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A building, place, or institution devoted to the acquisition, conservation, study, exhibition, and educational interpretation of objects having scientific, historical, or artistic value.
[Latin Mūsēum, from Greek Mouseion, shrine of the Muses, from Mouseios, of the Muses, from Mousa, Muse.]
For more information on museum, visit Britannica.com.
An institution for the assembly and public display of any kind of collection, esp. one of rare and/or educational value.
musēum (mouseion), in Greece, originally a place connected with the Muses, sometimes in a religious sense but more usually as a place where the arts and learning were cultivated. Thus ‘museum’ came to mean a place of education, connected with the Muses. Euripides describes the places where birds sing as mouseia. The most famous museum was that of Alexandria in Egypt, founded by Ptolemy I Soter (ruled 323–283 BC) possibly on the advice of the Athenian Demetrius of Phalerum. It was distinct from the Library, and housed scholars who were supported by the Ptolemies and, after Egypt came under Roman control, by the emperors. There is no evidence that there was provision for formal teaching, but lectures were given and there were many discussions which even the kings might attend; Cleopatra, the last independent ruler of Egypt, is reputed to have done so. After the foundation of Constantinople in AD 324 many of the Museum scholars are said to have retreated there to avoid the theological controversies of Alexandria. The last member of the Museum to be mentioned explicitly is Theon the mathematician, father of Hypatia, c. AD 400. Dinners with clever conversation were a characteristic institution of the Museum; a poet of the third century BC described it as the ‘hen-coop of the Muses’.
Following the creation of the first public museum, the Ashmolean in Oxford, which opened its doors on 6 June 1683, many thousands of similar institutions have been opened worldwide. Over the centuries their functions and role have changed, although at their heart is the preservation and display of collections. So far as archaeology goes there are three main roles or responsibilities that are fulfilled by museums today: the long-term management and curation of archaeological materials and associated archives; the presentation of a selection of this material to a range of audiences through displays and other interpretative means; and the researching and investigation of both the archaeological dimensions of the material and also its cultural nature as one of the agents that help to create a contemporary picture of the past.
The means by which museums have acquired some of their collections have come under intense scrutiny and debate in recent years, especially in relation to archaeological objects and heritage materials. Most of the world's great museums built their collections through campaigns that literally mined the cultural resources of countries around the world. In 1970 UNESCO agreed an international ‘Convention of the means of prohibiting and preventing the illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of cultural property’ that has been endorsed by many countries. More recently a new body of legislation known as the UNIDROIT Convention has been drafted by the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law, and in November 1986 the International Council of Museums (ICOM) adopted a code of professional ethics that includes the need to consider the connection between illicitly acquired material and the destructive means by which such material is usually acquired. In the USA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act adopted in 1986 mandates the return of all human remains and associated funerary objects to lineal descendants of the tribe from which the material was collected.
Museums define relationships between life, community, the nation, and the world through the interpretation of objects, experience, and the environment. These institutions range from community-based museums, such as the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, and Chinatown History Museum and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York, to house museums like Mount Vernon and Monticello. Among other developments are historic sites, reconstructed towns and villages such as the Boston African American National Historic Site and Lowell National Historic Park in Massachusetts; the Henry Ford Museum and Green-Field Village, Michigan; and Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. There are also national museums of art and science that include the National Museums of the Smithsonian Institution, Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Museum of Natural History, Field Museum of Chicago, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among thousands of others.
The sheer variety of museums evinces the need to address different constituencies and to engage different interpretations of historic events that recover the multiplicity of cultures that constitute American identity. In the United States, the provision of social and civic spaces by government, private, and nonprofit organizations points to the complex nature of the relationship between knowledge and identity that has developed in the last fifty years. A 1997 study of state museum organizations revealed an estimated 16,000 museums in operation. Because several hundred new institutions appear each year, this estimate may have risen to over 20,000. According to a 1999 census report, museums average 865 million visits per year, or 2.3 million visits a day, a statistic suggestive of their importance in American life.
