Light in the Canova Museum is the important aspect of the spatial composition that is designed to  animate the collection of the plaster  figures that are displayed. Scarpa, with the introduction or the corner window, was able to create a well modulated and varied light throughout the gallery spaces:

"Corner windows, an invention of the modernist movement, produce a room in which the glazed apertures - the light sources - and the walls - the surfaces which diffuse this light-are at right angles to each other. This solution avoids the dazzle resulting from a window in the middle of the wall, where the only diffusers are well away from the light source. Once it is realized that light can be modulated by an opportune combination of sources and diffusers, a new level of architectural quality becomes possible." - Sergio Los, 1994

In the same manner as described in Wright's 'Destruction of the Box', the corner window in this case also becomes a device through which the collection can conceptually inhabit the surrounding environment and vice-versa. Scarpa goes one step further by making it an inverted corner window. The view of the hillside is thus pulled into the interior while the space of the gallery is projected outward on to the hillside.

The relationships between the figures of the collection are also of note. Because it is a permanent collection, it affords the possibility of creating juxtapositions that give life to the figures. A bust, cantilevered from the wall, can be said to be in conversation with the reclining figure below it. The tension that is created by such a placement is one that is suspended between presence and absence. Unlike the modern diorama which takes this tension and frames it, the visitor in this context can fully navigate though this viscous space. 

According to Sergio Los, the work that Scarpa did for Canova was an example of architecture as a form of criticism, in the sense of a consummation of a work ofart rather than a judgement passed on it.

"For Scarpa, criticism was an experiment on the work of art, awakening the reflection by which the work becomes aware of itself. Scarpa's architecture functions as a system of symbols, as an architectural language, which, being a language, becomes a 'means' for the recognition/production of reality rather than the 'object' of such a recognition/production" - Sergio Los, 1994