Ancient vases in modern vitrines: the sensory dynamics and social implications of museum display

Abstract

This contribution explores the changing sensory priorities underpinning the display of Greek painted pottery in European collections. The focus is on the introduction of glass-fronted cabinets in the purpose-designed public museums of art and archaeology of the mid-nineteenth century. Contrary to expectations, the contemporaneous debates surrounding the use of gallery furniture show that the museum stakeholders were less worried about the safety of the objects than the prospect of middle- and working-class visitors being exposed to the sexualized imagery on Athenian pottery. A survey of the different traditions of display in Britain and continental Europe highlights the shift from the multisensory engagements in early modern elite collections with vases as evidence of ancient custom to the selective viewing of the objects’ painted decoration as works of art whose proper interpretation called for classical education.

To love [the Euphronios krater], you only have to look once. To adore it, you must read Homer and know that the drawing is perhaps the summit of art …¹

Athenian painted pottery can be made to speak to class-based analysis in both ancient and modern history. Analysis of class stratification will always be a matter of quantifying economic structures by distinguishing between those who control the means of production and those who do not. But such examination also involves an understanding of the dynamic between the objective class position of historical actors and their subjective identification with political interests, which rarely permit easy correlation. The social structure of democratic Athens, with its confusing mixture of individuals of different status (citizens, foreigners, and slaves) in the same class (as freeborn wage labourers or wealthy non-citizens who lease land), demonstrates how difficult it is to align economic stratification with other aspects of personal identity.² Painted pottery provided a medium through which the resulting contradictions could be sublimated or escalated in a given setting to give way to polarizing distinctions between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’, citizens and foreigners, or men and women. Its power as a positional commodity was not its monetary value; on the contrary, the widespread availability of painted pottery for eating, drinking, storage, and cult amplified its ability to generate different messages to different individuals.³ By the same token, surviving pots rarely permit secure association with specific consumers; but the study of how particular types of figured scenes coincided with particular pot shapes and contexts of use can show how individual types of users were prompted to perceive their place in society.

When Athenian vases became more widely known in modern Europe, however, this process of meaning-making between images, pots, and sensing bodies began to be reconfigured and the objects took on new purposes that were unrelated to their ancient contexts. The relative scarcity of surviving vases meant that they became artworks for visual appreciation rather than use, leaving only a narrowing circle of collectors and scholars able to experience the more intimate, haptic access to the objects—and, by extension, to the embodied modes of interpretation—that had been the norm in antiquity. This article takes a closer look at how the evolution of display practices in Europe’s foremost cultural capitals in the nineteenth century affected the understanding of Greek pottery amongst the growing museum-going public. The discussion seeks to highlight how the sensory participation among museum audiences came to diverge from the possibilities of physical access which ancient and modern elites had enjoyed. Unlike other articles in this issue of BICS, my goal is not to recover the voices of marginalized actors in the modern reception of Greek pottery. While non-elite visitors became more visible among the audiences of Europe’s museums, first-hand accounts of what they saw and how they made sense of their experiences are hard to come by. Even for periods in which sources are more plentiful, the question remains open of whether the increased access has resulted in a concurrent opportunity for the public to engage fully with these objects qua objects. While participation in the literary reception of the classics has been regulated almost exclusively through selective education in ancient languages, the contact that the broader public can have with ancient art is a less clear-cut issue, one in which access has been both greatly extended in some ways by museums and simultaneously restricted in others.

In his book on the museum as a mechanism of exclusion, Pierre Bourdieu confronts the apparent paradox that even though entry to public collections of art tends to be free in many institutions, only a comparatively small proportion of the population takes advantage of this opportunity.⁴ Looking at the social circumstances favouring museum attendance—which he locates in education and its intricate relations to class, income, and occupation—Bourdieu describes the ‘love of art’ as a symbolic struggle evolving in parallel to economic struggles in the formation of class and social identity. Through this struggle, the dominant groups seek to transform their aesthetic preferences into critical faculties that appear to be inborn. The unequal ability to ‘love’ art therefore perpetuates inherited privilege by underpinning class-based habitus with feelings of superiority and inferiority.

