The Display of Art: An Historical Perspective

An historical perspective on the changing ways that art has been displayed teaches us something about present-day art. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ mixed artworks with objects which today would belong in a museum of natural history or a museum of the history of science. In the eighteenth-century French Salon, visual artworks were displayed in ways that led to the creation of a new form of writing, art criticism. Contrasting these displays with those of the modern museum, we may understand some of the differences between present-day commercial art and art involving technology, which is a special concern of Leonardo.