Pubblici dei primi musei pubblici (XVIII-XIX secolo) I. Le fonti istituzionali
Academy of Architecture
Who were the first visitors to public museums? How were they received, observed, and regulated? And how did museum institutions help shape – and construct – the very idea of the “public”? This volume inaugurates a new series of studies devoted to the publics of the first public museums (18th-19th centuries). From the Museo Capitolino to the Louvre, from the Biblioteca Ambrosiana to the Rome of the catacombs, from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to the public collections of Poland, Thuringia, Romania, and Chile: different geographies and periods that enable us to reconstruct the complex network of norms, practices, and representations through which the museum space developed, dialogued, or conflicted with its public. In the essays collected here, institutional sources are given a new voice, especially those from the period between the 1730s and the late 19th century: regulations, admission registers, correspondence, catalogues, and visitors’ books. What emerges is a shared and largely untold story of mediations, disciplinary strategies, material experiences, and cultural discards: a history that invites us to rethink the genealogy of the modern museum as a living space of relationships, tensions, and negotiations between institutions and publics.