In 2014, the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art in Istanbul reopened with a new permanent exhibition, including rooms dedicated to sacred relics. The museum approach underlines the sacredness of these objects not only through this epistemological change, but also through the museography introduced to display these relics. A similar museography has been used in the new Museum of Islamic Civilizations, to be opened by the State in 2022, within the Çamlica Mosque, in the room dedicated to other relics. Thus this change in the way relics are displayed is not specific to a museum. Outside Turkey, other museums in the Islamic world have recently shown a change of approach to the question of religion and the display of objects. The interest shown in the religious identity and sacred essence of certain objects by museums in the Islamic world raises the hypothesis of the existence of a different museography, and thus museology regarding the sacred. Indeed, beyond the exhibition of objects, and therefore museography, this shift suggests a different perspective about the value of objects as musealia, and their sacredness. This article aims to study the possibility of another type of museology.
Paris, Hôtel de ville, July 31, 1830. Louis Philippe, led onto the balcony and receiving the tricolor flag, swears fidelity to the Charter before a jubilant crowd of Parisians. The coronation at Reims already seems far away at the dawn of a new reign whose foundations remain to be redefined. Louis Philippe of Orléans is fully aware of this, caught in the aporia of a constitutional monarchy yet to be built, poised between absolutist memory and liberal promise. The resolution of this paradox is particularly visible in the seigneurial chapels taken over by the Orléans family. These religious spaces include both the family’s former private residences and the official palaces of the Crown. True symbolic stages, these castle chapels become the laboratory for a new iconographic alliance between heavenly power and earthly power. The Orléans appropriate traditional codes while adapting them. In doing so, they propose a new paradigm, playing on different levels of sacredness and symbolically linking all these chapels together. Between providential faith, family attachment, and a passion for History, this sacralizing discourse calls into question royal dignity and its presentation under the monarchie de Juillet —and even today.
Cet article propose une étude approfondie de la Vierge à l’Enfant de Carlo Crivelli, aujourd’hui conservée au Palazzo Buonaccorsi de Macerata, dont on n’a reconnu que récemment qu’elle avait été initialement réalisée sur toile. S'agissant d'une œuvre unique dans le catalogue de l'artiste et d'un support peu courant à la Renaissance, cet article consacre une analyse détaillée au tableau, qui faisait à l'origine partie d'un retable à la forme singulière, dont on tente de reconstituer et de restituer un cadre historique et typologique précis.
This article examines panagiaria, Byzantine liturgical vessels associated with the rite of the elevation of the Panagia, whose reception in the West remains incomplete despite their presence in several French collections. Long misidentified, these objects have been discussed for their stylistic qualities, to the detriment of their liturgical significance. Inextricably linked to the rite, which originated in the Greek monastic world between the 10th and 11th centuries and spread to the Balkans and then the Slavic world, panagiaria are the last remaining evidence of Marian and Trinitarian devotion. From the 15th century onwards, the integration of the rite into domestic and travellers' practices encouraged the development, in the Slavic world, of a serial production of panagiaria-enkolpia with apotropaic purposes.
In the ancient Greek world, votive reliefs and funerary steles were two forms of sacred art, one devoted to the gods and the other to the deceased. Their display in situ, in sanctuaries or around tombs, reveals a unique set of practices and images. However, once rediscovered in modern times and entered into museum collections, these marble blocks were often combined and transformed into simple stone paintings. From the 19th-century exhibition in long rows on the walls to the work of the Grand Louvre, which attempts to suggest an “ancient viewpoint”, the Louvre Museum is undergoing profound museographic changes and transforming the discourse surrounding these sacred works.
The article traces the trajectory of the mural fragments recovered from the church of the Văcăreşti monastery – from their in extremis removal in 1985 to their current display in secular museums. After briefly reconstructing the historical context of this monastic and princely complex and its role within eighteenth-century Orthodox culture, the text focuses on the operations of detachment and the subsequent stages of restoration, which effectively functioned as a “workshop-school” for several generations of wall-painting conservators. The analysis then shifts to the ways in which these fragments, transformed into movable cultural assets and now dispersed among several museums in Bucharest, are embedded in differing curatorial narratives, ranging from white cube-type galleries to a lapidarium setting and a Brâncovenesc architectural space. At the core of the argument lies the question of how the sacrality of these images is reshaped once they leave the liturgical space, and how scenography, labels and historical contextualisation can sustain not only aesthetic contemplation but also a form of memorial patrimonialisation, in which these frescoes operate simultaneously as sacred images, as fragments of a destroyed monument, and as vehicles for a critical memory of historical violence.
