The Capitoline Hill

ART MUSEUMS, A HISTORY – PART ONE  

Compiled by Victoria Chick

Early museums that contained objects we would call art today also contained objects of natural history, weapons, plant material, bones, etc. Some museums still exhibit many areas of interest, but in the 16th century, Art Museums as a separate category grew more quickly and by the 20th century in the United States grew faster than any other interest. This series of articles describes how art museums came to be and the turning points in their evolvement over several thousand years.

There are many claims of or designations of museums as “The First Museum”. One of these is The Capitoline Museum, which was said by promoters in later years to be the first. Pope Sixtus IV in 1471 brought together many bronze statues found from the Roman Empire era and had them placed outdoors, on Capitoline Hill. His goal was to inspire strong feelings of Roman Pride using statues that were about Roman history, myth, and glory.  An inscription preserved specifies, that Pope Sixtus’s doing this was not a donation but a “restitution." He judged that these remarkable bronze statues were testimony to the ancient greatness of the Roman people who had them made and had to be returned to the people.

In 1734, 234 years later, Pope Clement I2th opened the first of the Capitoline Museums to the public.  The museum buildings on Capitoline Hill were typical of the style of the late Renaissance, which still borrowed heavily from elements of ancient Roman buildings borrowed from the Hellenistic Greeks.  In their claim of being the First Museum, the Church, in later years, included Pope Sixtus IV’s 15th-century sculpture placement. So 1471 was adopted as the beginning of the Capitoline Museum despite the disparity of time and intent and claimed it as the first museum.

Why did 18th-century Clement use the 15th-century style? Because the style was considered correct for important buildings.  It was imposing, its buildings had a symmetrical front façade, some with sides projecting forward, and with Roman arched window surrounds and two to three stories high.

Capitoline Museums

Probably the most important things future generations of Museums gained from the Capitoline Museums are:

1. Pope Clement 12th’s radical idea was that these museums would be open to the public
2. That their architectural style set the image in the public mind as to what museums should look like well into the beginning of the 20th century.

Before there were buildings that we call Museums there were Collectors. Collectors were and are people who see things they must have for their own. Collectors seek out and buy what interests them or find their interests in nature or as abandoned objects.  Some collections are random items, and other collections are organized of similar objects. Some are natural objects like shells or bones and some collections are man-made like paintings or utilitarian art forms such as pottery.

Collecting led to a phenomenon called Cabinets of Curiosities from Renaissance times into the 19th century. (Cabinett is an Italian word for small room.) Cabinets of Curiosity were rooms within private homes and only shown to invited guests to have them marvel at the owner’s collection. Items in Cabinets of Curiosities were generally not labeled; any interpretation was given personally by the collector. Collections could sometimes be small and placed in furniture-type cabinets. 

German Cabinet of Curiosities

Searching back centuries ago, we can see that the desire to collect and exhibit was not limited to recent history.  Archeologist Leonard Wooley, from 1924 -1934, unearthed the city of the 6th century B.C. Babylon discovered the remains of the Museum of Ennigaldi-Nanna, a princess of Babylon and priestess to its Moon God. She collected relics from earlier Mesopotamian civilizations and, acting as a curator would, she arranged them logically in a Museum. Cuneiform labels in the Museum were found in three languages indicating people, (probably dignitaries) from various locations traveled to visit the Museum. The artifacts ranged in dates from around 2100 B.C. to 600 B.C. and indicated signs of preservation. I am sure Professor Wooley was surprised to find this ancient Museum using classification and method.

We are probably safe saying Ennigaldi-Nanna is the world’s first museum, but there may be others, not yet discovered. We know
Ennigaldi-Nanna was also a scribe and probably operated a school for scribes. We know a great deal more about her father, the Neo-Babylonian king, Nabonidus, and her brother Belshazzar who ruled as his regent (Daniel, Chapter 5) and who brought about the end of the Babylonian empire.

Ruins of Ennigaldi-Nanna's Museum. Photo by M.Lubinski. Source Wikipedia, Flickr

Vatican Museums were founded in the early 16th century (1506) by Pope Julius II. They were not public but are museums in the city-state of the Vatican and are located within city borders. The Museum began as one statue (Laocoön and his Sons) but is now open and holds works collected by the Roman Catholic Church, from classical sculptures and paintings to modern religious art.         

Visitors in the painting hall in the House zur Mücke in 1837

Buildings for Art Museums and Concert Halls were constructed especially during these centuries. The City of Basel bought a private collection of the Amerbach Cabinet, a collection of artifacts, paintings, and libraries, assembled by members of the Amerbach family of lawyers in Switzerland. They built a public museum, the Kunstmuseum Basel. The Kunstmuseum Basel houses the oldest public art collection in the world and is generally considered to be the most important museum of art in Switzerland. The Amerbach Cabinet included a collection of works by Hans Holbein purchased by the city of Basel and the University of Basel in 1661, which made it the first municipally owned, and therefore open-to-the-public museum in the world. Its collection is distinguished by an impressively wide historic span, from the early 15th century up to the immediate present. Its various areas of emphasis give it international standing as one of the most significant museums of its kind. These (Holbeins) encompass paintings and drawings by artists active in the Upper Rhine region between 1400 and 1600, as well as the art of the 19th to 21st centuries.

Ashmolean Museum. Lewis Clarke, Oxford. CC BY-SA 2.0

The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford is the oldest university museum in the world. In 1677, it received its first collection, the Cabinet of Curiosities from Elias Ashmole.  You can see how the private Cabinets of Curiosities proved helpful when gifted to Museums. 

Catherine the Great of Russia founded the Hermitage Museum in 1764, but it was only opened, 88 years later, for public viewing of its art. It has the largest collection of art in the world.

The idea that Museums could provide benefits of inspiration and education to lower economic level people was still a radical idea in the late 1800s, but education had expanded along with travel, two movements that produced museum expansion and an interest that was also spurred by the idea one could better oneself economically. 

Newspapers became more numerous as literacy expanded and included accounts of exhibitions at Museums, so more people were attracted to attend.

English and German gentlemen archeologists were discovering ruins in Greece, Crete, Babylon, Mycenae, and Egypt.  Pompeii was being unearthed. Marble sculpture from Greece was brought “home” to England by Lord Elgin who eventually sold them to the Commonwealth where they were exhibited in the British Museum which had been founded in 1753.   The British Museum states the House of Commons committee in 1816 had found Lord Elgin had legally acquired the sculptures and the museum therefore became the legal owner of the sculptures when they were vested with the museum.

Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. By Jay M, Wikipedia