Emergence of Museums in America
While thousands of museums exist in contemporary rural and urban landscapes, their precedents in the United States extend to the late eighteenth century. The history of this earlier museum era begins after the 1770s and offers a different starting point for the founding of museums in the United States. Museums and cabinets existed nearly a century before the "great age" of museum building from 1870 to 1920, which resulted in the creation of large beaux-arts structures with classically inspired exteriors that housed collections of art and natural history. Instead of exhibiting the grand collections belonging to an aristocracy or monarchy, the museum in America has much humbler beginnings. In 1773, the Charleston Library Society founded a private museum that featured a collection of artifacts, birds, and books available to its members, until it was destroyed in wartime three years later. Once the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) was over, attention was turned toward the development of useful knowledge, and collections were one way of displaying the natural materials that could support the growth of industry and promote a sense of unity. Access to such early collections, also known as "cabinets," was possible through membership in philosophical societies or through courses taken in college. For some, awareness of a need to establish a sense of collective identity prompted them to open their collections to a paying public.
In 1780s Philadelphia, Dr. Abraham Chovet, Pierre Eugene Du Simitiere, and Charles Willson Peale each formed their own semiprivate cabinets accessible to a public made of the professional class for an admission fee. Such businesses offered their owners opportunities for pursuing nontraditional employment as an entrepreneur. In running them, they honed their skills in dealing with the public, and by experiment and experience, developed their respective displays. A public largely composed of merchants, government bureaucrats, and military officers paid admission fees equal to a laborer's daily wage. Sometimes admission fees were deliberately kept high, which effectively worked as a filter mechanism that limited the visitors to a specific group. Dr. Abraham Chovet maintained a cabinet of anatomical waxworks as a means of training physicians about the body at a time when actual subjects were in short supply. High admission fees ensured that students of physick (medicine) remained its main audience.
General museums of natural history and art charged admission fees of a half or quarter of a dollar to see examples of natural history, portraiture, waxworks, and trade goods. In port cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or New Haven, such extensive collections were entirely housed under a single roof. In 1784, Swiss expatriate Pierre Eugene Du Simitiere opened his cabinet for admission to the public in his Arch Street, Philadelphia, home, which he advertised in newspapers and broadsides as "The American Musaeum." For half of a dollar at an appointed time, he offered audiences tours of books, prints, archival collections, and the artifacts and antiquities of indigenous peoples. Everything was auctioned off after his death in 1785. Artist and saddle maker Charles Willson Peale was familiar with Du Simitiere's failed effort. He began his museum by building extensions onto his home, first building a portrait gallery to display his work to prospective clients, and then adding rooms to accommodate his collections of natural history. He maintained his practice of portraiture, thereby ensuring an income to support his large family, and he developed a style for the portraits of national heroes he displayed above cases of specimens. Peale continued to expand his home to house a growing collection. In 1794 he was able to rent rooms in the American Philosophical Society building and later, in 1802, the museum was moved to the Pennsylvania State House (Independence Hall), where it remained until 1829. Peale's Museum developed differently than museums in New York and Boston that catered more to popular entertainment. In part this was due to Peale's duties as curator of the American Philosophical Society and the desire of leaders to maintain Philadelphia's prominence as a cultural capital of the United States. Professors of natural philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania used the museum collections in courses on natural history, and Peale also delivered a series of lectures on natural history at the University. By the 1810s, the end of this mutual arrangement arrived. The University built its own museum and collections, which marked the growing divide between higher education, the rise of specialized societies, and popular efforts to educate citizens about natural history. Peale built a lecture room in his museum, used for scientific demonstrations and lectures on natural history. Other universities and colleges developed their own museums, where professors employed teaching collections in courses on anatomy and natural philosophy. This presaged the development of entertainment rather than science as a means of attracting customers to the museum.
When New York became the capital of the United States in 1790, the Tammany Society founded its own museum, dedicated to the collection of American Indian artifacts. First located in a rented room in City Hall, the museum quickly outgrew its initial home and was moved to the Old Exchange Building. In 1795, unable to maintain the museum, the Society transferred ownership to the museum keeper, Gardiner Baker. Baker's Tammany or American Museum (1795–1798) was dedicated to waxworks displays, paintings and collections of American Indian artifacts, automata, coins, fossils, insects, mounted animals, and a menage of live animals. Such a program of selected materials was followed by other museums. Aside from the entertainment, displays fell into two large categories—natural or artificial curiosities—the second designating objects that were made by people.
