Conferenza: "The European Museums, Between Unity and Diversity"

The visit of Dominique Poulot is organised in collaboration with Sandra Costa and Luigi Tomassini from the Department of Cultural Heritage.

One of the challenges today is probably to rethink the old European encyclopaedism of the Enlightenment, so closely linked to the modern idea of the museum, in an age of the «global museum ». In fact, the term was not entirely unknown in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: it evoked a huge collection representing all cultures, all periods and all kinds of objects.

At the time, the claim to universality was associated more with World’s Fairs, and with various publications that were like ‘paper museums’, sometimes even, as was the custom, including ‘museum’ in their titles, as, for example, the Musée universel , a French illustrated weekly review published in the 1870s. The adjective ‘universal’ has not been used officially over the last two centuries in relation to the national museums, and its uses in critical literature have remained largely metaphorical. The writers of fin-de-siècle nineteenth-century wrote about what they called a cosmopolitan art, that was supposedly common to all humanity.

Our relationship to that European identity is very different today, and  its forms are highly diverse, because of the new museology that emerged between the 1960s and 1980s, and of the critic of what is often considered as an Eurocentric vision of art history, instead of a really universal one.