«Museums, like clocks, allow us to see time.»

Krzysztof Pomian: “The museum acts as a temple of belief in the future”
Historian and author of a monumental trilogy entitled Le Musée, une histoire mondiale [The Museum, a global history], Krzysztof Pomian traces the birth of museums back to late 15th-century Italy. Over the centuries, princely treasures and cabinets of curiosities became secular places, open to the public and whose collections form a link between past and future generations.

Interview by Agnès Bardon
UNESCO

Museums are often thought to have originated with the European Enlightenment in the 18th century. But their origins go back much further. When do you think they started?

The first museums were created at the end of the 15th century – by chance. By donating a collection of antiquities to the Municipality of Rome, Pope Sixtus IV wanted to restore the Papacy's relations with the city, which had been sullied by his predecessor. The idea of a museum was foreign to him. But once displayed in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, these antiquities formed an unprecedented collection of secular, pagan objects, belonging to a public entity, hence expected to last indefinitely and be open to visitors. It was a perpetual celebration of the glory of Rome. Among the Italian elite, fascinated by all things Roman, it stimulated a desire for imitation. Half a century later, this public entity was given the name of museum, which once denoted a temple devoted to the muses.

Why was this institution created in Italy?

The museum was born in Italy because the monuments of Classical Roman antiquity were present here like nowhere else. And, because feelings that the present was inferior to this glorious past – and the desire to revive it – were more widespread and intense there than anywhere else. We can also assume that if Sixtus IV had not made his gesture, it would have been made by somebody else. The rapid expansion of the museum concept in Venice, Florence and Milan bears witness to this.

Until the end of the 17th century, the museum remained an Italian institution, as Europe north of the Alps was engulfed in religious wars. It then spread to the Germanic countries, Great Britain and France. After the French Revolution, we find it in all the capitals and major cities of Western Europe. It also established a number of bridgeheads in Central Europe, Russia, India and the Americas. Its global expansion began in the second half of the 19th century, when Europeans were colonizing every continent.

The museum was born in Italy because the monuments of Classical Roman antiquity were present here like nowhere else
How are museums different from the cabinets of curiosities or princely collections that existed before them?

The creation of museums in the Europe of the Ancien Régime consisted of opening princely art collections and cabinets of curiosities to the public – albeit in a very limited way at first. Later on, this meant adapting the architecture of the buildings in which they were displayed and the way the objects were presented, reclassifying the collections, monitoring them, and regulating opening hours and the price of admission. And this meant that museums had to employ competent staff.

You have described this institution as “useless but indispensable”. What role does it play in society?

From the 12th century onwards, European societies stopped looking to the distant past as a source for their models, examples and norms. They also stopped seeing the future as pre-determined. This happened slowly, with interruptions and conflicts, and unevenly across countries and periods. But there were two moments of intensification in this centuries-old shift in the centre of gravity from the past towards a future seen as the work of humankind itself – the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. By bringing together collections of natural and artificial objects from the past to be passed on to a distant human future, the museum acts as a temple of belief in the future. It is this belief that gives the museum its meaning.

It was born with the Renaissance and took its place at the centre of modern civilisation with the Enlightenment, when European societies ceased to be backward-looking and became future-oriented. As both a symptom of and a vehicle for this change, the museum puts history on display and raises awareness that it is ubiquitous. As a result you can visit a museum of prehistory, the Middle Ages or even the Second World War. What’s more, most museums are organised chronologically, within a geographical, thematic or other framework.

From the mid-19th century onwards, we see the number of museums multiply. How would you explain this success?

The rapid growth in the number of museums from the mid-19th century onwards was the result of the transition from agriculture to industry, from rural to urban life, from a society of orders to a society of classes, from illiteracy to writing, from a scarcity of images and sounds to their omnipresence, the progresses of secularisation and, more generally, the rapidity of the changes we perceive in the course of a lifetime, which encouraged the preservation of the remains of vanished worlds for the benefit of future generations.

What links do they have with the history of the towns in which they are located?

Since the 18th century, the museum has been a characteristic of civilization. It occupies a central place in any self-respecting city. It is one of its claims to fame, attracting visitors from outside and contributing, by its very existence and the events it organizes, to the regeneration of social bonds between its inhabitants. Paris would not be what it is without the Louvre, Madrid without the Prado, Munich without the Pinakothek and Arles without the Museon Arlaten.

Paris would not be what it is without the Louvre, Madrid without the Prado, Munich without the Pinakothek and Arles without the Museon Arlaten
What relationship do museums have with time?

Like clocks, museums show time. But it’s a different kind of time from that of clocks – long, qualitative, divided into periods and attached to a defined portion of terrestrial space. Time is also an integral part of museum practice itself. Museum objects come from the past and must be passed on to the future in a state that is as close as possible to their original state, or at least to the state they were in when they entered the collections. This is why they are kept in an environment that prevents or slows down the corrosive action of physical, chemical and biological factors. And they are restored to remove any traces of these impacts. However, these objects need to be displayed here and now, which is not always compatible with the demands of conservation. The art of the curator consists in finding compromises between respect for the past, the demands of the present and the constraints imposed by the future.

In this early 21st century, what roles do museums play in society? How do you explain their success, even in regions where they were not well established?

The trends that had been underway since the mid-19th century were halted by the two World Wars and their aftermath, the colonial wars. The return of peace has set them in motion again, with an intensity that is all the greater given that the pace of change is accelerating and that these changes are now overturning every aspect of social relations and the lives of individuals. Hence the desire felt by a growing number of people to preserve for our descendants the vestiges of what is disappearing. And this can only be done by creating new museums or extending existing ones.