Ancient vases in modern vitrines: the sensory dynamics and social implications of museum display
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Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 2020, 63, 91–109
doi: 10.1093/bics/qbaa009
Original article
Ancient vases in modern vitrines: the
sensory dynamics and social implications
of museum display
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Caspar Meyer
Bard Graduate Center, New York, NY
ABSTRACT
This contribution explores the changing sensory priorities underpinning the display of Greek
painted pottery in European collections. The focus is on the introduction of glass-fronted cabinets
in the purpose-designed public museums of art and archaeology of the mid-nineteenth century.
Contrary to expectations, the contemporaneous debates surrounding the use of gallery furniture
show that the museum stakeholders were less worried about the safety of the objects than the pros-
pect of middle- and working-class visitors being exposed to the sexualized imagery on Athenian pot-
tery. A survey of the different traditions of display in Britain and continental Europe highlights the
shift from the multisensory engagements in early modern elite collections with vases as evidence of
ancient custom to the selective viewing of the objects’ painted decoration as works of art whose
proper interpretation called for classical education.
To love [the Euphronios krater], you only have to look once. To adore it, you must read Homer and
know that the drawing is perhaps the summit of art . . .1
Athenian painted pottery can be made to speak to class-based analysis in both ancient and modern history.
Analysis of class stratification will always be a matter of quantifying economic structures by distinguishing be-
tween those who control the means of production and those who do not. But such examination also involves
an understanding of the dynamic between the objective class position of historical actors and their subjective
identification with political interests, which rarely permit easy correlation. The social structure of democratic
Athens, with its confusing mixture of individuals of different status (citizens, foreigners, and slaves) in the
same class (as freeborn wage labourers or wealthy non-citizens who lease land), demonstrates how difficult it
is to align economic stratification with other aspects of personal identity.2 Painted pottery provided a medium
through which the resulting contradictions could be sublimated or escalated in a given setting to give way to
1 Thomas Hoving, the former Director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, appraising the Euphronios krater after its illegal acquisi-
tion and export from Italy. Cited in Watson and Todeschini 2006: x–xi.
2 See the well-known substitution in Athenian history of status for class as the principal analytical concept by Finley 1973: 48–51, and the
Marxist critique in response by De Ste. Croix 1981: 58–59. For more recent historiographical reviews of the issue, see Nafissi 2004: 378–
410 and Kamen 2013: 1–7.
C The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Institute of Classical Studies. All rights reserved.
V
For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com. 91
92 Meyer
polarizing distinctions between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’, citizens and foreigners, or men and women. Its power as a
positional commodity was not its monetary value; on the contrary, the widespread availability of painted pot-
tery for eating, drinking, storage, and cult amplified its ability to generate different messages to different indi-
viduals.3 By the same token, surviving pots rarely permit secure association with specific consumers; but the
study of how particular types of figured scenes coincided with particular pot shapes and contexts of use can
show how individual types of users were prompted to perceive their place in society.
When Athenian vases became more widely known in modern Europe, however, this process of meaning-
making between images, pots, and sensing bodies began to be reconfigured and the objects took on new pur-
poses that were unrelated to their ancient contexts. The relative scarcity of surviving vases meant that they
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became artworks for visual appreciation rather than use, leaving only a narrowing circle of collectors and
scholars able to experience the more intimate, haptic access to the objects—and, by extension, to the embod-
ied modes of interpretation—that had been the norm in antiquity. This article takes a closer look at how the
evolution of display practices in Europe’s foremost cultural capitals in the nineteenth century affected the un-
derstanding of Greek pottery amongst the growing museum-going public. The discussion seeks to highlight
how the sensory participation among museum audiences came to diverge from the possibilities of physical ac-
cess which ancient and modern elites had enjoyed. Unlike other articles in this issue of BICS, my goal is not
to recover the voices of marginalized actors in the modern reception of Greek pottery. While non-elite visi-
tors became more visible among the audiences of Europe’s museums, first-hand accounts of what they saw
and how they made sense of their experiences are hard to come by. Even for periods in which sources are
more plentiful, the question remains open of whether the increased access has resulted in a concurrent op-
portunity for the public to engage fully with these objects qua objects. While participation in the literary re-
ception of the classics has been regulated almost exclusively through selective education in ancient languages,
the contact that the broader public can have with ancient art is a less clear-cut issue, one in which access has
been both greatly extended in some ways by museums and simultaneously restricted in others.
In his book on the museum as a mechanism of exclusion, Pierre Bourdieu confronts the apparent paradox
that even though entry to public collections of art tends to be free in many institutions, only a comparatively
small proportion of the population takes advantage of this opportunity.4 Looking at the social circumstances
favouring museum attendance—which he locates in education and its intricate relations to class, income, and
occupation—Bourdieu describes the ‘love of art’ as a symbolic struggle evolving in parallel to economic strug-
gles in the formation of class and social identity. Through this struggle, the dominant groups seek to trans-
form their aesthetic preferences into critical faculties that appear to be inborn. The unequal ability to ‘love’
art therefore perpetuates inherited privilege by underpinning class-based habitus with feelings of superiority
and inferiority.
Despite his focus on museums, Bourdieu does not pay particular heed to the importance that architecture
and especially display had for cultivating this ‘love of art’ along a purely visual axis, one that reinforces class
and social subjectivity.5 My article explores how the changing attitudes towards the display of Greek painted
vases reflect a complex give-and-take between museums and their visitors. While many sincere attempts have
been undertaken to allow the public access to such objects, this access has primarily been optic in nature.
The change from haptic to optic does speak to the importance that vases have gained thanks to the cult of au-
thenticity and their gradual elevation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as objects of art.6 However,
3 Key works on the subject include Lissarrague 1990; Lewis 2002; Neer 2002; Topper 2012; Osborne 2018.
4 Bourdieu and Darbel 1997.
5 Architecture and design only receive marginal comment concerning the extent to which they can be seen to reinforce a sense of belonging
or exclusion. See the suggestive remarks in Bourdieu and Darbel 1997: 112.