Despite his focus on museums, Bourdieu does not pay particular heed to the importance that architecture and especially display had for cultivating this ‘love of art’ along a purely visual axis, one that reinforces class and social subjectivity.⁵ My article explores how the changing attitudes towards the display of Greek painted vases reflect a complex give-and-take between museums and their visitors. While many sincere attempts have been undertaken to allow the public access to such objects, this access has primarily been optic in nature. The change from haptic to optic does speak to the importance that vases have gained thanks to the cult of authenticity and their gradual elevation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as objects of art.⁶ However, the elevation of the Greek vase as art has come at the cost of removing modes of appreciation that had been essential to these objects’ meaning since their creation: namely, the ability to touch and understand the physical objects as part of life in the ancient world. Although one can see the privileging of the optic over the haptic in the display of many other types of museum exhibit, Greek vases present an especially revealing case study. Since objects of this category have been a notable feature of collections since early modern times, we can examine the changes in the way that museums have displayed them—from haptic to almost entirely visual, from realia to relic—to chart the evolution of the museum itself as an institution. Entirely ocular-centric museum displays with objects safely behind glass instilled the tacit understanding that correct appreciation of painted pottery involved conversations about stylistic traits or dead poets and heroes of myth instead of such ordinary human interests as eating, drinking, and domestic production with which the objects were once inherently bound up. It is not surprising that classical education was soon established as a precondition for the proper enjoyment of the painted decoration, bringing into play the entrenched interdependencies between class, gender, and schooling in Western systems of privilege. While myth and iconography undoubtedly deserve attention in the study of Greek vases, text-based knowledge constitutes only one potential resource among many that can be brought to bear: indeed, its single-minded pursuit risks downplaying the volume and significance of painted pottery whose figured decoration defies identification with ancient narrative traditions.⁷

Museums have, of course, done much to bring the public into contact with ancient art; all the same, the tasteful minimalism characterizing so many of today’s museum interiors also allows the institutions to avoid difficult questions surrounding the origins of many items in their collections. By and large, the principles that continue to prevail in museum design perpetuate the myth of pure vision—the idea that objects are best left to ‘speak for themselves’ with a minimum of background information. To the detriment of the national heritage of Mediterranean countries, the treatment of these objects as purely visual creations also nurtured the conviction that to grasp the importance of Greek vases the educated eye only needed to apprehend their decoration and craft excellence, not the archaeological contexts or present-day communities from which they were taken.

In this article, I want to interrogate the way in which these displays have come to embody the relationship between seeing, sensing, and meaning in class-specific concepts of learning. Through their power to privilege certain questions and modes of appreciation over others, museum displays can determine not only whose story matters but also where the standards of good taste and academic disinterest lie. This is problematic for our field. And my hope is that a better comprehension of the evolution of museum practice in the past will provide a very preliminary starting point for re-evaluating and renegotiating their design in the present.

THE VITRINE: A BRIEF HISTORY

To gain traction on the overlooked influence of museum displays we need to shift our awareness to an actor that has remained unacknowledged—the glass case that contains the objects in modern-day galleries. Given the exorbitant prices which Greek vases garner on the market, it seems only natural that museums would want to keep these fragile objects in secured display cabinets. However, a closer look at the history of the museum vitrine indicates that in its formative years the stewards of Greek vase collections were just as concerned with controlling what viewers should see as they were with the safety of the objects on view. While a critical history of gallery furniture is yet to be written, even a cursory glance at its genesis suggests that Greek vases were at the vanguard in shaping the norm of vitrinized display.⁸

In early modern collections, storage and display were mostly separate concerns that only intermittingly began to converge in the construction of custom-built furniture aimed at regulating the disposition of both its contents and viewers. Glenn Adamson has demonstrated that in European cabinets of curiosities changes in the development of taxonomical knowledge went hand in hand with changing techniques of cabinetmaking.⁹ In the course of the sixteenth century, the medieval system of joinery—using large panels and posts fixed in place with mortise and tenon joints—gave way to lighter components held together by dovetail cuttings. This change allowed for the construction of self-standing pieces of furniture with stacks of small drawers and interior spaces divided into tiny, regularized units by thin boards. Robert St George has convincingly argued that the ability to build such furniture both reflected and sustained the rise of modern consumer behaviour. As the internal compartments accommodated a growing range of finished household items, the art of cabinetmaking in turn buttressed new notions of privacy and property, which are paralleled in the English countryside by the process of agricultural enclosure.¹⁰

In elite collections of curiosities, the internal subdivision of cabinets allowed distinctions between artificial and natural objects to be visualized by means of the gradation of material and formal properties. The collector’s practice of sorting objects—in a context that offered room for intuition, revision, and repetition—presented the training ground for the emergent taxonomical mindset of early modern science. As Adamson concluded, in the course of the seventeenth century, objects previously kept on open shelves were increasingly stored within cabinets which were often designed in ensembles and for specific types of items, in keeping with an emerging desire to understand and even give order to nature according to human reason.¹¹ Since the time of Descartes in particular, Enlightenment philosophy was characterized by the urge to develop a theory of representation that would bridge the inconsistency between objects and ideas. The cabinet of curiosities became a prime site for testing representations of nature and reflecting on the disparity between objects and ideas.

