La Nota Mancante opens at Palazzo Valier and treats scent as a museum medium

A new Venice foundation is opening with the argument that a museum room should smell like something specific. La Nota Mancante, the inaugural exhibition of the Fondazione Maddalena Di Giacomo, treats fragrance the way most institutions treat oil paint: as a primary medium, commissioned, attributed, and meant to be read.

The exhibition is curated by Alexandra Mazzanti, who also founded and directs the new foundation. Sensory curation comes from the art historian Caro Verbeek, whose research has tracked the historical role of scent inside the painted image. The fragrances themselves are developed by International Flavours & Fragrances under creative director Bernardo Fleming, with perfumers Marcelo Zapata and Eleonora Drago composing in dialogue with specific rooms and specific artworks. The olfactory vessels are by Juli About. Nothing is diffused as ambient background; every note is attributed and intended to be read alongside the works it surrounds.

Courtesy Fondazione Maddalena Di Giacomo

The foundation behind the show is named for Maddalena Di Giacomo, the Roman pianist and publisher who founded the Dorothy Circus Gallery with her daughter Alexandra Mazzanti in 2007, and who died ten years before this opening. The Fondazione exists to extend her unfinished project, the Petit Musée de la Femme, and to redirect what had been a private cultural enterprise into a non-profit institution open to the public. Mazzanti chairs and directs the new entity; the gallery she co-founded with her mother is its principal supporter and the bridge through which the contemporary artists in the show were placed in conversation with the historical collection.

The venue is Palazzo Valier, on the piano nobile a few steps from the Rialto Bridge, in the building where the Renaissance painter Giorgione is said to have lived and died. The interior restoration was led by British designer Rachel Chudley, who treated each room as an inhabited narrative rather than a neutral exhibition space. Colour, textile and architecture were worked together in a register that borrows from English Heritage but stays inside the Venetian palette of the palazzo. The result is a foundation that reads as a house rather than a white cube, and the show has been built to match: each room has its own theme, palette and identity, with spaces dedicated explicitly to fragrance and alchemy, including an Alchemical Lab and a room titled The Wish.

The exhibition’s headline work is High, a 2026 olfactory installation by the Belgian artist Peter de Cupere, sited in the Jeux d’Eau room whose windows look out onto the Grand Canal. A suspended cloud holds a fragrance composed from herbs historically associated with witchcraft and rituals of levitation. Visitors stand under it and read the work both as a literal piece of weather and as a coded reference to bodies that were not allowed to leave the ground. De Cupere himself frames the piece as “a temporary disengagement from gravity, clarity, and fixed meaning.”

The roster is the show’s other argument. La Nota Mancante runs Mark Ryden, Marion Peck, Esao Andrews, Brad Kunkle and a wing of the Pop Surrealist generation that the Dorothy Circus Gallery helped introduce to Italian collections, against a long historical line that includes Vilhelm Hammershøi, Marie Laurencin, Vivian Maier, Claude Lalanne, the seventeenth-century painter Alessandro Turchi (known as L’Orbetto), and a roster of European miniaturists from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The fragrances move between the contemporary and historical groupings; so do the sound cues. The point is not the period of an object but the way it lands in a body that has already smelled and heard something else in the room before it.

The framing concept is the “alchemy of memory”: the proposition that memory rarely returns as a complete image, but as a scent without a name, a sound without a source, the emotional residue of a face. The exhibition takes its title from Isabella d’Este’s Impresa delle Pause, the silent intervals between notes she chose as a personal emblem. La Nota Mancante is, on that reading, an exhibition about the note no one plays. Each room is shaped so the visitor walks through both the audible work and the inaudible space around it.

Courtesy Fondazione Maddalena Di Giacomo

The Fondazione’s stated mission, set by a scientific committee, is to study memory in dialogue with art, with particular attention to neurodivergence and to multisensory access. The programme will include artist residencies, concerts, symposia, scientific and literary publications, archives, and partnerships with universities, academies and conservatories. The intent is for the foundation to function as a working institution rather than a single exhibition; La Nota Mancante is the opening statement, not the entire programme.

The Fondazione also positions itself inside a long-standing claim about art and mental health. The proposition is that aesthetic experience, when arranged across sight, sound and scent at the same time, becomes a usable psychological tool: a space in which grief, loss and the kind of emotional fragility that does not survive ordinary conversation can be safely examined. The curators read the foundation as a sanctuary in that sense, which is also how they frame the rooms given over to fragrance, alchemy and the building’s old connection to the eastern Mediterranean.

The opening is timed to the 61st Venice Art Biennale and held at the palazzo on the evening of 21 May. Above the Grand Canal, Peter de Cupere’s cloud will release its herbs into a room of guests who have arrived expecting paint, and who will discover, before the night is out, that the most important note in La Nota Mancante is the one they cannot see.

Tags: Alexandra Mazzanti, art, Fondazione Maddalena Di Giacomo, La Nota Mancante, Mark Ryden, news, Peter de Cupere, Venice