6 See Whitehead 2006 for the nineteenth-century debates concerning the distribution of art and archaeology objects into different types of
public museum in the UK based on their perceived quality as art. Greek vases were typically seen as boundary objects between sculpture
and painting but firmly associated with the discourse of art (in contrast to Egyptian sculpture, for instance, whose status was considered
much more problematic).
Ancient vases in modern vitrines 93
the elevation of the Greek vase as art has come at the cost of removing modes of appreciation that had been
essential to these objects’ meaning since their creation: namely, the ability to touch and understand the physi-
cal objects as part of life in the ancient world. Although one can see the privileging of the optic over the hap-
tic in the display of many other types of museum exhibit, Greek vases present an especially revealing case
study. Since objects of this category have been a notable feature of collections since early modern times, we
can examine the changes in the way that museums have displayed them—from haptic to almost entirely vi-
sual, from realia to relic—to chart the evolution of the museum itself as an institution. Entirely ocular-centric
museum displays with objects safely behind glass instilled the tacit understanding that correct appreciation of
painted pottery involved conversations about stylistic traits or dead poets and heroes of myth instead of such
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ordinary human interests as eating, drinking, and domestic production with which the objects were once in-
herently bound up. It is not surprising that classical education was soon established as a precondition for the
proper enjoyment of the painted decoration, bringing into play the entrenched interdependencies between
class, gender, and schooling in Western systems of privilege. While myth and iconography undoubtedly de-
serve attention in the study of Greek vases, text-based knowledge constitutes only one potential resource
among many that can be brought to bear: indeed, its single-minded pursuit risks downplaying the volume
and significance of painted pottery whose figured decoration defies identification with ancient narrative
traditions.7
Museums have, of course, done much to bring the public into contact with ancient art; all the same, the
tasteful minimalism characterizing so many of today’s museum interiors also allows the institutions to avoid
difficult questions surrounding the origins of many items in their collections. By and large, the principles that
continue to prevail in museum design perpetuate the myth of pure vision—the idea that objects are best left
to ‘speak for themselves’ with a minimum of background information. To the detriment of the national heri-
tage of Mediterranean countries, the treatment of these objects as purely visual creations also nurtured the
conviction that to grasp the importance of Greek vases the educated eye only needed to apprehend their dec-
oration and craft excellence, not the archaeological contexts or present-day communities from which they
were taken.
In this article, I want to interrogate the way in which these displays have come to embody the relationship
between seeing, sensing, and meaning in class-specific concepts of learning. Through their power to privilege
certain questions and modes of appreciation over others, museum displays can determine not only whose
story matters but also where the standards of good taste and academic disinterest lie. This is problematic for
our field. And my hope is that a better comprehension of the evolution of museum practice in the past will
provide a very preliminary starting point for re-evaluating and renegotiating their design in the present.
THE VITRINE: A BRIEF HISTORY
To gain traction on the overlooked influence of museum displays we need to shift our awareness to an actor
that has remained unacknowledged—the glass case that contains the objects in modern-day galleries. Given
the exorbitant prices which Greek vases garner on the market, it seems only natural that museums would
want to keep these fragile objects in secured display cabinets. However, a closer look at the history of the mu-
seum vitrine indicates that in its formative years the stewards of Greek vase collections were just as concerned
with controlling what viewers should see as they were with the safety of the objects on view. While a critical
history of gallery furniture is yet to be written, even a cursory glance at its genesis suggests that Greek vases
were at the vanguard in shaping the norm of vitrinized display.8
In early modern collections, storage and display were mostly separate concerns that only intermittingly be-
gan to converge in the construction of custom-built furniture aimed at regulating the disposition of both its
7 Jane Harrison’s statement (discussed by A. Baker in this issue of BICS) that the subjects of Greek vase-painting are ‘almost always mythical
scenes’ provides a case in point.
8 For select case studies, see Welchman 2013.
94 Meyer
contents and viewers. Glenn Adamson has demonstrated that in European cabinets of curiosities changes in
the development of taxonomical knowledge went hand in hand with changing techniques of cabinetmaking.9
In the course of the sixteenth century, the medieval system of joinery—using large panels and posts fixed in
place with mortise and tenon joints—gave way to lighter components held together by dovetail cuttings.
This change allowed for the construction of self-standing pieces of furniture with stacks of small drawers and
interior spaces divided into tiny, regularized units by thin boards. Robert St George has convincingly argued
that the ability to build such furniture both reflected and sustained the rise of modern consumer behaviour.
As the internal compartments accommodated a growing range of finished household items, the art of cabinet-
making in turn buttressed new notions of privacy and property, which are paralleled in the English country-
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side by the process of agricultural enclosure.10
In elite collections of curiosities, the internal subdivision of cabinets allowed distinctions between artificial
and natural objects to be visualized by means of the gradation of material and formal properties. The collec-
tor’s practice of sorting objects—in a context that offered room for intuition, revision, and repetition—pre-
sented the training ground for the emergent taxonomical mindset of early modern science. As Adamson
concluded, in the course of the seventeenth century, objects previously kept on open shelves were increas-
ingly stored within cabinets which were often designed in ensembles and for specific types of items, in keep-
ing with an emerging desire to understand and even give order to nature according to human reason.11 Since
the time of Descartes in particular, Enlightenment philosophy was characterized by the urge to develop a the-
ory of representation that would bridge the inconsistency between objects and ideas. The cabinet of curiosi-
ties became a prime site for testing representations of nature and reflecting on the disparity between objects
and ideas.