When Baker died in 1798, the museum collections were auctioned off and became part of Edward Savage's Museum, which was, in turn, sold to John Scudder for his American Museum in the 1820s, and by the 1840s, these collections were incorporated into Barnum'S American Museum. In Boston, Daniel Bowen established his Columbian Museum (1795–1803), which featured extensive waxworks displays, paintings, and collections of animals, like those of Baker's and Peale's Museums. Bowen exited the museum business after three disastrous fires and worked with his nephew, the engraver Abel Bowen.
In this formative period between 1785 and 1820, museums gained additional support. City and state government provided support through the charge of a nominal fee ("one peppercorn" or minimal rent) for the lease of an available vacant building. For example, Scudder's American Museum began by renting the old New York Almshouse in City Hall Park in 1810. In 1816, Peale solicited the help of Philadelphia's City Corporation, newly owner of the State House, to establish a reasonable rent for his museum. Often, the interior of an older building was completely modified to hold display cases for arrangements of mounted specimens of the animal kingdom. Less frequently, a museum edifice was designed and built to order, as was the short-lived Philadelphia Museum (1829), Bowen's Columbian Museum in Boston (1803), and Peale's Museum in Baltimore (1814–1829), the latter operated by Peale's sons as a private business for profit. Fiercely competitive and dependent on profits from admission fees, museums were difficult to maintain given the uncertainty of an economy that suffered periodic depressions. Support from the federal government was negligible. Not until the formation of the National Park Service in the 1920s and the establishment of the Smithsonian did the U.S. government provide complete support for a public museum.
Changes in Collecting
Collecting became institutionalized between 1819 and 1864, and institutions dealing with the past—museums, historical societies, and collections—began to systematically develop their record keeping of acquisitions, inventories, and displays. Different fields of study branched from the humanities and the sciences, and institutions became more specific in their focus. Popular interest in the natural sciences spurred a broad range of activities and a market for lectures, textbooks, and journals channeled through the lyceum circuit by the 1840s. A decade later, many secondary schools and colleges featured their own collection of specimens, created by teachers and students. The growth of cities saw an increase in the number of museums in other national regions.
In general, two main types of museum emerged after midcentury—those devoted to the natural sciences, and those devoted to the arts. Not included in the histories of these large institutions is the "dime museum," which ranged from curio halls to storefronts that exhibited living anomalies, magic shows, plays, waxworks, or menageries. The predecessor of the dime museum was P. T. Barnum's American Museum (1841–1865) in downtown New York. Barnum's Museum became a national attraction that offered visitors displays of natural and scientific specimens along with live animal shows, plays, waxworks, sideshows, and plays in one location, for a quarter of a dollar. Together with Moses Kimball, proprietor of the Boston Museum, Barnum purchased the collections of museums at auction, recycling the contents of previous institutions unable to survive periodic depressions. Although Barnum left the museum business after three fires destroyed his collections in New York, the success of his institution inspired other museum entrepreneurs to follow his lead.
In the Midwest, museums were established near the waterfront in Cincinnati and St. Louis in the early 1800s. William Clark, Governor and Secretary of Indian Affairs at St. Louis, built an Indian council chamber and museum in 1816, filled with portraits by George Catlin and artifacts of various Native American peoples. Until his death in 1838, Clark's museum served as an introduction for visitors to the West and its resources. Part of Clark's collections was incorporated into Albert Koch's St. Louis Museum and dispersed after 1841, when Koch departed for Europe. Cincinnati's Western Museum (1820–1867) began as a scientific institution and was doing poorly by 1823; its new owner, Joseph Dorfeuille, transformed the museum into a successful popular entertainment. The Western Museum's most successful draw was the "Infernal Regions," a display that featured waxworks and special effects designed by the artist Hiram Powers. Low admission fees, central locations, and a wide variety of entertainment under one roof offered another option for spending leisure time in expanding industrial centers.