While orderly storage had become a prevalent concern in seventeenth-century collections, an equally pressing impulse to put classifications on show continued to evolve, but only slowly. The scant evidence we have from contemporary documents implies that practical and decorative considerations were still as likely to determine where individual objects were placed as formal or material relationships. The displays were intended to stimulate conversation as much as visual contemplation. Some of the painted ceramics that were beginning to come to light in Italian necropoleis entered such displays of miscellaneous curios.¹² The cabinets built for the Wunderkammern aspired to virtuosity in their own right. Richly bedecked with marquetry, intarsia, and crowning finials, their design set great store by the act of revealing the hidden contents through the performative opening of doors and drawers.¹³ A parallel development, which may have been as important as the cabinets in turning early museums into spaces of display, was the adoption of the so-called ‘wall system’ method for storing and displaying books in libraries. As Eric Graberson has shown, the wall system emerged in the late sixteenth century and had become the norm by the end of the seventeenth.¹⁴ Its distinctive feature was the orderly ranging of books, in floor-to-ceiling bookcases lined up along the walls of large and otherwise sparsely furnished rooms. The aim of the grand vistas thus created was not only princely ostentation, as is often assumed, but to make the library contents instantly perceptible in a single sweep of the eyes. The innovation responded to the mounting anxieties that the expansion of knowledge circulating in printed books would become uncontrollable without methods of spatial organization and remembering. The bookcases constructed for wall-system libraries were increasingly fronted with glass to protect their contents without obstructing one’s ability to read the books’ spines (fig. 1).

The impact of the wall system can be recognized in the natural history collections of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such the Leverian Museum in London (fig. 2).¹⁵ The trustees of the British Museum appear to have adopted a similar system when Sir Hans Sloane’s collection was transferred to its first public residence at Montagu House in 1755. To judge from contemporary specifications, Sloane’s existing bookcases were fitted with glass for reuse as display cabinets, and new items ordered to match the old ones.¹⁶ Crucially, the wall system survived the demise of the Wunderkammer at the end of the seventeenth century, when the contents previously held in single collections were allocated to separate institutions, specializing in either art or nature. Wall cases can be seen in interior views of the great public collections fitted out in the nineteenth century, including the British Museum and the Louvre. They were a conspicuous feature in Robert Smirke’s new building for the British Museum, conceived in 1823.¹⁷ The architect’s designs for glazed mahogany cases remained in use from 1835 until well into the twentieth century, lining the walls of almost all rooms on the upper floor. Most of them were gradually removed in more recent years as they failed to conform to modern conservation and lighting requirements, except in the current Gallery 73 (‘Greeks in Italy’), where the original furnishings were purposefully retained (fig. 3). Similar cases were fitted in early public museums throughout Europe, among them the preserved examples in the Thorvaldsen Museum designed in the 1830s to contain the vases brought to Copenhagen by the Danish sculptor.¹⁸

The examples in London and Copenhagen give a good impression of the overall effect created by the high wall cases. The wooden grilles dividing the glazed doors frame the contents on the internal shelves in squares recalling windows or pictures. As in wall-system libraries, galleries equipped with such furniture permitted the viewer to scan the exhibits at an instant and orientate themselves within the dominant themes informing the display. The unbroken rows of shelving facilitated juxtaposition and comparison of object groups and were especially serviceable in visualizing the evolutionary concepts of nineteenth-century science. On the other hand, as the significance of the taxonomical series eclipsed that of its constitutive specimens, the viewer’s attention was easily diverted from the properties of the individual example. Furthermore, with shelves extending both above and below eye level, the arrangement of the exhibits inevitably underwent hierarchical sorting based on size or perceived importance.

By the nineteenth century, the wall system had fundamentally tied sight and display to each other in spaces of exhibition. However, the impetus towards mass display in wall cabinets was inimical to the attention which some of their contents began to attract as aesthetic creations. It is therefore necessary to follow a separate but interweaving thread in the history of museum display, one in which Greek vases played a significant role.

