A city council resolution, 1893, to the Giardini, 1895.

La Biennale di Venezia started as a decision of the city. Wikipedia says the Venetian City Council passed a resolution on 19 April 1893 to set up a biennial exhibition of Italian art, the Esposizione biennale artistica nazionale, to mark the silver anniversary of King Umberto I and Queen Margherita of Savoy. A year later the council chose a system of invitation, reserved a section for foreign artists and agreed to admit works by uninvited Italian artists selected by a jury. The first Esposizione in 1895, the I Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia, had been planned for April 1894 and was opened by the king and queen on 30 April 1895. designboom, in a history of the Biennale published on 2 May 2021, also dates its establishment to 1895.

The venue was the Giardini, on the eastern edge of the city. The Biennale says on its website that the gardens were laid out under Napoleon at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and that in 1894 the municipal council commissioned a Palace of Exhibitions there, then called Pro Arte, to a project by Enrico Trevisanato, with a liberty-style façade by Marius De Maria and Bartolomeo Bezzi. Until 1905, the Biennale says, every country’s artists showed together inside that one building.

Then the countries built their own. The Biennale says it encouraged foreign countries to put up pavilions in the Giardini, and that Belgium did so in 1907. Wikipedia adds Hungary, Germany and Great Britain in 1909, France in 1912 and Russia in 1914. Among the later buildings the Biennale names Josef Hoffmann’s Austrian pavilion, Gerrit Rietveld’s Dutch pavilion and Alvar Aalto’s Finnish pavilion, a prefabricated structure on a trapezoidal plan.

The central palace kept changing too. The Biennale lists an entrance by Ernesto Basile in 1905, decorations by Galileo Chini from 1907 to 1909, a façade by Guido Cirilli in 1914 and a rotunda by Gio Ponti in 1928; in 1932 it became the Italian Pavilion, behind a façade by Duilio Torres. From 1948 until 1972 the architect Carlo Scarpa worked directly with the Biennale; the website credits him with a sculpture garden built in 1952 and a mezzanine added to the central hall in 1968.

Six festivals, the Arsenale and two alternating years.

The art exhibition was joined by other disciplines. Wikipedia says a royal decree of 13 January 1930 made the Biennale an autonomous body, an Ente Autonomo, and that a music festival followed in 1930, the Venice Film Festival in 1932 and a theatre festival in 1934; the film festival takes place on the Lido. A dance festival made its debut in 1999, according to both the Biennale’s history page and Wikipedia, giving the institution the six fields it covers today: art, architecture, cinema, dance, music and theatre.

Architecture arrived through an exhibition about a mill. designboom wrote in its 2021 history that in 1975, under the president Carlo Ripa di Meana, the Biennale held A proposito del Mulino Stucky, curated by Vittorio Gregotti, about possible uses for the neo-Gothic Stucky mill on the Giudecca. In 1980 an architecture department was set up with Paolo Portoghesi as director. His exhibition, La Presenza del Passato (The Presence of the Past), was laid out as a street called the Strada Novissima, a row of theatre-wing façades by twenty architects, among them Frank Gehry, Robert Venturi and Rem Koolhaas, each showing work behind their own front. designboom captioned an image of the entrance as designed by Aldo Rossi, who directed the architecture exhibition of 1985, Progetto Venezia.

That show also opened a second site. The exhibition was set in the Corderie dell’Arsenale, which designboom called a new display space for the Biennale. The Biennale’s venue page describes the Arsenale as the complex where the fleets of the Venetian Republic were built, and says the Corderie, where ropes and cables for ships were made, were built in 1303 and rebuilt between 1579 and 1585 to a project by Antonio Da Ponte. Wikipedia says the curators Achille Bonito Oliva and Harald Szeemann introduced Aperto, a section for emerging art, in 1980, and that Szeemann’s editions of 1999 and 2001 spread into newly restored parts of the Arsenale. The Biennale lists the Teatro alle Tese and Teatro Piccolo Arsenale (2000), the Giardino delle Vergini (2009) and the Sale d’Armi (2015) among spaces opened since.

The two big exhibitions now take turns. Wikipedia says the art exhibition was held in odd-numbered years until 2019; after a postponement during the pandemic, architecture has run in odd years since 2021 and art in even years since 2022.

Lions, columns and pavilions.

Design and art events carry their identity in places a consumer brand rarely reaches. A recurring exhibition or festival often puts a year, an edition number or a season into its name, so the wordmark has to work as a stable root that accepts a changing suffix. The same name then has to hold together across a catalogue, a poster series, a website and a printed guide that is replaced every edition.

Host-city signage is a second surface. Banners on lamp posts, flags on venues and wayfinding panels in streets, stations and pavilions have to be read at walking pace and at a distance, often in more than one language. Typography chosen for these jobs tends toward clear letterforms, generous spacing and strong contrast against the street.

Catalogues and posters are the third surface, and the most collected. They outlast the event itself, and many organisers commission a different designer or studio for each edition, so continuity comes from the name, a grid or a colour habit rather than from a fixed logo. For a design guide, the useful question is which elements stay fixed from edition to edition and which are allowed to change.

A lion on a red column.

The Biennale’s mark is built from a Venetian monument. The branding agency Inarea says on its website that it developed the brand identity for the Biennale in 2001. Before that, Inarea says, the institution had used the Lion of Saint Mark as its emblem, later replaced by a red rectangle containing the institution’s name in a serif typeface. Inarea says it set out to distil the key elements of those earlier identities, working on the communication system and brand architecture as a whole rather than on single events, so that the Biennale would be recognisable before any of its individual fields came into play.

The result, as Inarea describes it, is a logo based on the column in St Mark’s Square topped by the statue of the winged lion, which the agency notes was originally a chimera. The shaft of the column is red, a colour Inarea links to the flags and banners of the Doges and to the paintings of Titian and Tintoretto. The institution’s name sits in white inside the shaft, and a red square beside it lists the six fields of the Biennale. Inarea says the system has been applied to the cultural programme, the institutional exhibitions and the spaces of participating countries, as well as to signage and advertising around the city.

The Biennale also keeps its own record of its look. Wikipedia says a historical institute of contemporary art opened in 1928 as the core of the Biennale’s archive collections and was renamed the Historical Archive of Contemporary Art in 1930; designboom illustrated its 2021 history with images credited to that archive, the ASAC.

Interiors carry the identity as well. The Biennale says that in 2009 the Central Pavilion in the Giardini became a year-round, multifunctional building, with spaces designed by artists: an education area by Massimo Bartolini, a bookshop by Rirkrit Tiravanija and a cafeteria by Tobias Rehberger. Domus reported on 31 March 2026 that Rehberger’s cafeteria, a saturated interior of graphic contrasts, mirrored surfaces and brightly coloured furniture, had been removed in a renovation of the Central Pavilion, with interiors redesigned by the Rome practice Labics: neutral walls, dark counters, suspended glass lamps and a new arcade.

For a design guide, La Biennale di Venezia shows how one civic symbol, reduced to a red column and a lion, can stand above six festivals and the national pavilions without competing with them. Compare documenta, another recurring exhibition tied to one city, and Art Basel. For this guide we use red, stone, lagoon teal and brick with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep La Biennale di Venezia’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.