The display of industrial achievement had a profound influence on exhibition culture in the antebellum period. In 1853, the first U.S. World's Fair, the New York Crystal Palace, opened, followed by the Sanitary Fairs of the Civil War era. Fairs highlighted national achievement, rather than focusing on an individual artist, through participation in these venues. These events exposed larger segments of the population to the arts of painting and sculpture in addition to displays of manufacturing and industrial power. The rise of exhibitions and world's fairs offered opportunities for many to purchase reproductions, if not the original works on display. Expositions offered opportunities for public education. As instruments of social control, fairs and museums reiterated the racial and cultural hierarchy of white dominance. Access to museums by people of color was often restricted, and even specified in admission policy as early as 1820 at Scudder's American Museum. Beginning with the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, this restriction was expressed through the organization of living ethnological displays. Indigenous groups from the Philippines and the United States were housed in reservations surrounded by fences and guards, while visitors moved around the areas to watch performances of everyday life. Between 1876 and 1939, fairs took place in St. Louis, Omaha, Cleveland, New Orleans, Dallas, and Seattle. World's fairs and expositions had a close relationship to museums, like that between the Smithsonian and the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Materials on display became part of museum collections; elements of exposition displays, such as the period room, were developments incorporated into museums. Frequently, former fair buildings became homes for new museums.
Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., developed into important centers for the arts and the natural sciences. The architecture of larger institutions featured an imposing exterior executed in a classical or gothic style that symbolized power on a federal level. In New York, the American Museum of Natural History opened in 1869, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in 1870. The Castle, the Smithsonian Institution's original red brick gothic building, was visible for a distance from its bare surroundings in Washington, D.C. Its rapidly increasing collections of specimens, some of which came from the 1876 Exposition, were contained in a series of glass cases that lined the walls of the Castle's Great Hall. By the 1880s, the Smithsonian comprised the U.S. National Museum and the Arts and Industries Building. Museums of natural history featured large collections arranged according to the latest scientific taxonomy, supported research, and expeditions for fossils and living specimens. Interest in prehistoric life-forms increased, and the skeletons of large dinosaurs, wooly mammoths, and giant sloths remained immensely popular with the public for the next seventy-five years.
Large science museums were not simply sites for educating students about biology, geology, or chemistry, but illustrated the place of America in the larger world, through the featured display of large collections of specimens culled from around the globe by official exploring expeditions sponsored by the United States government. Smaller regional organizations also formed museums, and their members gave courses in ornithology, geology, mineralogy, or conchology to a local public, as did the Worcester Natural History Society in Massachusetts. Such organizations frequently lacked the staff and collection resources of larger urban institutions, but offered access to natural history through shelves of natural specimens or guided field trips to the surrounding area.
Curators of natural history museums were also involved in another collection activity as anthropology became a distinct discipline, and interest in acquiring the material culture and remains of various indigenous peoples intensified. By the end of the nineteenth century, interest in anthropology led to the development of ethno-graphic exhibit techniques, some influenced by the villages of World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Much of this material was donated to public museums. Although the displays of objects or dioramas of native life received scientific treatment, they also contained a moral dimension. Underpinning approaches to the study of indigenous cultures was a sense of Americans as inheritors of civilization, and the ongoing population decline of many American Indian peoples precipitated interest in the development of representative collections. Little changed until the 1990s, when Native and non-Native curators and scholars began to reevaluate the interpretation and presentation of Native American peoples in museums.
Over the course of the twentieth century, cities increased in physical size, population, and wealth. Museums and related institutions developed and were shaped by the public response to education as entertainment. Gradually, more funds, more services, and more equipment was dedicated to museums and their programs as municipal and state governments realized how tourism contributed to their regions. Higher education and training programs developed the study of art and cultural production, which in turn, shaped the acquisition and display of antiquities, paintings, and sculpture in museums.