SEEING THROUGH TOUCH

The reception of Greek vases had experienced a marked shift in the second half of the eighteenth century, from their previous perception among antiquarians as everyday implements to the reappraisal of their decoration as traces of artistic genius. Key to this development was the discovery of the bountiful necropoleis around Naples—notably at Nola and Capua—and the concurrent reinterpretation of Renaissance master drawings as intimations of creativity rather than preparatory sketches. Owing to their ambivalent position midway between art historical and antiquarian interests, Greek painted vases were of prime importance in bringing about an alternative approach to display, one more suited to directing the gaze of the viewer to specific points of interest and fostering the mode of visual concentration characteristic of the modern museum visitor. Whereas the wall system introduced in the previous section became obsolete in the twentieth century, the ocular-centric emphasis adopted in vase displays has had far-reaching consequences for gallery design, felt to this day.

In the eighteenth century, as discoveries at Italian sites became more plentiful, vases were moved out of cabinets of curiosities and exhibited in libraries, alongside books rather than with other, more illustrious antiquities. As Vinnie Nørskov has pointed out, the collection of the Naples lawyer Joseph Valetta appears to have been crucial in establishing this tradition.¹⁹ The vases may already have been exhibited in a library in Valetta’s private residence. They were certainly placed in a library when the collection entered the Vatican in 1728 through the bequest of Cardinal Gualtieri, who had acquired many of Valetta’s vases through his heirs.

Contemporary engravings of the Galleria Clementina show the vessels arrayed in symmetrical groupings on top of tall bookcases along the walls (fig. 4). Later visitors interested in the objects complained that they were not only too far up for visual inspection but also had their decorated front turned to the wall, apparently to accentuate the decorative effect of the vessels’ profiles.²⁰ Already prior to his death, Valetta had sold twenty vases along with his library to the Oratorio dei Girolamini in Naples, where some of them remain intact to this day.²¹ The prominence of ancient pottery in the Vatican Library prompted northern European visitors to adopt similar schemes in their estates. The library tradition was especially widespread in British stately homes, where vases supplemented elegant furnishings as restrained substitutes for baroque porcelain garnitures. Such displays can still be seen in Charlecote Park in Warwickshire, Sir John Soane’s Museum in London and, in a latter-day incarnation, at Hearst Castle, the Californian residence of the newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.²²

A variation of the library tradition took hold in specialized collections where painted vases constituted a significant proportion of the holdings. The display of the collection assembled by Marchese Felice Maria Mastrilli, from finds on his family properties at Nola and through acquisitions on the Naples market, was nothing short of pioneering.²³ Over the years, Mastrilli’s collection had come to comprise almost four hundred items, requiring their transfer in 1753 from Nola to a specially prepared room at the Palazzo di San Nicandro in Naples. Soon known as the Museo Mastrilliano or Nolano, the display attracted the attention of local cognoscenti and northern visitors. The room was decorated with (now lost) oval wall paintings which had sconces or brackets affixed to their gilt frames. Resting on such wall attachments, the vases were brought nearer to the viewer’s eye level, inviting closer attention to variations in shape and figured decoration.

This emphasis on individual objects provided important stimuli to neoclassical taste and sensitivity to style, as is clear from Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s references to the collection and the acquisition of much of its contents by Sir William Hamilton.²⁴ In contrast to such Enlightenment antiquarians as Bernard de Montfaucon and Anne Claude Comte de Caylus, who saw ancient pots as curiosities and sources for understanding ancient cult practice and everyday life, Winckelmann reframed the reception of Greek vases as genuine relics of the lost art of Greek drawing by comparing the figured decoration to the work of Raphael.²⁵ Winckelmann’s assessment was picked up by Sir William Hamilton, who quoted it in the catalogues of the collections of vases that he had assembled during his time as the British ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples. When this renowned collection was acquired by the British Museum in 1772, it represented some of the first man-made antiquities to enter a museum that was essentially still a scientific and ethnographic collection (or at best a very large cabinet of curiosities). As contemporaries had already noted, it is in large part due to Hamilton and his promotion of his collection as art that ancient pots became ‘vases’.²⁶

In the literature on the reception of Greek ceramics, this shift in viewing practices is presented as a harbinger of modern disciplinary approaches to the iconography and style of vase-painting. Claire Lyons recognizes in the Museo Mastrilliano a fundamental departure from the ‘indiscriminate’ or ‘decorative’ displays in cabinets and libraries so as to justify the designation ‘museum’ in the modern sense.²⁷ Her assessment presupposes that the elite visitors in the Mastrilli collection and its successors behaved just as modern museum visitors do, examining the objects through a concerted ocular effort. However, more recent work in sensory anthropology contradicts this assumption. As Constance Classen and David Howes have shown, in early museums visitors were routinely expected to handle the items and converse about the links and contrasts between optic and haptic perceptions.²⁸ Touch was considered a necessary complement to visual inspection in gaining genuine familiarity with objects. While the risk of loss or damage caused occasional concern, in general the visitors’ experience of the exhibits in the present was deemed more important than their conservation for posterity. To judge from the accounts of early museum visits which Classen and Howes discuss, object handling was normally considered too unremarkable to be commented on. Furthermore, as Fiona Candlin has stressed, the frequent touching of museum exhibits was not just a reflection of some elite visitors’ entitlement; it had its justification in the writings of early scientists, such as Hans Sloane, who invoked the utility of tactile investigation in classifying natural specimens.²⁹ This contrasts sharply with the concept of the museum that arose in the nineteenth century as a space reserved for visual experience, where touch—as we will see—had no feasible role in aesthetic or intellectual appreciation.

