The Casa del Mantegna, a masterpiece of Renaissance architecture and an enigmatic building in many respects, from the uncertain attribution of its design to the original function of its space, presents itself as a structure of great geometric rigor marked by a persistent sense of incompleteness. The central circular courtyard, possibly conceived as a covered space and a place of representation, together with the discontinuity between the rooms and their weak relationship with the city and the garden, contributes to defining an architecture suspended between domestic scale and museological character. Even the radical twentieth-century restoration, while restoring a unified image of the building, left many of its spatial ambiguities unresolved. 

Rather than imposing a single itinerary, the exhibition proposes a plurality of paths that reflect the fragmented nature of the house. Through measured curatorial choices, the opening of window panels to allow natural light to enter, the visual reactivation of doors and secondary passages, and the enhancement of often-overlooked architectural elements such as the coffered wooden ceilings or the high-level openings in the rooms of the northern wing, the installation connects the courtyard with the sequence of interior spaces and suggests continuity between inside and outside, between the house, the garden, and the city. 

The research materials on display, models, drawings, sketches, and interpretive devices, make the design process visible and contribute to a layered reading of the building, highlighting the dialogue established between Andrew Berman’s work and the architectural “mystery” of the Casa del Mantegna. What emerges is the idea of an exhibition shaped by listening to the space that hosts it: a “show within a show,” in which historic architecture and contemporary intervention illuminate one another.