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From the museum’s inception, artists have been reflecting on its relationship with time. In 1796, while working on proposals to improve the galleries at the newly created Muséum central des Arts at the Louvre, the French artist Hubert Robert presented two contrasting visions of the Grande Galerie.2 The first shows the gallery much improved with evenly spaced display bays and skylights where citizens and artists view, study or copy the works; the second depicts it in ruins. Whether its sad state is the result of natural catastrophe, of time or war, remains unclear. In the rubble life goes on. Some people seem to be cooking on an open fire, others scramble about in the debris like tourists in Rome or Pompeii. In the midst of the mayhem squats an artist. He is sketching the Apollo Belvedere at whose feet perches a bust of Raphael while the torso of one of Michelangelo’s slaves slants not far off to the right. His copies will serve as inspiration for new art and ensure the continuation of culture. In the museum, past, present and future remain intimately connected, even if among the ruins aspirations of cultural rebirth may seem almost utopian. Robert’s vision of the Grande Galerie’s futures, one in planning and the other distant but seemingly inevitable, inscribes the museum in the cycle of culture’s rise and fall which Denis Diderot described so eloquently when discussing Robert’s works at the 1767 salon exhibition: The effect of these compositions, good and bad, is to leave you in a state of sweet melancholy. Our glance lingers over the debris of a triumphal arch, a portico, a pyramid, a temple, a palace, and we retreat into ourselves; we contemplate the ravages of time, and in our imagination we scatter the rubble of the very buildings in which we live over the ground, in that moment solitude and silence prevail around us, we are the sole survivors of an entire nation that is no more. Such is the first tenet of the poetics of ruins.3
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