Wealthy industrialists contributed to their own collections, which ultimately became a privately or publicly run museum. For two industrialists, objects were seen as the means of conveying history. Henry Ford believed that objects told the story of American history more accurately than texts, and was the largest buyer of Americana in the country, collecting objects and entire buildings, which he moved to Dearborn, Michigan, to create Greenfield Village. Henry Mercer held similar ideas to Ford concerning objects, and sought to create an encyclopedic collection of every implement used by European Americans before 1820. Mercer's museum, built in 1916 in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, focused on tools, and his collection of 25,000 artifacts is housed in a seven-story building of his own design in reinforced concrete. Industrialists also worked to found large institutions that later housed numerous private collections displayed for the benefit of public audiences. This specialization began in the early twentieth century, with the emergence of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art.
In the 1930s, museum management shifted; the federal government increasingly became a source of support for museums through grants, and businesses supported and programmed science museums. In the post–World War II era, collectors and philanthropists turned their attention to founding institutions, which focused on national culture, business, and industry. Museums were not just one structure, but could constitute a number of buildings. A particular and specific image of the past was evoked by clustering old buildings in danger of demolition on a new site, renamed and declared an authentic link to the past. Examples of this include Greenfield Village, Old Sturbridge Village, and Colonial Williamsburg. But like many institutions of that time, displays offered a segregated history geared for white audiences. Audiences at these sites are introduced to another reading of the past, visible in a comparison of programming with that a half century earlier. For example, the William Paca House in Annapolis, Maryland, and Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home in Charlottesville, Virginia, make visible the relationship of slavery to the structure and history of the site, restoring visibility to people fundamental to the economy in the Colonial period and in the early Republic. Sites run by the National Park Service have also under-gone similar shifts in interpretation, which changes the perception and understanding of history for the public. There remains much to be done. Museums are responsive rather than static sites of engagement.
In the early twenty-first century, the history of museums and collection practices are studied in terms of their larger overlapping historical, cultural, and economic contexts. No longer anchored to a national ideal, the architecture of new museums instead attracts tourists, workers, and students and invites connections with local institutions. Programming, outreach, and work with artists and communities have brought museums further into the realm of public attention, sparking support, controversy, or concession over the links between the present and the past. Exhibitions such as the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum or the artists exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum of Art's show Sensation make visible the social tensions that surround the display and the ways in which particular narratives are told. The thousands of museums that exist in the United States today testify to the power of material culture and the increasingly central role display maintains across the country.
Bibliography
Adams, Bluford. E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Alderson, William T., ed. Mermaids, Mummies, and Mastodons: The Emergence of the American Museum. Washington, D.C.: American Association of Museums, 1992.
"America's Museums." DAEDALUS: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Summer 1999. Issued as Volume 128, Number 3, of the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Brigham, David R. Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale's Museum and Its Audience. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.
The Changing Presentation of the American Indian: Museums and Native Cultures. National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution/University of Washington Press, 2000.
Conn, Steven. Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876– 1926. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Dennett, Andrea Stulman. Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America. New York: New York University Press, 1997.
Eichstedt, Jennifer L., and Stephen Small. Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums. Washington, D.C., and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002.
Handler, Richard, and Eric Gable. The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.
Hinsley, Curtis M. The Smithsonian and the American Indian: Making a Moral Anthropology in Victorian America. Washington, D.C., and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981.
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Phillips, Ruth B., and Christopher Steiner, eds. Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999.
Rivinus, E. F., and E. M. Youssef. Spencer Baird of the Smithsonian. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.
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I went to a museum where they had all the heads and arms from all the statues in the other museums.
A museum is a "permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits, for purposes of study, education, enjoyment, the tangible and intangible evidence of people and their environment". [1]
The Museums Association definition (adopted 1998) is:
| “ | Museums enable people to explore collections for inspiration, learning and enjoyment. They are institutions that collect, safeguard and make accessible artifacts and specimens, which they hold in trust for society. | ” |
A previous Museums Association definition was:
However, there have been controversies recently regarding artifacts being damaged or being exposed to high risk of damage whilst on loan. For example, an ancient Egyptian stone lion on loan from the British Museum was being manually carried down a flight of stairs (as shown in a BBC Television documentary 2007). The supervisor in charge advised the people carrying it if it starts to fall, let it drop. The irony is that these artifacts have been carefully excavated and transported, often thousands of miles, without damage. Once arriving at a museum the artifact usually does not receive the same level of care and attention that it received whilst being excavated and transported. Another example of this is the recent return of a Terracotta Army horse on loan from a museum in Rome, which showed the item to be damaged on return. As yet, there is no internationally agreed protocol for a level of standard of care of artifacts on display or on loan from museums.