While orderly storage had become a prevalent concern in seventeenth-century collections, an equally
pressing impulse to put classifications on show continued to evolve, but only slowly. The scant evidence we
have from contemporary documents implies that practical and decorative considerations were still as likely to
determine where individual objects were placed as formal or material relationships. The displays were
intended to stimulate conversation as much as visual contemplation. Some of the painted ceramics that were
beginning to come to light in Italian necropoleis entered such displays of miscellaneous curios.12 The cabi-
nets built for the Wunderkammern aspired to virtuosity in their own right. Richly bedecked with marquetry,
intarsia, and crowning finials, their design set great store by the act of revealing the hidden contents through
the performative opening of doors and drawers.13 A parallel development, which may have been as important
as the cabinets in turning early museums into spaces of display, was the adoption of the so-called ‘wall sys-
tem’ method for storing and displaying books in libraries. As Eric Graberson has shown, the wall system
emerged in the late sixteenth century and had become the norm by the end of the seventeenth.14 Its distinc-
tive feature was the orderly ranging of books, in floor-to-ceiling bookcases lined up along the walls of large
and otherwise sparsely furnished rooms. The aim of the grand vistas thus created was not only princely osten-
tation, as is often assumed, but to make the library contents instantly perceptible in a single sweep of the
eyes. The innovation responded to the mounting anxieties that the expansion of knowledge circulating in
9 Adamson 2014: 243–79. On the transition from cabinets of curiosities to museums more generally, see Daston and Park 1998; Preziosi
and Farago 2004.
10 St George 2006: 221–29.
11 Adamson 2014: 248. This growing attention to order reflects the epistemic rupture which Michel Foucault described in The Order of
Things (Foucault 2002: 139–44). That is, whereas in pre-modern times concepts and things were held to be indivisible and anchored in di-
vine creation, from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, conceptual systems came to be seen as creations of human reason that were po-
tentially incommensurate with nature. Language and things were no longer interconnected through inherent chains of kinship or
cosmology, but correlations established through observation and measurements.
12 Examples surveyed in Nørskov 2002: 27–35.
13 Key in this trend was the Augsburg workshop of Philipp Hainhofer (1578–1647); see Alfter 2000; Mundt 2009.
14 Graberson 2006: 105–36, and Adamson 2014: 259–60 for comments on the significance of the wall system for museum display.
Ancient vases in modern vitrines 95
printed books would become uncontrollable without methods of spatial organization and remembering. The
bookcases constructed for wall-system libraries were increasingly fronted with glass to protect their contents
without obstructing one’s ability to read the books’ spines (fig. 1).
The impact of the wall system can be recognized in the natural history collections of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, such the Leverian Museum in London (fig. 2).15 The trustees of the British Museum
appear to have adopted a similar system when Sir Hans Sloane’s collection was transferred to its first public
residence at Montagu House in 1755. To judge from contemporary specifications, Sloane’s existing book-
cases were fitted with glass for reuse as display cabinets, and new items ordered to match the old ones.16
Crucially, the wall system survived the demise of the Wunderkammer at the end of the seventeenth century,
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when the contents previously held in single collections were allocated to separate institutions, specializing in
either art or nature. Wall cases can be seen in interior views of the great public collections fitted out in the
nineteenth century, including the British Museum and the Louvre. They were a conspicuous feature in
Robert Smirke’s new building for the British Museum, conceived in 1823.17 The architect’s designs for glazed
mahogany cases remained in use from 1835 until well into the twentieth century, lining the walls of almost
all rooms on the upper floor. Most of them were gradually removed in more recent years as they failed to
conform to modern conservation and lighting requirements, except in the current Gallery 73 (‘Greeks in
Italy’), where the original furnishings were purposefully retained (fig. 3). Similar cases were fitted in early
public museums throughout Europe, among them the preserved examples in the Thorvaldsen Museum
designed in the 1830s to contain the vases brought to Copenhagen by the Danish sculptor.18
The examples in London and Copenhagen give a good impression of the overall effect created by the high
wall cases. The wooden grilles dividing the glazed doors frame the contents on the internal shelves in squares
recalling windows or pictures. As in wall-system libraries, galleries equipped with such furniture permitted the
viewer to scan the exhibits at an instant and orientate themselves within the dominant themes informing the
display. The unbroken rows of shelving facilitated juxtaposition and comparison of object groups and were
especially serviceable in visualizing the evolutionary concepts of nineteenth-century science. On the other
hand, as the significance of the taxonomical series eclipsed that of its constitutive specimens, the viewer’s at-
tention was easily diverted from the properties of the individual example. Furthermore, with shelves extend-
ing both above and below eye level, the arrangement of the exhibits inevitably underwent hierarchical sorting
based on size or perceived importance.
By the nineteenth century, the wall system had fundamentally tied sight and display to each other in
spaces of exhibition. However, the impetus towards mass display in wall cabinets was inimical to the attention
which some of their contents began to attract as aesthetic creations. It is therefore necessary to follow a sepa-
rate but interweaving thread in the history of museum display, one in which Greek vases played a significant
role.
