Arazzeria Scassa

In the former Certosa di Valmanera, the Arazzeria Scassa developed a hand-woven tapestry tradition using high-warp looms to translate designs by twentieth-century artists into wool.

Why it matters

Founded in Asti in 1957 by Ugo Scassa, the Arazzeria Scassa is housed in the former Certosa di Valmanera, a monastery complex first settled by Vallombrosan monks in the eleventh century and later held by the Carthusians. The eighteenth-century building survives after the original monastery was dismantled in the early nineteenth century. Scassa's tapestries are held in institutions including the Quirinale Palace in Rome and the Vatican. The hand process combines wool dyeing, tracing and weaving.

What to notice

The high-warp technique projects a design onto the warp threads, which are traced by hand before the weft is passed. Dyers match and blend wools to reproduce a painter's gradations, creating the shading in the finished tapestries. The collection includes tapestries based on designs by artists such as De Chirico, Guttuso, Dalí, Ernst, Kandinsky, Klee, Matisse and Miró. The restored eighteenth-century rooms, with their tall portico and salons, are part of a former monastic complex that extended over roughly 6,000 square metres.

Context and history

Ugo Scassa opened the business in 1957 and steered it towards tapestry around 1960, when the workshop won the competition to furnish the ballroom of the ocean liner Leonardo da Vinci with sixteen tapestries designed by leading Italian painters including Cagli, Corpora, Turcato, Santomaso, Capogrossi and Bernini. Commissions for the liners Michelangelo and Raffaello followed — twelve pieces for the former, twenty-four for the latter — and between 1957 and 2007 the manufactory wove more than two hundred tapestries from cartoons by Italian and international artists — a list that extends from Sironi, Casorati, Vedova, Carla Accardi and Renzo Piano to Miro and Matisse. Scassa led the workshop into old age, dying in January 2017 at eighty-eight; the workshop's history is associated with the continuation of that technique. The Certosa itself adds a second historical layer: suppressed under Napoleon in 1801 and stripped of its furnishings, the complex later passed through private hands before its mid-twentieth-century restoration gave it a cultural role.