On how lighting shaped museums
Résumé
Nowadays, museum lighting functions to protect, contemplate, and visually restore works of art and exhibits. This seems to have been established quite recently in the history of museums-as late as the 1960s and 1970s. But natural and artificial lighting within museums stems from an older tradition that remains largely unexplored in museum studies. When did this tradition begin? And what are the main theories and practices it has established? This paper examines the main turning points in the history of museum lighting, architecture, and exhibition arrangements, based on a literature review of articles, case studies, manuals, and notebooks. To describe this evolution, we study four major periods: (i) the prelude of the museum from ancient times to the Renaissance; (ii) classical public museums in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; (iii) modern museums in the twentieth century; and (iv) the beginnings of contemporary museums in the 1950s and 1960s. The paper aims to encourage an understanding of the impacts that lighting had in museums and so, its contemporary practice.
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