SEEING THROUGH TOUCH
The reception of Greek vases had experienced a marked shift in the second half of the eighteenth century,
from their previous perception among antiquarians as everyday implements to the reappraisal of their decora-
tion as traces of artistic genius. Key to this development was the discovery of the bountiful necropoleis
around Naples—notably at Nola and Capua—and the concurrent reinterpretation of Renaissance master
drawings as intimations of creativity rather than preparatory sketches. Owing to their ambivalent position
midway between art historical and antiquarian interests, Greek painted vases were of prime importance in
bringing about an alternative approach to display, one more suited to directing the gaze of the viewer to
15 See recently Kaeppler 2011.
16 Wilson 2002: 31.
17 Wilson 2002: 96, pl. 20, 22.
18 See the photographs in Melander 1982: 67–106 and Nørskov 2002: 55–56, 62, fig. 11.
96 Meyer
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Figure 1. Dyrham Bookcase, made in 1695. The bookcase is constructed in four separate sections: the lower cupboard,
two vertical halves of the upper cupboard, and the upper cornice. It was one of a pair made for William Blathwayt,
Secretary of War to William III in 1683–1704. Oak, with original iron fittings and glass panes in the doors. H. 247.5 cm,
W. 145.5 cm, D. 54 cm. V&A Inv. W.12:1 to 11-1927. Photograph V C Victoria and Albert Museum.
Figure 2. Perspective view of Sir Ashton Lever’s Museum in Leicester Square, London. The collection was also known
as the ‘Holophusikon’. Watercolour by Sarah Stone, dated 30 March 1785, 34.5 39 cm. Mitchell Library, State Library
of New South Wales.
Ancient vases in modern vitrines 97
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Figure 3. Glazed wall cases after designs by Robert Smirke in Room 72 of the British Museum, photographed shortly
before their removal in 1986. British Museum, Domestic Archive 174702.
specific points of interest and fostering the mode of visual concentration characteristic of the modern mu-
seum visitor. Whereas the wall system introduced in the previous section became obsolete in the twentieth
century, the ocular-centric emphasis adopted in vase displays has had far-reaching consequences for gallery
design, felt to this day.
In the eighteenth century, as discoveries at Italian sites became more plentiful, vases were moved out of
cabinets of curiosities and exhibited in libraries, alongside books rather than with other, more illustrious an-
tiquities. As Vinnie Nørskov has pointed out, the collection of the Naples lawyer Joseph Valetta appears to
have been crucial in establishing this tradition.19 The vases may already have been exhibited in a library in
Valetta’s private residence. They were certainly placed in a library when the collection entered the Vatican in
1728 through the bequest of Cardinal Gualtieri, who had acquired many of Valetta’s vases through his heirs.
Contemporary engravings of the Galleria Clementina show the vessels arrayed in symmetrical groupings
on top of tall bookcases along the walls (fig. 4). Later visitors interested in the objects complained that they
were not only too far up for visual inspection but also had their decorated front turned to the wall, apparently
to accentuate the decorative effect of the vessels’ profiles.20 Already prior to his death, Valetta had sold
twenty vases along with his library to the Oratorio dei Girolamini in Naples, where some of them remain in-
tact to this day.21 The prominence of ancient pottery in the Vatican Library prompted northern European
visitors to adopt similar schemes in their estates. The library tradition was especially widespread in British
stately homes, where vases supplemented elegant furnishings as restrained substitutes for baroque porcelain
garnitures. Such displays can still be seen in Charlecote Park in Warwickshire, Sir John Soane’s Museum in
19 Nørskov 2002: 37, 52.
20 See the observations by W. Uhden, published in Böttiger 1800: 22–24.
21 Bertarelli 1938: 168.98 Meyer
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Figure 4. The New Gallery of the Vatican Library at Rome. Ancient vases can be seen arranged on top of the cupboards
lining the walls. Print after an original drawing by Giuseppe Vasi, published in 1794, 278 mm 425 mm. From S.
Emmering Bequest. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Public Domain Dedication (CC0 1.0).
Figure 5. Sections through the design for an extension to Montagu House, February 1803. British Museum, Central
Archive. Photograph VC British Museum. All rights reserved.Ancient vases in modern vitrines 99
London and, in a latter-day incarnation, at Hearst Castle, the Californian residence of the newspaper magnate
William Randolph Hearst.22
A variation of the library tradition took hold in specialized collections where painted vases constituted a
significant proportion of the holdings. The display of the collection assembled by Marchese Felice Maria
Mastrilli, from finds on his family properties at Nola and through acquisitions on the Naples market, was
nothing short of pioneering.23 Over the years, Mastrilli’s collection had come to comprise almost four hun-
dred items, requiring their transfer in 1753 from Nola to a specially prepared room at the Palazzo di San
Nicandro in Naples. Soon known as the Museo Mastrilliano or Nolano, the display attracted the attention of
local cognoscenti and northern visitors. The room was decorated with (now lost) oval wall paintings which
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had sconces or brackets affixed to their gilt frames. Resting on such wall attachments, the vases were brought
nearer to the viewer’s eye level, inviting closer attention to variations in shape and figured decoration.
This emphasis on individual objects provided important stimuli to neoclassical taste and sensitivity to
style, as is clear from Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s references to the collection and the acquisition of
much of its contents by Sir William Hamilton.24 In contrast to such Enlightenment antiquarians as Bernard
de Montfaucon and Anne Claude Comte de Caylus, who saw ancient pots as curiosities and sources for un-
derstanding ancient cult practice and everyday life, Winckelmann reframed the reception of Greek vases as
genuine relics of the lost art of Greek drawing by comparing the figured decoration to the work of Raphael.25
Winckelmann’s assessment was picked up by Sir William Hamilton, who quoted it in the catalogues of the
collections of vases that he had assembled during his time as the British ambassador to the Kingdom of
Naples. When this renowned collection was acquired by the British Museum in 1772, it represented some of
the first man-made antiquities to enter a museum that was essentially still a scientific and ethnographic collec-
tion (or at best a very large cabinet of curiosities). As contemporaries had already noted, it is in large part
due to Hamilton and his promotion of his collection as art that ancient pots became ‘vases’.26
In the literature on the reception of Greek ceramics, this shift in viewing practices is presented as a harbin-
ger of modern disciplinary approaches to the iconography and style of vase-painting. Claire Lyons recognizes
in the Museo Mastrilliano a fundamental departure from the ‘indiscriminate’ or ‘decorative’ displays in cabi-
nets and libraries so as to justify the designation ‘museum’ in the modern sense.27 Her assessment presup-
poses that the elite visitors in the Mastrilli collection and its successors behaved just as modern museum
visitors do, examining the objects through a concerted ocular effort. However, more recent work in sensory
anthropology contradicts this assumption. As Constance Classen and David Howes have shown, in early
museums visitors were routinely expected to handle the items and converse about the links and contrasts be-
tween optic and haptic perceptions.28 Touch was considered a necessary complement to visual inspection in
gaining genuine familiarity with objects. While the risk of loss or damage caused occasional concern, in gen-
eral the visitors’ experience of the exhibits in the present was deemed more important than their conservation
for posterity. To judge from the accounts of early museum visits which Classen and Howes discuss, object
22 See Coltman 2012: 121–39. On the Soane vases, see Vermeule 1973. For images of the Hearst library, see Kastner 2000, cf. Von Bothmer
1957: 165–80.