The English "museum" comes from the Latin word, and is pluralized as "museums" (or, rarely,
"musea"). It is originally from the Greek mouseion, which denotes a place or
temple dedicated to the Muses (the patron divinities in Greek
mythology of the arts), and hence a building set apart for study and the arts, especially the institute for philosophy and research at the Library established at Alexandria by Ptolemy I Soter c280 BCE This was considered by many to be the first museum/
Museums collect and care for objects of scientific, artistic, or historical importance and make them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. Large museums are located in major cities throughout the world and more local ones exist in small cities. Most museums offer programs and activities for a range of audiences, including adults, children, and families, as well as those for more specific professions. Programs for the public may consist of lectures or tutorials by the museum faculty or field experts, films, musical or dance performances, and technology demonstrations. Many times, museums concentrate on the host region's culture. Although most museums do not allow physical contact with the associated artifacts, there are some that are interactive and encourage a more hands-on approach. Modern trends in museology have broadened the range of subject matter and introduced many interactive exhibits, which give the public the opportunity to make choices and engage in activities that may vary the experience from person to person. With the advent of the internet, there are growing numbers of virtual exhibits, i.e. web versions of exhibits showing images and playing recorded sound.
Museums are usually open to the general public, sometimes charging an admission fee. Some museums have free entrance, either permanently or on special days, e.g. once per week or year.
Museums are usually not run for the purpose of making a profit, unlike galleries which engage in the sale of objects. There are governmental museums, non-governmental or non-profit museums, and privately owned or family museums.
There are very many types of museums, from very large collections in major cities, covering many of the categories below, to very small museums covering either a particular location in a general way, or a particular subject, such an individual notable person. Categories include: fine arts, applied arts, craft, archaeology, anthropology and ethnology, history, cultural history, military history, science, technology, children's museums, natural history, numismatics, botanical and zoological gardens and philately. Within these categories many museums specialize further, e.g. museums of modern art, local history, aviation history, agriculture or geology. A museum normally houses a core collection of important selected objects in its field. Objects are formally accessioned by being registered in the museum's collection with an artifact number and details recorded about their provenance. The persons in charge of the collection and of the exhibits are known as curators.
History museums cover the knowledge of history and its relevance to the present and future. Some cover specialized curatorial aspects of history or a particular locality; others are more general. Such museums contain a wide range of objects, including documents, artifacts of all kinds, art, archaeological objects. Antiquities museums specialize in more archaeological findings.
A common type of history museum is a historic house. A historic house may be a building of special architectural interest, the birthplace or home of a famous person, or a house with an interesting history. Historic sites can also become museums, particularly those that mark public crimes, such as Tuol Sleng or Robben Island. Another type of history museum is a living museum. A living museum is where people recreate a time period to the fullest extent, including buildings, clothes and language. It is similar to historical reenactment.
An Art museum, also known as an art gallery, is a space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art, and usually primarily paintings, illustrations, and sculpture. Collections of drawings and old master prints are often not displayed on the walls, but kept in a print room. There may be collections of applied art, including ceramics, metalwork, furniture, artist's books and other types of object.
