Page 32 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

16 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

typical of a particular school or historical style. Before the Louvre opened in
1793, art was valued in collections for its rarity and uniqueness, and for the
extent to which it adhered to the rules of classical beauty. Great art was art that
successfully followed these rules and achieved near-perfection. Art was under-
stood as an imitative practice, and the exemplary models were those paintings
and sculptures which measured as most perfect according to the rules and
which were known as masterpieces (Belting 2001: 27–33). On this basis, some
argued that the museum should be a school of taste, and show only master-
pieces, only, that is, works worthy of imitation. They imagined the museum as
continuing to serve the purposes of an élite. Others advocated a chronological
survey of art history, in which works typical or representative of different
schools would be displayed, to educate a broadly conceived public in art history.
Ultimately the Louvre, and the art museums that followed it, still reserved
a special place for the masterpieces of antiquity and the Renaissance, but
prioritized an art historical narrative arrangement.
In this new context of the art historical arrangement, Belting argues,
masterpieces were stripped of their function as models for artistic imitation,
disassociated from the rules of classical beauty which had measured their
achievement, and removed from the hierarchy of genres which had established
certain subjects as more worthy than others. The museum cut paintings and
sculptures from their use twice over: first from their original or previous uses, as
communicative, domestic or religious artefacts, and second, from their use in
the imitative learning of the rules of classicism. Consequently, shorn of both
kinds of use value, they re-emerge as the objects of new practices: the practice
of experiencing art history as a journey through the museum, and the practice
of a new kind of aesthetic contemplation (Belting 2001). The art historian
Carol Duncan argues that these practices are secular rituals which replace
religious practices as part of the wider secularization of European society and
thought in the eighteenth century. Religious ritual can seem to suspend time,
and provide distance from day-to-day concerns, enabling a certain kind of
contemplative consciousness (Duncan 1995: 11). Participants emerge trans-
formed and ‘restored’. Duncan claims that the art museum is a secular ritual
space, and in it, aesthetic experience becomes the secular counterpart to
religious contemplation (1995: 14).
Belting (2001) also argues for a connection between aesthetic and religious
contemplation, through the example of the Sistine Madonna. This altarpiece
by Raphael had been taken straight from a Roman Catholic chapel in Piacenza,
and installed in the Royal Gallery of Paintings in Dresden in 1753. The painting’s
subject matter is the Virgin Mary appearing as a miraculous vision to Saint
Sixtus. After the museum abruptly deprived the painting of its religious function,
the Sistine Madonna became – to its (mainly Protestant) eighteenth-century