23 See the in-depth study by Lyons 1992: 1–26, with further observations in Lyons 1997: 229–39 and Nørskov 2002: 40.
24 On Winckelmann, see Rehm 1954: 124 and 538 (Letter to L. Usteri, 24 February 1761). On William Hamilton, see Ministero della
Pubblica Istruzione 1878: x.
25 Winckelmann 2006: 177–78. On the context and implications of the Winckelmann passage, see Schmidt 1999: 29–47; 2004: 22–26;
2005: 31–40. See also the papers by M. Gaifman and A. Smith in Meyer and Petsalis-Diomidis Forthcoming.
26 On the apotheosis of Greek vases as fine art, see the letter of 1800 by the artist Johann Tischbein to the archaeologist Karl Böttiger (pub-
lished in Tischbein 1972: 78): ‘We owe it to Hamilton . . . that the vases have been recognized as artworks. Previously it was presumed
that these were just pots decorated with figures representing little more than merry dances or other anecdotes and ridiculous ideas, which
the potters had painted for a laugh.’
27 Lyons 1992: 6, echoed in Nørskov (2002: 40): ‘Mastilli’s vase collection is important because it is the first collection where the paintings
on the vases were emphasised.’
28 Classen and Howes 2006: 199–222.100 Meyer
handling was normally considered too unremarkable to be commented on. Furthermore, as Fiona Candlin
has stressed, the frequent touching of museum exhibits was not just a reflection of some elite visitors’ entitle-
ment; it had its justification in the writings of early scientists, such as Hans Sloane, who invoked the utility of
tactile investigation in classifying natural specimens.29 This contrasts sharply with the concept of the museum
that arose in the nineteenth century as a space reserved for visual experience, where touch—as we will see—
had no feasible role in aesthetic or intellectual appreciation.
Seen in this light, the difference between the specialized vase collections, modelled on the Mastrilli ‘mu-
seum’, and the displays attested in Wunderkammern and libraries may not have been as profound as is often
claimed. Irrespective of whether the vases were presented as decoration or autonomous artworks, we can con-
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fidently expect that any privileged visitor who had access to the relevant collections and wanted to learn
more about a particular example was free to lift it up and move it close enough to eye level for convenient in-
spection from all sides. Visual and manual modes of examination were simply inseparable in eighteenth-
century epistemic frameworks. Regulatory contraptions designed to shield the exhibits from curious hands
were almost unknown, regardless of how widely accessible a given collection was. As an example of a compar-
atively public display, we can point to the first purpose-designed installation of William Hamilton’s vase col-
lection in the British Museum after its acquisition in 1772. The architectural drawings for the north-west
extension of Montagu House, opened in 1808—the Townley Gallery, as it became known—show the vases
on open shelves occupying much of the wall-height of the building’s upper floor (fig. 5).30 A similarly open
installation is implied by the drawings for display furniture preserved in the archive of the Department of
Greece and Rome, if these were in fact implemented. The designs envisaged two levels of shelving atop a
case piece with marquetry doors.31 In the engravings of the Museo Etrusco Gregoriano, produced soon after
its 1837 inauguration, vases can be discerned on columns and open shelves supported by brackets and con-
soles.32 It is also telling that the vases in the Galleria Clementina, mentioned above, were chained to the
bookcases on which they rested, suggesting that they could be pulled from the shelves for consultation just
like the books below them.33 Their inaccessible placement is testament to nothing more than the relative in-
significance of the collection and the infrequent attention which it attracted. The continuity between displays
in private and public spaces is borne out by the shelving and etageres seen in contemporary depictions of
vase cabinets, such as those in the homes of Thomas Hope in London and Anton Franz Graf von Lamberg-
Sprinzenstein in Vienna.34
The Greek vase as an object of art did not sit comfortably within the regime of sight that the wall system
produced. Touch was just as important as vision for understanding these objects, even with their elevation
from realia to ‘fine art’ in the eighteenth century. Yet this mode of appreciation began to disappear over the
course of the next two centuries. Indeed, the emerging sensibilities of the nineteenth century as well as new
archaeological discoveries had long-lasting effects on how Greek vases and museum objects in general have
come to be displayed today.
THE BIRTH OF ‘ANAESTHETIC’ VISION
To date, there has been relatively little interest in examining when the insistence on visual knowledge came
to assert itself in gallery designs and how one might best explain it with reference to specific types of object.
29 Candlin 2010: 65–69, adding nuance to Foucault’s (2002) account concerning the role of visual construction of knowledge in the transi-
tion to the ‘classical’ episteme of the seventeenth century.
30 Jenkins 1992: 102–03.
31 Reproduced in Lyons 1992: 7, fig. 2, and Nørskov 2002: 51, fig. 7.
32 L’Album: giornale letterario e di belle arti, 2 March 1838 and 2 June 1838, reproduced in Pietrangeli 1993: 176, fig. 147; 182, fig. 152; cf.
180, fig. 149.
