Spazi e forme dell’esporre tra cabinet e museo pubblico

The essay aims to analyse the relationships between the culture of collecting and the architecture designed to display the collections, focusing particularly on how architects shape the container on the content. Starting from the private dwelling, Basso Peressut sheds light on the typological, formal, aesthetical and technical paradigms of the early-modern museums. Through the analyses of buildings and iconographic sources, Basso Peressut proceeds from the private dwelling, the most ancient early-modern museums in which the primitive concept of ownership as ornament shapes the collection display. In the cabinet the architecture works as a device enabling the creation of an order into an informal mass of objects. Once become social, the passion for collecting involves other kind of spaces for display, such as the gallery, a room more suitable for the needs of public ostentation rather than for the private enjoyment. Through paintings, engravings and illustrated catalogues, Basso Peressut investigates the display principles used in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting galleries. In the passage from cabinet to gallery, Basso Peressut locates the origin of the seminal transformation of museums from a private to a public institution. The gallery represents a pivot in the architectural history of museum, which increasingly become a building type during the eighteenth century. The several museums that rose throughout Europe at that time, together with the academic concours and prix that made museum an object of architectural exercise contribute to this process definitely in motion at the turn of the century.