The Venice Biennale is the international art exhibition that the city has staged since 1895, when a first edition followed the statute of 1894 that sanctioned its international character (Martini, 2020). Four moments shape its history: the arrival of national pavilions in the public gardens of Castello from 1907, the protests of 1968, the law that refounded the institution in 1973, and the move into the Arsenale in 1980.
The exhibition was a civic and national project before it was an art-world fixture. One study of its institutional history describes it as conceived as an "educator and initiator of a new, modern culture for giovane Italia", young Italy, in a city that had joined the Italian kingdom only in 1866 (Martini, 2020; Pierazzo, 2016, p. 84). Italian artists made up about 45 per cent of the exhibitors at the first edition, so the early Biennale was as much a national showcase as an international one (Martini, 2020).
What follows is the institution as a history: how the pavilion model was invented and why it still shapes what visitors see, how the exhibition nearly came apart and was rebuilt by statute, and how it spread east into the shipyard. Dates, tickets and opening times for the current edition sit on the Venice Biennale experience page, and the Giardini and the Arsenale have pages of their own.
When did the Venice Biennale start?
The exhibition's international character was sanctioned by a statute of 1894, and the first edition followed in 1895 (Martini, 2020). Venice had been part of the Italian kingdom only since 1866, when the city and its shipyard were absorbed into the new state (Pierazzo, 2016, p. 84), and the exhibition was framed as a contribution to that state rather than as a market event. The purpose, in the words quoted by one institutional history, was to act as an "educator and initiator of a new, modern culture for giovane Italia".
The balance of that first edition was still weighted towards Italy: Italian artists accounted for about 45 per cent of the exhibitors in 1895 (Martini, 2020). The seat of the exhibition was the public gardens at the eastern edge of the Castello district, with a main pavilion at their centre, and it has stayed there for more than a century. That single-building arrangement is the part of the Biennale that visitors today would least recognise, because within twelve years the exhibition had begun to break itself into separate national buildings, a decision that set the format for every large recurring exhibition that came after it.
Why does the Giardini have national pavilions?
National pavilions were conceived in 1907 and justified at the time as a guarantee of "the most favorable international solidarity" (Martini, 2020). The buildings were erected by the participating countries and were, in the words of the same study, "completely independent from the administration of the Biennale". Belgium built the first in 1907. Hungary and Germany followed in 1909, Great Britain, France and Holland in 1912, and Russia in 1914, by which point seven large international powers had pavilions in the gardens.
The study calls the result a "cellular" structure, "a non-uniform, but rather, dispersed exhibition" (Martini, 2020). That structure explains what visitors notice first and understand last. Each country appoints its own artists and commissioners, so the gardens hold a set of parallel national decisions rather than a single curated show, several of them made in buildings designed to carry a political argument. The arrangement also made the Biennale exportable. A biennial was established in Sao Paulo in 1951 "Based on the Venetian model, while at the same time updating it" (Martini, 2020), and the pavilion idea has been copied, adapted and criticised by recurring exhibitions ever since.
What happened at the Venice Biennale in 1968?
The 34th edition, in 1968, is the point at which the institution nearly stopped. Student protests overwhelmed the exhibition and ended in violent clashes with the police, and the scale of the repression drew international attention (Martini, 2020). The criticism was specific: the Biennale was charged with institutional and cultural backwardness and with isolation from the city that hosted it. The film festival on the Lido was under dispute in the same September.
The numbers behind the complaint had been visible for years. The main section that year included twenty three Italian artists, down from seventy two four years earlier (Martini, 2020), and its title, "Lines of Contemporary Research: from Informal Art to the New Structures", described a survey rather than an argument. The institution then spent several years negotiating what it should become. It met foreign commissioners in December 1969, and the 1972 edition ran under the theme "Work or Behaviour". The settlement, when it came, was legislative rather than curatorial, which is unusual for an art exhibition and tells you how far the trouble reached.
The law of 1973 and what it changed
The reform replaced the statute of 1938 that had governed the Biennale through the fascist period, when the main pavilion was managed by the fascist government (Martini, 2020). The new law, dated 25 July 1973 in the body of that study and 26 July in its footnote, carried the title "New Regulations for the Autonomous Body La Biennale di Venezia" and described the institution in its first article as a "democratically organised institution of culture". Article 10 made participation depend on a direct, personal invitation from the board of directors, a change aimed squarely at the autonomy of the national sections.
The reform had a cost in time. The traditional exhibition could not go ahead in 1974, and the Biennale met foreign representatives on 31 July 1974 to settle how participation would work under the new rules (Martini, 2020). A Visual Arts and Architecture section was created, which is the ancestor of the separate architecture exhibition that visitors now attend in alternate years. The national pavilions in the gardens reopened in 1976 after four years closed, so the gap between the crisis and the restart was most of a decade.
The 1976 edition and the figure of 692,000 visitors
The first fully reformed edition, in 1976, ran under the theme "Environment, Participation and Cultural Structure" and presented eight exhibitions across six areas of the city, with the national pavilions in the gardens open again after four years (Martini, 2020). The central pavilion held a show of site-specific work by thirteen artists. The edition is usually described as a record, and the figure attached to it is about 692,000 visitors.
That figure deserves a note, because it is the number most often repeated about the historical Biennale. It appears in a footnote of the institutional history, credited to a 1995 book on the exhibition, rather than in the Biennale's own records: the Historical Archive of Contemporary Arts "does not possess any calculation, or specific statistics on the influx of visitors to the Biennale" (Martini, 2020). The director of the time put the figure higher still, estimating more than a million people between 20 July and the end of October. Both numbers are worth knowing and neither is an audited count, which is a useful caution for any attendance claim made about the event.
When did the Biennale move into the Arsenale?
The Arsenale became an exhibition site for the Biennale in 1980, seven years before the lagoon was designated a World Heritage Site, and the institution has since led much of the restoration there, redeveloping several areas for its own activities (Camerin, 2024, p. 68). The shipyard had been allocated to private shipbuilding after the First World War and was then largely abandoned after the Second, until interest returned at the end of the 1970s; the first restorations, of the Corderie on the south side, were undertaken in 1983 (Pierazzo, 2016, p. 84).
The second venue is on a different scale. The walled enclosure covers 478,000 square metres and about 20 per cent of the Castello district once water is left out (Camerin, 2024, p. 64), and the navy still holds 77,000 square metres of it (p. 68), so much of the site "remains largely inaccessible to the public" (p. 70). In 2022 the defence ministry, the culture ministry and the city council signed a draft agreement backed by 170 million euros of public national funding, 107 million of it from Italy's recovery and resilience plan, covering a research centre for the contemporary arts run by the Biennale in a navy area, the restoration of the old docks and the Galeazze canal, and a requirement to host two events a year of at least fifteen days each (p. 70). That study is critical of the agreement, arguing that the Arsenale risks being reduced to a venue for Biennale events.
