Reshaping Museum Space

Abstract

In 1716, Filippo Bonnani, then curator of the Museo Kircheriano at the Collegio Romano in Rome, felt compelled to correct a common misconception of visitors to his museum.Bonnani presided over the city's most significant collection of art, natural history and ethnographic material that was comparable in its scope to the great kunst-and wunderkammers of Northern Europe.Yet visitors nonetheless tended to refer to his collection as a galleria.For Bonnani, this diminished the seriousness of his project.As he put it, the term 'galleria' should be used to describe collections 'made solely for their magnificence', whereas for his institution 'One should more properly say Museo . . .or, as musaeum alludes, one says a place dedicated to the muses'.[1] In referring to the Renaissance concept of the locus musus, Bonnani signalled the encyclopaedic aspirations of his museum since, as his readers would have instantly recognized, the muses presided over all aspects of enlightened human activity.He also drew on the long-established spatial distinction between the semiprivate Renaissance humanist study cum museum and the more expansive, public and transitory space of the gallery.In architectural terms, a gallery was accordingly defined as a semi-open loggia or corridor connecting one area of a palace to another (the Galleria degli Uffizi being the quintessential instance of this in sixteenth-century Europe).[2] Bonnani's complaint thus confirms that, at this stage in its development at least, the transit space of the gallery carried associations of leisure, social communication and aesthetic enjoyment that were to be differentiated, in turn, from the more serious and comprehensive aspirations of the museum.Museums have, of course, long since ceased regarding themselves as semi-private spaces of arcane contemplation.Conversely, no public art gallery would today identify its mission as not involving a fundamental concern with education and public programming of the broadest and most accessible kind.The continued relevance of Bonnani's distinction nonetheless bears reinforcing at the outset of this discussion.If pushed to formulate an inevitably too simplistic generalization to explain this we might venture that museums constitute inherently projective spaces, whereas art galleries remain committed to the ideal of a more self-contained and reflective space.Museums generally encompass a greater diversity of objects and/or ideas than art galleries and they allow for a greater degree of spatial interactivity as a result.This is as much true of a sixteenth-century wunderkammer as it is of a contemporary air and space museum.This is not to say, on the other hand, that galleries are not

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