Museums, creating new common identities

History tells us of constant changes over recent decades radical enough to question the identity of museum

Author

Fulvio Irace

Professor emeritus, Milan Polytechnic

Museums today grapple with redefining their identity amid shifting cultural, social, and technological paradigms. Once pillars of national identity and education, they now navigate demands for inclusivity, digital integration, and global dialogue. This evolution challenges traditional roles, transforming museums into dynamic spaces for shared experiences and new narratives. Fulvio Irace, professor emeritus at the Milan Polytechnic, tells us all about these changes.

It is difficult to define exactly what a museum is these days, because every imaginable definition clashes with the impossibility of referring to one standard model. Although museums often continue to be seen by many as an institution linked to the past, unchanging or virtually immobile, history tells us of constant changes, sometimes creeping up slowly or, at other times as in the case over recent decades, so radical as to question their very identity.

Originally designed to be private institutions for holding collections owned by noble people, princes and rulers, museums ended up serving public purposes with the emergence of national states; products of the Enlightenment, they opened their doors to everybody to reinforce the identity of individual nations and played an educational role in the creation of a common culture founded on the centrality of the Western paradigm.

Altes Museum in Berlin covering the period from Greek art to the 19^th century is still the prototype that inspired the great heritage collections across Europe: the Prussian architect Karl Friederich Schinkel gave it an architectural layout that set the benchmark through until the first part of the following century. Set out in grandiose forms inspired by the sacredness of a temple of knowledge, Altes Museum gave museums the almost sacred status of a three-dimensional book about the history of mankind, so visitors could be reassured about their own place in the world and reminded of their own responsibility towards contributing to the nation’s progress.

From their original status right through to the present day, museums have become the main sign of a crisis in the purpose they are (consensually) taken to serve in face of changes in collective sensibility, the emergence of new cultural scenarios, and the onset of new social conditions. The art that a museum is designed to host has changed; the users and the ways in which they consider contact with artistic experience have also changed; lastly, the context in which museums are set since they were re-founded in the middle of the last century has also changed. In Italy, for example, the transition from dictatorship to the Republic created an awareness of a closer relationship between art and society, according to Herbert Read's well-known formula “Education through Art”, which led to the so-called “golden age” of museums. The Italian architect Franco Albini neatly summed up their epoch-making significance when he criticised the concept of a “setting” to which museum layouts had hitherto conformed: a setting was intended to create interaction with the works on display, but it did not take visitors into account, not bothering to bring them closer to art through a language consistent with their sensitivity.

Users and ways of perceiving artistic experience have changed and the context in which museums have so far operated has also changed

Advocating the need for a close relationship between architect, graphic designer, interior designer and lighting technician, Albini emphasised the importance of an overall project that focused on the communicative and participatory side of art places and exhibition facilities. In the age of the rise of industrial design, he masterfully drew on its methods by combining them with relics from the past, as in the famous (and misunderstood) arrangement of Margaret of Brabant’s head from Giovanni Pisano’s Fragment from the Tomb of Margaret of Brabant, boldly installed on a telescopic metal pivot. The supporting piston for the Elevatio animae (elevation of the soul) became not only a useful exhibition prop, but also a manifesto for a period in history when Italian architecture questioned the purpose and spatial layout of museums.

The theme of narration took shape, which Carlo Scarpa was inspired by to varying extent when he redesigned Castelvecchio Museum in Verona and Correr Museum in Venice along narrative lines. Likewise, the BBPR team devised solutions with a deliberately “popular educational function” for the museums in the Sforza Castle in Milan.

The BBPR design team devised solutions with a deliberately “popular educational function” for the visitors of the museums in the Sforza Castle in Milan

And yet, half a century or more later, these museums have undergone profound revisions: examples include Palazzo Bianco in Genoa and the Sala degli Scarlioni hall in the Milan Castle, where Michelangelo’s statue Pietà Rondanini is exhibited separately in another location in accordance with Michele De Lucchi's exhibition design that privileges the aesthetic veneration of this quite unique masterpiece as an object over the complete narrative layout.

In short, whereas in the aftermath of the Second World War museums set out to reassert the issue of democracy by working on access to collections and the messages to be conveyed to societies emerging from the great conflict, nowadays the pressure of social media has once again reset the boundaries of access, forcing museums to serve the purpose of being a social regulator. This has resulted in a crucial shift from the domain of curators and art historians to that of social mediation with individuals becoming key players imposing new behaviours, new rules and new questions about museums in a global debate in which equal solutions for all are struggling to emerge.

This is the same uncertainty demonstrated by ICOM (International Council of Museums), which has had to update the definition of the canon several times, extending it to encompass the domains of the immaterial, the intangible and sustainability, and extending its tasks from mere conservation to communication at first and then even to enjoyment and “pleasure”.

Indeed, in the latest declaration of 2022, we read that museums “operate and communicate ethically and professionally and with the participation of communities, offering diverse experiences for education, pleasure, reflection and knowledge sharing”. It is no longer sufficient to state that museums are “at the service of societies and their development” without asking how these societies have changed and what values or needs they represent nowadays, if we want to avoid mistakenly defining them in accordance with the identity of the European or, at most, Western world alone.

If gender issues pose conservators with the dilemma of inclusion and the revising of layouts, the emergence of digital technology has caused a real earthquake and our entire cultural heritage now finds itself at the focus of a dilemma: repositories of established identities or means of constructing new shared identities?

Thanks to the digital agility of the tools available, an avenue full of potential opens up for the enhancement of spaces

Michelangelo's Pietà Rondanini is enhanced by Michele de Lucchi's installation project, which uses the surrounding environment to focus on the artistic masterpiece. Mapei contributed by supplying a specific system for the installation of wood floors.

Showcasing artworks has become an important party of numerous cultural promotion strategies adopted by museums, and experiments on the notion of an empathic museum have broken down the traditional practice of the “paintings-hanging-on-wall” or white box museum; thanks partly to the digital agility of the tools now available, there is now a wealth of potential for enhancing the spaces available. Obviously, the ease of digital and virtual technology also gives rise to shifts in what has been defined as the “museum-fairground” where spectacularity and the abuse of special effects end up destroying the value of the materials on display at exhibitions that are, not surprisingly, euphemistically described as “experiences”.

Author

Fulvio Irace

Professor emeritus, Milan Polytechnic