Museum of Fine Arts, Plan of the First Floor

MFA--1903.jpg

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Floor plan to the influential art museum in Boston, MA shows not simply a series of galleries but an historical sequence that is displayed walking through the rooms. As Logan Ward suggests, visitors following a counter-clockwise route enact the implied transition from "Oriental" cultures (Assyrian, Egyptian, Phoenician) to the ascendency of "Western" Greco-Roman cultures, which prepares the way for an Italian Renaissance.

This was part of broader colonial influence of museums gathering or appropriating materials from around the world. Galleries that had been organized by artistic media--by very specialized curators--now were overseen by individuals with expertise organized by geographicl and cultural knowledge.

Source Consulted: Logan Ward, “Museum Orientalism: East versus West in US American Museum Administration and Space, 1870-1910, Part Two,” The Coalition of Master’s Scholars on Material Culture, October 7, 2021.

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Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin, Vol. 1 (1903): 33

Courtesy of Internet Archive

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