The Diocesan Museum and, later, the Tapestry Museum were major cultural institutions for Angers and the surrounding area, providing a setting for the display of sacred art in the city from 1857 to 1952. The collections, with their diversity of types and origins, gradually came to occupy the spaces of the Bishop’s Palace, which was increasingly dedicated to this museum function. Through the implementation of a genuine policy of acquisition, public engagement and visitor reception, these museums succeeded in capturing the interest of both locals and tourists, attracting an ever-growing number of visitors until the works were dispersed in 1952.
The oldest museum of sacred art in France, the Hiéron, founded in 1879 with the aim of re-Christianizing society, houses a rich collection: 17th- and 18th-century Italian paintings, religious gold and silverware, Romanesque sculpture, and more. But it also bears the weight of its esoteric past. Now owned by the municipality and completely renovated in 2005, it has reinvented itself to address the subject of Catholic spirituality in art through a thematic presentation that encourages dialogue between eras and opens up to other monotheistic religions. As part of the reflections prompted by the updating of the Hieron Museum’s Scientific and Cultural Project, this article explores the specificities of its museographic identity and the diversity of ways in which contemporary art enriches and renews visitors’ perspectives on sacred objects within the museum space.
This contribution focuses on collections of plaster casts of ancient sculptures, which proliferated in museums and university collections in the German states during the second half of the 19th century. Around 1900, plaster copies of sculptures began to lose their appeal to the public. However, the significant development of ancient archaeology in universities gave new impetus to this type of collection: they were used to give shape to the most recent hypotheses formulated on the original state and articulation of Greek and Roman sculptures preserved in international collections. This new scientific tool fascinated France, whose universities drew inspiration from this model. However, in the German states, the practice of reconstructing ancient sculptures using plaster quickly posed major problems; it even sparked a crisis that ultimately led to the decline of university plaster cast collections in favour of photography.
This article offers a new study of the European porcelain collection of the Khanenko Museum in Kyiv, one of the most significant in Ukraine. Drawing on archival documents, Bohdan Khanenko’s memoirs, the first museum descriptions from 1919, and the analysis of inventory labels attached to the objects, the research reconstructs the original ensemble and traces its transformations throughout the twentieth century. The study highlights the collector’s encyclopedic taste for major European manufactories: Meissen, Sèvres, Vienna, Vezzi, among others: and examines the impact of Soviet museum policies, nationalization processes and wartime losses on the integrity of the collection.It shows that nearly one-third of the pieces listed in 1919 have disappeared or been transferred to other institutions, while 393 objects can now be firmly reattributed to the founders’ holdings. By overcoming eight decades of uncertainty and generic references to “former deposits”, the investigation restores historical context and coherence to the collection. It lays the groundwork for a future catalogue raisonné and contributes to the reassessment of a heritage long overshadowed by the upheavals of the twentieth century.
This article examines the ideological factors that delayed the establishment of a museum of decorative or industrial arts in nineteenth-century France, to the benefit of the Louvre. It shows that under Napoleon III, the Galerie d’Apollon functioned as a substitute for such a museum within a political context marked by Caesarism, and that the Third Republic continued this arrangement without fundamentally challenging it. The study brings together the history of museum spaces and that of the objects displayed, considered as material and symbolic configurations whose staging generates new meanings. The reorganisation of the Galerie d’Apollon after 1861 thus provides a framework for understanding how certain museographic choices have had a lasting impact on the status accorded to decorative arts in France.
Ethnographic collecting has a long history. From the 16th and 17th century cabinets of rarities onwards, ethnographic collecting has become more and more institutionalized. Present-day ethnographic museums are however confronted with different challenges, mainly related to a contested past. This article argues that the contested past of colonialism and violence is only part of the story. We could also interpret ethnographic collecting in terms of exchange. This offers us a more nuanced view of the way these collections were formed and how they can be used nowadays.
The article deals with the reconstruction of a Roman villa from Pompeii at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham (1854), a gigantic museum of plaster casts situated near London. This space goes far beyond the evocation of domestic art in ancient Rome, and functions as the main operator of the museum as a whole, as it is put at the service of the British industrial empire and the production of domestic consumer goods.
