design is in a totally modern idiom so one can always see exactly what parts of the building are original and which have changed. There are none of the false attitudes about ‘keeping in keeping’ that inhibit most Australian designers when confronting old buildings. Italians have no inhibitions about combining modern stainless steel and glass with the original, more traditional materials. Scarpa’s renovations and museum installations in the Castello Sforza in Milan, the Castelvecchio in Verona and the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, for example, are now over 30 years old, yet they still stand as touchstones of elegant and beautiful museum display.
Bellini has inherited these attitudes to display and aided by revolutions in glass and lighting technologies, has built on them.
Roy Grounds designed the St Kilda Road building in 1959 and it was opened in 1968. Grounds claimed that the design had been influenced by the Royal Palace (not a museum) at Capodimonte—outside Naples—and there are indeed strong similarities in the plan
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In his excellent guide, Melbourne Architecture, Philip Goad reminds us that, ‘the project caused the 1962 split between Grounds and his erstwhile partners Robin Boyd and Fred