The first publicly owned museum in Europe was the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. While initially conceived as a a palace for the offices of Florentian magistrates (hence the name), it later evolved into a display place for many of the paintings and sculpture collected by the Medici family or commissioned by them. After the house of Medici was extinguished, the art treasures remained in Florence, forming the first modern museums. The gallery had been open to visitors by request since the sixteenth century, and in 1765 it was officially opened to the public. The first museum to open to the public was The British Museum in London, which opened free to the public in 1759 after been funded a few years earlier in 1753. It was a 'universal museum' with very varied collections covering art, applied art, archaeology, anthropology, history, and science, and a library. The science collections, library, paintings and modern sculpture have since been found separate homes, leaving history, archaeology, non-European and pre-Renaissance art, and prints and drawings. [citation needed]
The specialised art museum is considered a fairly modern invention, the first being the Hermitage in St. Petersburg which was established in 1764.
The Louvre in Paris, France was established in 1793, soon after the French Revolution when the royal treasures were declared for the people. The Czartoryski Museum in Kraków was established in 1796 by Princess Izabela Czartoryska. This showed the beginnings of removing art collections from the private domain of aristocracy and the wealthy into the public sphere, where they were seen as sites for educating the masses in taste and cultural refinement.
Science museums and technology centers revolve around scientific marvels and their history. To explain complicated inventions, a combination of demonstrations, interactive programs and thought-provoking media are used. Some museums may have exhibits on topics such as computers, aviation, physics, astronomy, and the animal kingdom. Science museums, in particular, may consist of planetaria, or large theatre usually built around a dome. Museums may have IMAX feature films, which may provide 3-D viewing or higher quality picture. As a result, IMAX content provides a more immersive experience for people of all ages. Also new virtual museums, known as Net Museums, have been appearing. These are usually web sites belonging to real museums and containing photo galleries of items found in those real museums. This is very useful for people far away who wish to see the contents of these museums.
Museums of natural history and natural science typically exhibit work of the natural world. The focus lies on nature and culture. Exhibitions may educate the masses about dinosaurs, ancient history, and anthropology. Evolution, environmental issues, and biodiversity are major areas in natural science museums. Notable museums of this type include the Natural History Museum in London, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History in Oxford, the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta, and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
Although zoos are not often thought of as museums, they are considered "living museums." They exist for the same purpose as other museums: to educate, inspire action, study, and preserve a collection. Notable zoos include the Wildlife Conservation International in New York, London Zoo, the San Diego Zoo, Berlin Zoo, Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, Frankfurt Zoo and Zoo Zurich in Switzerland.
Open air museums collect and re-erect old buildings at large outdoor sites, usually in settings of re-created landscapes of the past. The first one was King Oscar II's collection near Oslo in Norway, opened in 1881. In 1891 Arthur Hazelius founded the famous Skansen in Stockholm, which became the model for subsequent open air museums in Northern and Eastern Europe, and eventually in other parts of the world. Most open air museums are located in regions where wooden architecture prevail, as wooden structures may be translocated without substantial loss of authenticity.[citation needed] A more recent but related idea is realized in ecomuseums, which originated in France.[citation needed]
A number of different museums exist to demonstrate a variety of topics. Music museums may celebrate the life and work of composers or musicians, such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Other music museums include live music recitals such as the Handel House Museum in London.
A recent development with the expansion of the web, is the establishment of virtual museums, while some have no counterpart in the real world, such as the LIMAC http://li-mac.org/, which has no physical location and can be confused with the city's own museum, other online initiatives like the Virtual Museum of Canada http://www.virtualmuseum.ca provide physical museums with a web presence, as well as online curatorial platforms such as Rhizome http://rhizome.org. In addition to this, many museums have turned to technology to classify their objects. Larco Museum in Lima, Peru was one of the first to place their entire 45,000 piece collection in an electronic catalog.
Museums targeted for the youth, such as Great Explorations, The Children's Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, and the Miami Children's Museum, often exhibit interactive and educational material on a wide array of topics. The Baseball Hall of Fame museum is an institution of the sports category. The Corning Museum of Glass is devoted to the art, history, and science of glass. Interpretation centres are modern museums or visitors centres that often uses new means of communication with the public.
Mobile museum is a term applied to museums that make exhibitions from a vehicle, such as a van. Some institutions, such as St. Vital Historical Society and the Walker Art Center, use the term to refer to a portion of their collection that travels to sites away from the museum for educational purposes. Other mobile museums have no "home site," and use travel as their exclusive means of presentation.