Seen in this light, the difference between the specialized vase collections, modelled on the Mastrilli ‘museum’, and the displays attested in Wunderkammern and libraries may not have been as profound as is often claimed. Irrespective of whether the vases were presented as decoration or autonomous artworks, we can confidently expect that any privileged visitor who had access to the relevant collections and wanted to learn more about a particular example was free to lift it up and move it close enough to eye level for convenient inspection from all sides. Visual and manual modes of examination were simply inseparable in eighteenth-century epistemic frameworks. Regulatory contraptions designed to shield the exhibits from curious hands were almost unknown, regardless of how widely accessible a given collection was. As an example of a comparatively public display, we can point to the first purpose-designed installation of William Hamilton’s vase collection in the British Museum after its acquisition in 1772. The architectural drawings for the north-west extension of Montagu House, opened in 1808—the Townley Gallery, as it became known—show the vases on open shelves occupying much of the wall-height of the building’s upper floor (fig. 5).³⁰ A similarly open installation is implied by the drawings for display furniture preserved in the archive of the Department of Greece and Rome, if these were in fact implemented. The designs envisaged two levels of shelving atop a case piece with marquetry doors.³¹ In the engravings of the Museo Etrusco Gregoriano, produced soon after its 1837 inauguration, vases can be discerned on columns and open shelves supported by brackets and consoles.³² It is also telling that the vases in the Galleria Clementina, mentioned above, were chained to the bookcases on which they rested, suggesting that they could be pulled from the shelves for consultation just like the books below them.³³ Their inaccessible placement is testament to nothing more than the relative insignificance of the collection and the infrequent attention which it attracted. The continuity between displays in private and public spaces is borne out by the shelving and etageres seen in contemporary depictions of vase cabinets, such as those in the homes of Thomas Hope in London and Anton Franz Graf von Lamberg-Sprinzenstein in Vienna.³⁴

The Greek vase as an object of art did not sit comfortably within the regime of sight that the wall system produced. Touch was just as important as vision for understanding these objects, even with their elevation from realia to ‘fine art’ in the eighteenth century. Yet this mode of appreciation began to disappear over the course of the next two centuries. Indeed, the emerging sensibilities of the nineteenth century as well as new archaeological discoveries had long-lasting effects on how Greek vases and museum objects in general have come to be displayed today.

THE BIRTH OF ‘ANAESTHETIC’ VISION

To date, there has been relatively little interest in examining when the insistence on visual knowledge came to assert itself in gallery designs and how one might best explain it with reference to specific types of object. For object specialists, it is worthwhile to explore not only who was prevented from touching museum exhibits but precisely what was kept out of reach. In view of the distinction which collections of Greek vases had attained by the late eighteenth century, it should come as no surprise that this foundational class of minor arts shaped the curatorial conventions for other portable objects. Closer scrutiny reveals that the relationship between Greek vase displays and the disciplining of eyes and minds runs deeper than one might expect.

Current literature emphasizes that the birth of the modern museum corresponded to broader shifts in contemporary science towards visual definitions of knowledge. The evolution of the museum into a locale predisposed to visual learning is no longer seen as inevitable or self-explanatory. For instance, the museum historian Tony Bennett describes the changing sensory regime of museum didactics in relation to the prevalent behaviours among visitors and the academic pedagogies seeking to reform or justify existing conditions. For him, the critical turning point towards the privileging of vision occurred in the Enlightenment, when the Renaissance spaces of civic conversation (that is, where relations of ‘speaking, hearing, and seeing were more or less equally balanced’) were transformed into ones in which sight was to be ‘entirely subordinated to the regulation of an ordering mind’.³⁵ He associates this transition, somewhat sweepingly, with contrasts between mainly Catholic modes of oral–visual learning in southern Europe and Protestant preferences for detached observation inspired by the growing northern European print culture. However that may be, while the contents of scientific collections in the Enlightenment were named and organized according to visible differences, different modes of engagement—conversational as well as literate–ocular—coexisted well into the nineteenth century. From the 1860s, though, the growing league of museum professionals began to ground the relationship between seeing, sensing, and meaning in class-specific concepts of learning. In Britain, such liberal reformers as Thomas Huxley and Augustus Lane-Fox (or Pitt Rivers) sought to develop popular forms of instruction in accordance with the needs of working-class visitors. One implication of extending male suffrage was, as Bennett emphasizes, the stress on displays that allowed rushed and uninformed visitors to take in lessons at a glance and attain knowledge commensurate to their civic responsibilities.³⁶ The well-worn trope that objects should ‘speak for themselves’ goes back to this era.