33 See n. 20 above.
34 Hope 1807: pl. 4 and Laborde 1813: frontispiece. On the Hope interiors and displays, see Watkin 2008 and Petsalis-Diomidis
Forthcoming.Ancient vases in modern vitrines 101
For object specialists, it is worthwhile to explore not only who was prevented from touching museum exhibits
but precisely what was kept out of reach. In view of the distinction which collections of Greek vases had
attained by the late eighteenth century, it should come as no surprise that this foundational class of minor
arts shaped the curatorial conventions for other portable objects. Closer scrutiny reveals that the relationship
between Greek vase displays and the disciplining of eyes and minds runs deeper than one might expect.
Current literature emphasizes that the birth of the modern museum corresponded to broader shifts in
contemporary science towards visual definitions of knowledge. The evolution of the museum into a locale
predisposed to visual learning is no longer seen as inevitable or self-explanatory. For instance, the museum
historian Tony Bennett describes the changing sensory regime of museum didactics in relation to the preva-
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lent behaviours among visitors and the academic pedagogies seeking to reform or justify existing conditions.
For him, the critical turning point towards the privileging of vision occurred in the Enlightenment, when the
Renaissance spaces of civic conversation (that is, where relations of ‘speaking, hearing, and seeing were more
or less equally balanced’) were transformed into ones in which sight was to be ‘entirely subordinated to the
regulation of an ordering mind’.35 He associates this transition, somewhat sweepingly, with contrasts between
mainly Catholic modes of oral–visual learning in southern Europe and Protestant preferences for detached
observation inspired by the growing northern European print culture. However that may be, while the con-
tents of scientific collections in the Enlightenment were named and organized according to visible differences,
different modes of engagement—conversational as well as literate–ocular—coexisted well into the nineteenth
century. From the 1860s, though, the growing league of museum professionals began to ground the relation-
ship between seeing, sensing, and meaning in class-specific concepts of learning. In Britain, such liberal
reformers as Thomas Huxley and Augustus Lane-Fox (or Pitt Rivers) sought to develop popular forms of in-
struction in accordance with the needs of working-class visitors. One implication of extending male suffrage
was, as Bennett emphasizes, the stress on displays that allowed rushed and uninformed visitors to take in les-
sons at a glance and attain knowledge commensurate to their civic responsibilities.36 The well-worn trope
that objects should ‘speak for themselves’ goes back to this era.
In a recent monograph devoted to touch in museums, Candlin argues that such general explanations tend
to take too little notice of the changing institutional contexts determining who was allowed to touch museum
objects. The plentiful evidence of upper-class visitors continuing to handle objects to investigate their proper-
ties and authenticity is not an accidental survival from a bygone age of aristocratic ownership. In contrast to
the harmful fumbling by ordinary visitors, elite touch was made out to be tempered by rational intentions
and faculties. Candlin’s analysis of nineteenth-century eyewitness accounts and admissions data from the
British Museum underscores the sheer miasma which the hands of the growing numbers of working-class vis-
itors were thought to inflict on the collections.37 Visitor numbers had begun to surge after the Principal
Librarian Joseph Planta had convinced the trustees in 1810 to abolish the onerous ticketing system and
allowed visitors to roam unattended through the galleries.38 The propensities of the mass visitors who began
to flock to the museum were soon associated with instinctual behaviour, the groping by social inferiors—
women, children, and primitives. The underlying prejudice against working-class visitors is exposed by the
Select Committee Reports of the museum of the 1830s–50s, which regularly commented on their good be-
haviour and respect towards the exhibits.
It was not an increase in the non-elite crowds alone that led to the ocular-centric turn in the museum experi-
ence. According to Classen and Howes, another factor was the rise of nineteenth-century consumer capitalism.39
35 Bennett 1998: 345–71, with quotes at 347 and 352.
36 Bennett 1998: 354–61.
37 Candlin 2010: 71–86.
38 Wilson 2002: 58–59, 81: admissions increased from 13,046 in 1807 to 79,131 in 1827, and from 1836 the museum was open during holi-
day periods.
39 Classen and Howes 2006: 208, further developed in Howes 2006: 281–303.102 Meyer
By their account, the presentation of museum exhibits came to resemble ever more closely that of mass-
produced imitation goods in department stores, whose success depended on the seduction of buyers to purchase
items they had not intended to acquire when they entered the premises. Like consumer goods, museum exhibits
were now appealingly displayed rather than just stored. An even more significant factor was the attempt to focus
and train the visitors’ minds to consume only certain elements of Greek vases to the exclusion of others. As we
have seen in the previous section, the handling of objects in early collections was deemed so central to their un-
derstanding that the methods of display developed for private settings were replicated in the British Museum
and the Vatican. Greek vases appeared in similarly unprotected arrangements in the first art museums in
Germany, the Altes Museum in Berlin (1830) and Alte Pinakothek in Munich (1840).40 In later institutions,
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however, we notice an unmistakable preference for furnishings designed to prevent touch, with the introduction
of the glass-fronted cabinets or fully glazed vitrines that provide clear precursors to the sleek fittings in modern
galleries. Far from predictable, this shift was the outcome less of the increasing numbers of visitors than of dis-
agreements concerning their sensibilities and expected level of understanding. The controversies surrounding the
vase galleries of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich suggest that changes in what visitors could see on Greek pottery
were at least as important a factor in transforming museum space as the changing social profile of those who
came to see the exhibits. While precise admissions numbers are unknown for Munich, access arrangements indi-
cate that working-class crowds were, in contrast to the British Museum, less of a concern than the suspicions of
‘uneducated’ voyeurism among the middle-class public frequenting museums in smaller European cities. Either
way, it is no coincidence that the seminal innovations in mid-nineteenth-century museum design occurred in
central Europe, where the monarchies of the post-Napoleonic era were eager to assert their civic credentials with
lavish museum foundations.