The museum is usually run by a director, who has a curatorial staff that cares for the objects and arranges their display. Large museums often will have a research division or institute, which are frequently involved with studies related to the museum's items, as well as an education department, in charge of providing interpretation of the materials to the general public. The director usually reports to a higher body, such as a governmental department or a board of trustees. Objects come to the collection through a variety of means. Either the museum itself or an associated institute may organize expeditions to acquire more items or documentation for the museum. More typically, however, museums will purchase or trade for artifacts or receive them as donations or bequests.
For instance, a museum featuring Impressionist art may receive a donation of a Cubist work which simply cannot be fit into the museum's exhibits, but it can be used to help acquire a painting more central to the museum's focus. However, this process of acquiring objects outside the museum's purview in order to acquire more desirable objects is considered unethical by many museum professionals. Larger museums may have an "Acquisitions Department" whose staff is engaged full time in this kind of activity. Most museums have a collections policy to help guide what is and is not included in the collection.
Museums often cooperate to sponsor joint, often traveling, exhibits on particular subjects when one museum may not by itself have a collection sufficiently large or important. These exhibits have limited engagements and often depend upon an additional entry fee from the public to cover costs.
Early museums began as the private collections of wealthy individuals, families or institutions of art and rare or curious natural objects and artifacts. These were often displayed in so-called wonder rooms or cabinets of curiosities. Public access was often possible for the "respectable", especially to private art collections, but at the whim of the owner and his staff.
The first public museums in the world opened in Europe during the 18th century's Age of Enlightenment:
These "public" museums, however, were often accessible only by the middle and upper classes. It could be difficult to gain entrance. In London for example, prospective visitors to the British Museum had to apply in writing for admission. Even by 1800 it was possible to have to wait two weeks for an admission ticket. Visitors in small groups were limited to stays of two hours. In Victorian times in England it became popular for museums to be open on a Sunday afternoon (the only such facility allowed to do so) to enable the opportunity for 'self improvement' of the other - working - classes.
The first truly public museum was the Louvre Museum in Paris, opened in 1793 during the French Revolution, which enabled for the first time in history free access to the former French royal collections for people of all stations and status. The fabulous art treasures collected by the French monarchy over centuries were accessible to the public three days each "décade" (the 10-day unit which had replaced the week in the French Republican Calendar). The Conservatoire du muséum national des Arts (National Museum of Arts's Conservatory) was charged with organizing the Louvre as a national public museum and the centerpiece of a planned national museum system. As Napoléon I conquered the great cities of Europe, confiscating art objects as he went, the collections grew and the organizational task became more and more complicated. After Napoleon was defeated in 1815, many of the treasures he had amassed were gradually returned to their owners (and many were not). His plan was never fully realized, but his concept of a museum as an agent of nationalistic fervor had a profound influence throughout Europe.
American museums eventually joined European museums as the world's leading centers for the production of new knowledge in their fields of interest. A period of intense museum building, in both an intellectual and physical sense was realized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (this is often called "The Museum Period" or "The Museum Age"). While many American museums, both Natural History museums and Art museums alike, were founded with the intention of focusing on the scientific discoveries and artistic developments in North America, many moved to emulate their European counterparts in certain ways (including the development of Classical collections from ancient Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia and Rome). It is typically understood that universities took the place of museums as the centers for innovative research in the United States well before the start of the Second World War, however, museums to this day contribute new knowledge to their fields and continue to build collections that are useful for both research and display.
The design of museums has evolved throughout history. Interpretive museums, as opposed to art museums, have missions reflecting curatorial guidance through the subject matter which now include content in the form of images, audio and visual effects, and interactive exhibits.
Some of these experiences have very few or no artifacts; the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, being notable examples where there are few artifacts, but have strong, memorable stories to tell or information to interpret. In contrast, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC uses many artifacts in their memorable exhibitions.
Notable international museum exhibition designers include Ralph Appelbaum Associates, C&G Partners, ESI Design, Burdick Group, André & Associates Interpretation & Design Ltd.
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Português (Portuguese)
n. - museu (m)
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