Nowadays, many museums choose to share their data online. Any digitally savvy netizen can now conduct a quantitative study using these databases from the comfort of their own home. For example, it would be possible to evaluate the geographical spread of a museum's collection. The present study aims to assess the use of these 'computerised data' to shed light on the history of a collection. This article uses the data from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which is available on a GitHub repository as a table containing more than 470,000 objects, as a case study. Despite their limitations, these quantitative methods reveal how the museum's collection was enriched. These novel numeric approaches thus offer a new and complementary way to consider the history of museums.
The jawbones of enemies killed by the Bamum were hung from these calabashes. These symbols of victory were the used for rituals and considered the dynasty’s regalia. During the colonial period, they became artefacts collected by Europeans, particularly missionaries. Their acquisition led to a break with their original context and a change in function, and the calabashes were reused for propaganda purposes, particularly to justify the missionaries’ actions in the field and demonstrate their effectiveness. This article examines a set of four Nka’a kügha calabashes from the Bamum Kingdom (Cameroon), collected by the Société des Missions évangéliques de Paris (SMEP) in the 1920s and 1930s and now in the British Museum, and the museums of ethnography in Neuchâtel and Geneva. Their circulation, reuse in different social universes, reconnection with the context of origin and restitution have placed the calabashes at the centre of contemporary museum issues, starting with the exhibition of works made using human remains.
Moments of spoliation and restitution can be seen as passages in the life of objects that categorise them, make them part of our heritage, give them or take away their value, and document them. The Nazis’ vast undertaking of artistic predation was thus a major moment in the movement and loss of objects in Europe, particularly from private collections. Through the archives of the Commission de Récupération Artistique from 1944 to the 1950s, and by delving into Le Répertoire des biens spoliés published beginning in 1947, historians can bring to life rare objects, private collections, and dismantled and disappeared sets, recounting their respective biographies and offering a perspective on the tastes of the time, thanks to the descriptions, photographs and drawings that accompany the inventories. Le Répertoire des biens spoliés, sometimes the only documentation of seized works or collections, helped preserve cultural heritage as well as its memory. While the objects, through their materiality and presence, may then be considered witnesses to the past, their absence also constitutes a testimony of sorts.
Collected in 1904, during a colonial criminal case, Taga’s bracelet, a wooden piece from northern Vanuatu, became part of Louis Joseph Bouge’s collection, adding to its owner’s prestige. In this context, it seems to have been part of an exchange of gifts on the occasion of the erudite collector’s marriage to Emma Quille. Much later, the bracelet returned to the collection of its first owner, then was bequeathed by Louis Joseph Bouge’s widow to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres. When the object’s journey is examined from a biographical angle, a succession of social roles emerges, raising questions about the singularisation of objects, their agency as “trophies” and their place among non-agonistic gifts.
In the nineteenth century, as the idea of a museum took shape in the Paris region, the first attempts at museography and restoration appeared. An object biography of four wooden sculptures of women attributed to Germain Pilon at the time provides an opportunity to explore these intertwined phenomena. The journey of the figures, which once supported the shrine of Saint Genevieve in the Paris church of the same name, illustrates both the museum practice of an era and its growing taste for the French Renaissance. The aim of this study is to analyse the peregrinations of the group during the nineteenth century, as well as the various practices that enabled it to be exhibited in three institutions that were themselves key players in the history of collections: the Musée des Monuments Français, the Louvre and the History Galleries of Versailles.
Inji Efflatoun (1924–1989) organized her first solo exhibition at the ADAM Gallery in Cairo in March 1952. A leading figure in modern Egyptian art, Efflatoun made a name for herself with her dual career as a painter and Marxist, feminist and anti-colonialist activist. While pursuing her artistic training, she organised her exhibition against the backdrop of the Suez Crisis, which heralded the 23 July Revolution and accelerated the struggles for national independence. A study of Efflatoun’s artworks, which denounce the ravages of colonialism on the most disadvantaged segments of the population, particularly rural women, reveals the discursive strategies developed by the artist to disseminate her opinions. By observing the to-and-fro between her paintings and her writings, it is possible to understand the March 1952 exhibition as a manifesto for art committed to the society she lived in.