Commissioned to house the art treasures of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, the Alte Pinakothek was a su-
premely influential structure, one of the first purpose-built museums conceived more with bourgeois art lov-
ers in mind than aristocrats or aesthetes from the academies of art. One of its chief attractions was the
chronological display of paintings in the galleries on the first floor of the building, illustrating the rise and de-
cline of art from the Italian Renaissance through the ‘errors’ of French baroque to the budding of contempo-
rary art, under Ludwig’s patronage. The main galleries, inaugurated in 1836, had a ‘prequel’ on the ground
floor, five halls for Greek vases conceived to articulate the classical origins of European painting.41 As in other
continental collections, access was a self-selecting process. Although ostensibly free, admission was controlled
through dress codes and limited opening hours, which prevented individuals in regular employment from at-
tending. The rate of change in relaxing such restrictions was glacial. As late as 1847 (i.e. the year before
Ludwig I’s abdication) the Alte Pinakothek was open only on weekdays from 9 am to 12 pm.42 Access to the
vase galleries was more tightly restricted than in the rest of the building, requiring personal application at the
director’s office. Even academic visitors found it difficult to gain entry. The checks were put in place allegedly
to alleviate security concerns raised by the picturesque installation of the vases on tables and open shelves
(fig. 6). But the correspondence relating to visitor applications shows that theft was not the main source of
apprehension; the real worry was the prospect of a broader public—women, children as well as non-elite visi-
tors—gaining access to the graphic imagery on some of the items. A particular uproar occurred in 1846 as
the museum’s architect and advisor, Leo von Klenze, requested permission on behalf of the French scholar
Desiré-Raoul Rochette to reproduce vase-paintings for a publication on ‘ancient pornography’. Ludwig
rejected the request in no uncertain terms: ‘No! It cannot be done, Klenze, otherwise it will be widely known
that such abominations are in my possession!’43
40 Levezow 1834: xi–xiv; Wünsche 1985: 73–74.
41 Wünsche 1985: 71–77.
42 Haase 1847: 40.
43 Quote translated after Klenze’s personal memoirs (Memorabilien, vol. 6, 83r), published on the CD-ROM accompanying the catalogue,
Nerdinger 2000.Ancient vases in modern vitrines 103
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Figure 6. Vase gallery in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, designed by Leo von Klenze. The vaulted ceiling and
reproductions of Etruscan wall-paintings in the lunettes were meant to recall the interior of the Etruscan tombs in which
the exhibits had come to light. Note that by the time this photograph was taken, smaller vessels were protected by wire
cages, visible at the left border of the frame. Photograph after Reidelbach 1888.
Indeed, the traditional practice of exhibiting vases in ways suitable for handling might well have persisted,
were it not for the profound conversions which the known corpus of Greek vase-paintings underwent after
the onset of large-scale excavations in the Etruscan cemeteries to the north of Rome.44 The material which
began to flood the antiquities market in the early 1830s—just as the construction of the Pinakothek entered
its finishing stages—was older than that known from earlier discoveries. The Etruscan sites produced the
kind of finds which histories of ancient sexuality rely upon: that is, Athenian sympotic pottery of the late ar-
chaic period. Its visual repertoire was not only much more explicit than that which was previously known; it
also yielded a proliferating range of scenes identifiable with ‘everyday life’, owing to the absence of mytholog-
ical characters.45 While the items acquired by eighteenth-century collectors featured some mild heterosexual
titillation that would not have looked out of place in contemporary academic painting, the new finds
appeared to show real Greeks indulging in most unreal sex.
The introduction of specialized display furniture in later museums was a direct consequence of the failed
experiment in Munich. When Leo von Klenze was hired to build a court museum in St Petersburg for the
Russian tsar Nicholas I, the vase gallery was provided with splendid glass-fronted cabinets which remain in
use to this day in the State Hermitage Museum. A watercolour of the gallery’s interior shows a stucco-clad
hall made to resemble the interior of a temple, with a cella divided into three naves by monolithic granite col-
umns (fig. 7). According to the contemporary guide, twenty-eight cabinets of two sizes were set into the bays
between the spur walls with engaged pilasters.46 The furniture was finished in light birch wood with dark am-
aranth inlays inspired by the colour scheme and ornament of Greek vase-painting (fig. 8). The cabinets were
44 Nørskov 2009: 63–76.
45 On the problematic category of ‘daily life’ in Athenian vase-painting, see Bazant 1980: 193–201 and Ferrari 2003: 37–54. In this respect
the material which came to light at Etruscan sites also differed from erotic imagery in the Hamilton collection, which was published by
Baron d’Hancarville as evidence of cult rather than life. See Davis 2010: 51–82; Orrells 2015: 69–72.
46 Stephani 1856: 257–336. On the history of the vase collections and displays in the Hermitage, see Bukina, Petrakova, and Phillips 2013;
Bukina 2014: 213–30.104 Meyer
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Figure 7. Hall of Greco-Etruscan Vases in the New Hermitage in St. Petersburg, designed by Leo von Klenze.
Watercolour by Konstantin Andreevich Ukhtomskii, produced shortly after the opening of the museum to the public in
1852, 29.2 41.6 cm. Inv. OR-11257. V
C The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
Figure 8. Display cabinet from the Hall of Greco-Etruscan Vases in the New Hermitage. Conifer, amaranth and birch
wood, 283 98 56 cm. Built by the court workshops of G. D. Pokhitonov, after an initial design by Leo von Klenze.
Inv. Epr-4010. Photograph V C The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Photograph by Pavel Demidov, Alexander
Koksharov.Ancient vases in modern vitrines 105
glazed on three sides and the vessels distributed on the three or four shelves inside. Only a few outsize pieces
were on open display, on top of the cabinets and on the square pedestals of artificial marble placed in the
intercolumniations.