In a recent monograph devoted to touch in museums, Candlin argues that such general explanations tend to take too little notice of the changing institutional contexts determining who was allowed to touch museum objects. The plentiful evidence of upper-class visitors continuing to handle objects to investigate their properties and authenticity is not an accidental survival from a bygone age of aristocratic ownership. In contrast to the harmful fumbling by ordinary visitors, elite touch was made out to be tempered by rational intentions and faculties. Candlin’s analysis of nineteenth-century eyewitness accounts and admissions data from the British Museum underscores the sheer miasma which the hands of the growing numbers of working-class visitors were thought to inflict on the collections.³⁷ Visitor numbers had begun to surge after the Principal Librarian Joseph Planta had convinced the trustees in 1810 to abolish the onerous ticketing system and allowed visitors to roam unattended through the galleries.³⁸ The propensities of the mass visitors who began to flock to the museum were soon associated with instinctual behaviour, the groping by social inferiors—women, children, and primitives. The underlying prejudice against working-class visitors is exposed by the Select Committee Reports of the museum of the 1830s–50s, which regularly commented on their good behaviour and respect towards the exhibits.

It was not an increase in the non-elite crowds alone that led to the ocular-centric turn in the museum experience. According to Classen and Howes, another factor was the rise of nineteenth-century consumer capitalism.³⁹ By their account, the presentation of museum exhibits came to resemble ever more closely that of mass-produced imitation goods in department stores, whose success depended on the seduction of buyers to purchase items they had not intended to acquire when they entered the premises. Like consumer goods, museum exhibits were now appealingly displayed rather than just stored. An even more significant factor was the attempt to focus and train the visitors’ minds to consume only certain elements of Greek vases to the exclusion of others. As we have seen in the previous section, the handling of objects in early collections was deemed so central to their understanding that the methods of display developed for private settings were replicated in the British Museum and the Vatican. Greek vases appeared in similarly unprotected arrangements in the first art museums in Germany, the Altes Museum in Berlin (1830) and Alte Pinakothek in Munich (1840).⁴⁰ In later institutions, however, we notice an unmistakable preference for furnishings designed to prevent touch, with the introduction of the glass-fronted cabinets or fully glazed vitrines that provide clear precursors to the sleek fittings in modern galleries. Far from predictable, this shift was the outcome less of the increasing numbers of visitors than of disagreements concerning their sensibilities and expected level of understanding. The controversies surrounding the vase galleries of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich suggest that changes in what visitors could see on Greek pottery were at least as important a factor in transforming museum space as the changing social profile of those who came to see the exhibits. While precise admissions numbers are unknown for Munich, access arrangements indicate that working-class crowds were, in contrast to the British Museum, less of a concern than the suspicions of ‘uneducated’ voyeurism among the middle-class public frequenting museums in smaller European cities. Either way, it is no coincidence that the seminal innovations in mid-nineteenth-century museum design occurred in central Europe, where the monarchies of the post-Napoleonic era were eager to assert their civic credentials with lavish museum foundations.

