“Artempo: Where Time Becomes Art” is a fabulously eclectic exhibition at the Fortuny Museum here that regularly blurs the line between art and nature. Among the most strange and powerful exhibitions, it stands at the pinnacle of a curatorial madness that seems to erupt here during the Biennale season. “Artempo” belongs to something of a trend: exhibitions that ignore all distinctions of time and place. Like this year’s Documenta art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, it blithely yet rewardingly ignores divisions between periods, styles, mediums and even cultures. But it goes further, creating a site-specific, wildly stimulating environment of all kinds of artifacts, functional objects and natural specimens. It has been insinuated into an artist’s house museum, that of the multitalented Mariano Fortuny (1871-1949), an innovator in fashion, textile and lighting who was also a painter, photographer and theatrical designer. Fortuny lived, worked and experimented in his 16th-century Venetian-Gothic palazzo for the last 49 years of his life, creating a universe that remains very much intact today. The most ostentatiously Fortunian space is the grand middle floor of the palazzo, draped with the designer’s textiles and lighted by his ornate parasol-like painted silk lamps, which served as a studio-salon-showroom. The organizers of “Artempo” have used this setting to create a reverie in three acts, skimming across human and geological history, ruminating on the nature and effects of time. It dramatizes art’s ability to encapsulate time, and time’s ability to turn just about anything, man-made or natural, into art.The exhibition was conceived by Mattijs Visser, head of exhibitions at the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf, Germany, inspired by the vision and collection of Axel Vervoordt, a Belgian connoisseur, designer and antiques dealer. His many loans here suggest a preoccupation with decay. (Among his pieces are flaking table tops, displayed as paintings.) The show was organized by Jean-Hubert Martin, former director of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; Mr. Visser; and Giandomenico Romanelli, general director of the city museums of Venice. Daniela Ferretti was exhibition designer. “Artempo” moves along the fluctuating line of demarcation “where time becomes art,” where an object’s age and beauty acquire their own value. Beauty may be outright decay, or its speedier cousin, accident. Near the elephant’s ear, for example, are three dark abstract paintings. Two are by Alberto Burri, a precursor of the Arte Povera movement. The third is a 16th-century canvas from the school of Tintoretto, scorched into blackness by fire, on loan from Venice’s famed Galleria dell’Accademia. The show’s three acts can be characterized in various ways — as the Marxist thesis, antithesis and synthesis; as a religious journey from earth, through purgatory to heaven; or as a continual back and forth between Mannerism and Modernism.On the ground floor, the display is closest to that of a conventional museum — albeit one with very dark walls — and the works center on the human body. It is an object of obsession and distortion for Francis Bacon and Hans Bellmer; a serene classical form in an ancient Roman male torso; and a container for the soul in a small Jain sculpture of a beatific figure that is nothing but a silhouette of air, cut into a small copper plaque. In a video we watch Kimsooja as she watches the River Ganges flow past. We see our own bodies change shape in an immense S-curve of mirrored metal by Anish Kapoor. On the second level, ego, death and opulence enter the picture. Things turn mannered and oppressive. Fortuny’s textiles recycle Moorish and Gothic styles into something new; his many paintings are academic-modern, like late Picabia but played straight. The body begins to come apart. There are the flayed figures used to study human musculature; a severely weathered wood figure from 12th-century Japan; two full-size anatomical models from 19th-century France; one of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings of mute manikins; and several of Lucio Fontana’s slashed abstract paintings, suggesting pierced skin. High above, a skull covered with jewel-like scarabs holds a dead rat it its mouth — not the work of some long-dead Venetian craftsman but of the contemporary Belgian artist Jan Fabre. Heads, skulls and masks start to proliferate and the bodies cease to be exclusively human. A stuffed python here, an armadillo there, some petrified dinosaur eggs elsewhere. Disparate things are grouped in wood cupboards: a Hopi mask, a Cycladic goddess, a Yemeni goddess that looks Cycladic and a chunk of coral that is eerily skull-like. Just as you’re beginning to grasp the show as a kind of walk-in, large-scale wonder cabinet, a real and quite spectacular one comes into view — about 90 objects displayed in tall glass cabinets stretching across a wall. This is an exhibition in itself: turned ivory objects, chunks of malachite, African fetishes, the head of an 18th-century doge in wax and one of an eighth-century B.C. Egyptian priest in basalt, a sexy photograph by Man Ray. The genius of nature and man vie for attention. On the palazzo’s top floor the mood lightens and turns more resolutely contemporary. The walls are pale, beautiful centuries-old patchworks of brick, textured plaster, decorative painting, repairs and partial renovations — a kind of architectural diary. The prevailing motif is less bodies than skin itself — the walls; the surfaces of ceramic vessels both ancient and modern; the gouged and punctured abstract paintings of the 1950s, both European and Japanese. There are burned paintings by Cai Guo-Qiang and Yves Klein, more works by Burri and Fontana, and a mysterious piece of detritus the size of a small car but thickly covered with fine dust, a work from 2006 by the Belgian artist Peter Buggenhout. Ultimately, “Artempo” brings art and the display of art full circle by connecting the Renaissance wonder cabinet, a starting point of museums, with modern art, which has done so much to open museums to the outside world. The cabinets were inspired by a fascination with the marvels of both man and nature. Modernism taught us that anything can be considered art. This show marches exultant between those two attitudes. “Artempo: Where Time Becomes Art” continues through Oct. 7 at the Fortuny Museum, San Marco, Venice.