It is not entirely clear who should be credited with the design of the display furniture. The initial drawings
sent to St Petersburg by Klenze resembled the interiors of the vase halls in the Alte Pinakothek very closely,
featuring open shelves and tables and the same wall decorations inspired by Etruscan wall-painting.47 While
local architects and curators often were tasked to refine Klenze’s conceptions, preserved registers of their
communication show that revisions and instructions were sent to St Petersburg as late as 1848, probably in
response to the problems which his designs caused in the Alte Pinakothek. Whatever its exact genesis, the re-
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sult was sufficiently different from the wall system to be recognized as a distinct tradition.48 In contrast to the
glazed, full-height cases familiar from Smirke’s British Museum, the three-sided wall cases on a base were cre-
ated to contain a sparse selection of objects, strategically positioned to direct the viewer’s attention to specific
points of interest.
VITRINIZATION AND ITS ALTERNATIVES
Since their inception in the nineteenth century, glass boxes have become such a staple presence in modern
museums that visitors are hardly aware of them. Yet on closer consideration their transparency turns out to
be illusory, and their effect far from negligible. The anxieties over ‘pornographic’ imagery surfacing in Ludwig
I’s collections indicate that unobtrusive ‘censorship’ might initially have motivated the adoption of glazed cab-
inets. The encasement of the objects in shallow cabinets allowed curators to police the gaze of visitors by de-
ciding which side of a pot was the principal one and which aspect of the decoration should be obscured. By
foregrounding individual elements of a vase’s overall pictorial repertoire, the institutional authority was given
the power to reconfigure the narrative relationships that were so fundamental to the functioning of Greek
pottery in its ancient contexts of consumption. Recent literature has stressed the tactical placement of images
on different parts of the vessels’ bodies, revealing their interconnections and meanings in stages as the object
is manipulated. When these relationships are disrupted by placing the vessel behind glass, the pot loses its
bodily presence and the decoration is turned into a picture. Furthermore, as individual images are lifted from
their context, and for example placed in textbooks, they attain an ostensible evidentiary status which they
could never have had in antiquity, to the effect that Athenian sympotic jokes about ‘masculine’ self-control
and ‘female’ avarice are regularly misconstrued as evidence of ‘everyday life’.49
The example of painted pottery also illustrates how the outcomes of vitrinized display exceeded the goal
of iconographic control that had motivated its initial inception. The viewer who wants to properly apprehend
exhibits behind reflective glass has to arrest her movement through the gallery and face the cabinet frontally.
The concurrent inertia of the observer and the observed lifts the object on display out of the domain of lived
time and place. This choreographed pause in turn allows the viewer to fix her perception on a single sense so
as to concentrate fully on the decipherment of the visual messages presented by the artefact. At the same
time, the viewer is conditioned to block out the knowledge deriving from somatic experience and her aware-
ness of the specific sensory stimuli which similar artefacts afford in everyday use.50 As a result, the exhibit
becomes so powerfully defined by its visual characteristics that it is difficult to associate any other qualities
with it, regardless of whether we are dealing with a visually striking Greek vase or a less eye-catching artefact.
In defining objects as visual phenomena, museums prioritize interpretative skills that depend on educational
47 Drawings published in Gervits 2003: 99–101. On the history of the interior design of the New Hermitage, see Voronikhina 1983: no.
XIV; Gervits, Semenova, and Asvarishch 1984: 41–45, nos. 29–33; Pavlova 2010: 167–68; Semenova 2014: 49.
48 See n. 14, above.
49 For recent discussion of Greek vases as ‘object-images’, see Lissarrague 2015: 237–47. On the implications of misreading Athenian visual
humour as evidence of life, see Meyer 2018: 143–68 and Forthcoming.
50 On this effect, see Classen and Howes 2006.106 Meyer
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Figure 9. The perfect vitrine. Study model for an acrylic solid block vitrine with embedded sculpture. The creator Rem
Koolhaas explains that the ‘cubistic’ effect would restore ‘an immediacy that the frame, materiality, scale, and
collectivism of the vitrine typically compromise’. Image courtesy of OMA.
attainment in literature and languages as opposed to the democratizing experiences of embodiment and con-
sumption. Within the museum’s ‘empire of sight’, objects tend to bring out class-based distinctions rooted in
differing levels of education rather than the physiological processes that unify different ways of social
existence.
Among the few recent critics addressing the broader ramifications of the museum vitrine is the Dutch ar-
chitect Rem Koolhaas. In his view, it is unsurprising that scholars are unwilling to confront the legacy of this
nineteenth-century device, for it marks their exclusive territory:
In the vitrine, we tolerate absurd compositions, groupings, scale conflicts, awkward and disturbing la-
belling systems, redundant and trivial information . . . it casually imposes coexistence between artifacts
that are robbed, by the vitrine, of their vitality.51
To transform the vitrine from a contrivance that restricts access into a creative element, he proposes to
cast the objects in solid blocks of acrylic that preserve their contents and simultaneously open multiple per-
spectives to the viewer (fig. 9). Interestingly, Koolhaas leaves it open whether these blocks should be handled
by visitors. His solution may succeed in challenging some of the taxonomical hierarchies enshrined in mu-
seum display; but by locating the vitrine’s shortcomings solely in the restrictions on vision the proposal also
reinforces the inherited idea that the truth of objects is in their visual relationships. Likewise, the burgeoning
experiments in museum education with handling original objects or 3D-printed reproductions too often tend
to corroborate the association of touch with visually impaired visitors or the pre-rational understanding of
child’s play.52 As digital technologies have evolved and become more widely available, they deserve greater
51 Koolhaas 2015: 202–03.
52 For recent discussions of object handling and printing in museums (none focusing on Greek vases), see Chatterjee 2008; Levent and
Pascual-Leone 2014; Cooper 2019.You can also read