Commissioned to house the art treasures of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, the Alte Pinakothek was a supremely influential structure, one of the first purpose-built museums conceived more with bourgeois art lovers in mind than aristocrats or aesthetes from the academies of art. One of its chief attractions was the chronological display of paintings in the galleries on the first floor of the building, illustrating the rise and decline of art from the Italian Renaissance through the ‘errors’ of French baroque to the budding of contemporary art, under Ludwig’s patronage. The main galleries, inaugurated in 1836, had a ‘prequel’ on the ground floor, five halls for Greek vases conceived to articulate the classical origins of European painting.⁴¹ As in other continental collections, access was a self-selecting process. Although ostensibly free, admission was controlled through dress codes and limited opening hours, which prevented individuals in regular employment from attending. The rate of change in relaxing such restrictions was glacial. As late as 1847 (i.e. the year before Ludwig I’s abdication) the Alte Pinakothek was open only on weekdays from 9 am to 12 pm.⁴² Access to the vase galleries was more tightly restricted than in the rest of the building, requiring personal application at the director’s office. Even academic visitors found it difficult to gain entry. The checks were put in place allegedly to alleviate security concerns raised by the picturesque installation of the vases on tables and open shelves (fig. 6). But the correspondence relating to visitor applications shows that theft was not the main source of apprehension; the real worry was the prospect of a broader public—women, children as well as non-elite visitors—gaining access to the graphic imagery on some of the items. A particular uproar occurred in 1846 as the museum’s architect and advisor, Leo von Klenze, requested permission on behalf of the French scholar Desiré-Raoul Rochette to reproduce vase-paintings for a publication on ‘ancient pornography’. Ludwig rejected the request in no uncertain terms: ‘No! It cannot be done, Klenze, otherwise it will be widely known that such abominations are in my possession!’⁴³

Indeed, the traditional practice of exhibiting vases in ways suitable for handling might well have persisted, were it not for the profound conversions which the known corpus of Greek vase-paintings underwent after the onset of large-scale excavations in the Etruscan cemeteries to the north of Rome.⁴⁴ The material which began to flood the antiquities market in the early 1830s—just as the construction of the Pinakothek entered its finishing stages—was older than that known from earlier discoveries. The Etruscan sites produced the kind of finds which histories of ancient sexuality rely upon: that is, Athenian sympotic pottery of the late archaic period. Its visual repertoire was not only much more explicit than that which was previously known; it also yielded a proliferating range of scenes identifiable with ‘everyday life’, owing to the absence of mythological characters.⁴⁵ While the items acquired by eighteenth-century collectors featured some mild heterosexual titillation that would not have looked out of place in contemporary academic painting, the new finds appeared to show real Greeks indulging in most unreal sex.

The introduction of specialized display furniture in later museums was a direct consequence of the failed experiment in Munich. When Leo von Klenze was hired to build a court museum in St Petersburg for the Russian tsar Nicholas I, the vase gallery was provided with splendid glass-fronted cabinets which remain in use to this day in the State Hermitage Museum. A watercolour of the gallery’s interior shows a stucco-clad hall made to resemble the interior of a temple, with a cella divided into three naves by monolithic granite columns (fig. 7). According to the contemporary guide, twenty-eight cabinets of two sizes were set into the bays between the spur walls with engaged pilasters.⁴⁶ The furniture was finished in light birch wood with dark amaranth inlays inspired by the colour scheme and ornament of Greek vase-painting (fig. 8). The cabinets were glazed on three sides and the vessels distributed on the three or four shelves inside. Only a few outsize pieces were on open display, on top of the cabinets and on the square pedestals of artificial marble placed in the intercolumniations.

It is not entirely clear who should be credited with the design of the display furniture. The initial drawings sent to St Petersburg by Klenze resembled the interiors of the vase halls in the Alte Pinakothek very closely, featuring open shelves and tables and the same wall decorations inspired by Etruscan wall-painting.⁴⁷ While local architects and curators often were tasked to refine Klenze’s conceptions, preserved registers of their communication show that revisions and instructions were sent to St Petersburg as late as 1848, probably in response to the problems which his designs caused in the Alte Pinakothek. Whatever its exact genesis, the result was sufficiently different from the wall system to be recognized as a distinct tradition.⁴⁸ In contrast to the glazed, full-height cases familiar from Smirke’s British Museum, the three-sided wall cases on a base were created to contain a sparse selection of objects, strategically positioned to direct the viewer’s attention to specific points of interest.

VITRINIZATION AND ITS ALTERNATIVES

Since their inception in the nineteenth century, glass boxes have become such a staple presence in modern museums that visitors are hardly aware of them. Yet on closer consideration their transparency turns out to be illusory, and their effect far from negligible. The anxieties over ‘pornographic’ imagery surfacing in Ludwig I’s collections indicate that unobtrusive ‘censorship’ might initially have motivated the adoption of glazed cabinets. The encasement of the objects in shallow cabinets allowed curators to police the gaze of visitors by deciding which side of a pot was the principal one and which aspect of the decoration should be obscured. By foregrounding individual elements of a vase’s overall pictorial repertoire, the institutional authority was given the power to reconfigure the narrative relationships that were so fundamental to the functioning of Greek pottery in its ancient contexts of consumption. Recent literature has stressed the tactical placement of images on different parts of the vessels’ bodies, revealing their interconnections and meanings in stages as the object is manipulated. When these relationships are disrupted by placing the vessel behind glass, the pot loses its bodily presence and the decoration is turned into a picture. Furthermore, as individual images are lifted from their context, and for example placed in textbooks, they attain an ostensible evidentiary status which they could never have had in antiquity, to the effect that Athenian sympotic jokes about ‘masculine’ self-control and ‘female’ avarice are regularly misconstrued as evidence of ‘everyday life’.⁴⁹

