ABSTRACT
Tradition and transformation The art museum is one of the most significant institutions in modern culture and has, throughout its history, enjoyed a close and mutually influential relationship with architecture. In his encyclopaedic, A History of Building Types, 1 Pevsner locates the beginning of art collection, in its modern meaning, in the Italian Renaissance and proposes that the first ‘special setting’ for the display of antiques was Bramante’s open cloister adjacent to Innocent VIII’s Belvedere Pavilion in the Vatican, dated about 1508. This was quickly followed, throughout Europe, by the construction of buildings specifically for the display of statuary. As a typical example Pevsner illustrates Scamozzi’s long gallery at Sabbioneta (1583-1590). In addition to sculpture, paintings were also collected and special rooms for their display were commonplace in palaces and country houses throughout Europe during the seventeenth century. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the museum had become a specialised building type, separate from the house, and soon after collectors began to open their museums to the public, creating the conditions of the modern institutional museum that was to emerge at the end of the eighteenth century and to flourish in the nineteenth. At this time the museum became increasingly specialised as distinctions between categories of knowledge – art, science, natural history and so forth – were increasingly institutionalised. As a consequence of this process, the art museum acquired particular architectural characteristics that derived from its purpose to display works of art, increasingly collections of paintings to a wider public.
