ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Danish museums’ exhibiting of classical material culture conceptualises Denmark and Danish identity within the European cultural landscape. It focuses on two museums in particular, the National Museum of Denmark and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. The chapter explores perspectival material shown in older exhibitions, it will focus on the formation of museums’ collections and their exhibitions in order to assess continuities and breaks in the ideological conceptualisation of classical antiquity as part of a Danish imagined geography. The humanists’ increased engagement with Greek texts from the mid-fifteenth century onwards necessitated a broad distinction in the cultural geography of classical antiquity. The integration of excavation finds into museum collections and the invention of the archaeological site brought into focus a more specific geography of ancient world. The imagined geography of the Mediterranean as the cradle of European civilisation was instead connected to the young democracies of Europe, establishing them as the ideological and cultural heirs to classical heritage.