The example of painted pottery also illustrates how the outcomes of vitrinized display exceeded the goal of iconographic control that had motivated its initial inception. The viewer who wants to properly apprehend exhibits behind reflective glass has to arrest her movement through the gallery and face the cabinet frontally. The concurrent inertia of the observer and the observed lifts the object on display out of the domain of lived time and place. This choreographed pause in turn allows the viewer to fix her perception on a single sense so as to concentrate fully on the decipherment of the visual messages presented by the artefact. At the same time, the viewer is conditioned to block out the knowledge deriving from somatic experience and her awareness of the specific sensory stimuli which similar artefacts afford in everyday use.⁵⁰ As a result, the exhibit becomes so powerfully defined by its visual characteristics that it is difficult to associate any other qualities with it, regardless of whether we are dealing with a visually striking Greek vase or a less eye-catching artefact. In defining objects as visual phenomena, museums prioritize interpretative skills that depend on educational attainment in literature and languages as opposed to the democratizing experiences of embodiment and consumption. Within the museum’s ‘empire of sight’, objects tend to bring out class-based distinctions rooted in differing levels of education rather than the physiological processes that unify different ways of social existence.

Among the few recent critics addressing the broader ramifications of the museum vitrine is the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. In his view, it is unsurprising that scholars are unwilling to confront the legacy of this nineteenth-century device, for it marks their exclusive territory:

In the vitrine, we tolerate absurd compositions, groupings, scale conflicts, awkward and disturbing labelling systems, redundant and trivial information … it casually imposes coexistence between artifacts that are robbed, by the vitrine, of their vitality.⁵¹

To transform the vitrine from a contrivance that restricts access into a creative element, he proposes to cast the objects in solid blocks of acrylic that preserve their contents and simultaneously open multiple perspectives to the viewer (fig. 9). Interestingly, Koolhaas leaves it open whether these blocks should be handled by visitors. His solution may succeed in challenging some of the taxonomical hierarchies enshrined in museum display; but by locating the vitrine’s shortcomings solely in the restrictions on vision the proposal also reinforces the inherited idea that the truth of objects is in their visual relationships. Likewise, the burgeoning experiments in museum education with handling original objects or 3D-printed reproductions too often tend to corroborate the association of touch with visually impaired visitors or the pre-rational understanding of child’s play.⁵² As digital technologies have evolved and become more widely available, they deserve greater attention than they currently have, not only in the quest for broadening access to museums but also with a view to diversifying the means by which existing audiences can relate to their collections.

In this contribution I surveyed how the different types of museum furniture supported different modes of sensory engagement and tried to bring out the particular issues which the presentation of Greek pottery posed to the creation of public collections with missions in civic pedagogy. I argued that the solutions developed in this field—involving invisible barriers and boxes—had repercussions for curatorial choices more broadly. To speak of the ‘invention’ of the modern vitrine may be an exaggeration, but only a slight one. No doubt, earlier collections had displayed valuable or delicate items behind glass, and the practice of having temporary or less distinguished exhibits laid out on tables continued beyond the mid-nineteenth century. Nevertheless, since Greek vases were neither of great inherent value nor always of undisputable artistic quality, the cultural capital issuing from this class of artefact depends to a crucial extent on the conventions established around its appreciation. Much is to be gained in terms of social standing from looking at a vase in the ‘right way’ and making the ‘right’ comments about the subject and style of its decoration. It is therefore no accident that primary-school gallery activities in the United Kingdom usually put greater value on identifying gods and mythological narratives on Greek pots than on discussing how and by whom the items were made or used. Be that as it may, it is imperative that museums interrogate their own display practices, consider fully the promises offered by technological innovation, and perhaps even challenge the hegemony of the gaze. To be sure, museums have long recognized their duty to extend the content of their exhibitions to communities underrepresented in traditional sources and historical accounts. Yet what is still missing, as I have tried to stress, is a commensurate willingness to reflect on their own role in prioritizing what counts as significant knowledge and by what means visitors can legitimately participate in its evaluation and distribution.

Footnotes

BIBLIOGRAPHY