Imagined interiors – imagined collections

Abstract

Cabinet paintings showing an (art) collection in an interior developed as a genre in the early seventeenth century in Antwerp. The depicted collection could be the actual art collection in an imagined, idealized interior, or, more metaphorically, it could also be an imagined, fictional collection of paintings, sculptures, scientific instruments, silverwork, textiles, and naturalia such as flowers or shells. Jan Bruegel the Elder (1568–1625) and Pieter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), among others, used this genre in a series illustrating the five senses. These imagined interiors also influenced the caprices by Panini and Piranesi of a cityscape that is a collage of buildings, ruins, and archaeological fragments. In this essay, we relate these fictional representations of collections – objects as well as architectural and archaeological fragments – with the collections and scenography of (house) museums. We consider two house museums in particular: the house of the architect and collector Sir John Soane in London and the Museum of Innocence by writer Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul. House museums traditionally expose collections aside from a museological scenography but in their historical, domestic setting – “frozen” in another context and epoch. The two selected cases, however, were initially conceived as museums and contain an eclectic collection, presented as a pastiche, with a domestic setting that is strongly theatrical or even artificial.

KEYWORDS:

• Cabinet painting
• picture of collection
• house museum
• Museum of Innocence
• Sir John Soane Museum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Part of his Parva naturalia. The text required that each sense could be depicted as a human figure holding significant objects (Nordenfalk 1985).

2 Chapter 81 ‘The Museum of Innocence’ in Pamuk, Orhan. 2009. The Museum of Innocence. London: Faber and Faber Limited.

3 Coincidental or not, Giovanni is also the first name of the artist Piranesi, who Soane befriended in Rome in 1778 when Soane undertook a Grand Tour.

4 The Pasticcio was dismantled in 1896 but was re-erected in 2004. The totem-pole-like assemblage of stylistically diverse architectural fragments, including some reclaimed and some test-pieces designed by Soane, is aimed at showcasing the progressive nature of architectural styles (Knox 2009).

Additional information

Funding

This research was partly financed by a grant of the Flemish Research Institute (12ZW621N).

Notes on contributors

Bie Plevoets

Bie Plevoets studied Interior Architecture and Conservation and obtained a PhD in adaptive reuse approached from an interior perspective. She is currently a senior postdoctoral fellow at the Flemish Research Institute, working in the research group Trace. Her research focuses on adaptive reuse, specifically the notion of the ruin in adaptive reuse theory and practice. She is the author of “Adaptive Reuse of the Built Heritage: Concepts and Cases of an Emerging Discipline”, which was co-authored by Koenraad Van Cleempoel (Routledge, 2019). She teaches the theory module of the International Master in Adaptive Reuse and other theory courses on adaptive reuse and heritage at Hasselt University. [email protected]

Koenraad Van Cleempoel

Koenraad Van Cleempoel studied art history in Leuven, Madrid, and Oxford. He completed a PhD at the Warburg Institute in London. Since 2004, he has lectured on art history at Hasselt University. He is the coordinator of the research group Trace and has a special interest in the history and theory of adaptive reuse of heritage buildings. He teaches the “Genius Loci” research seminar for the International Master in Adaptive Reuse at Hasselt University. He is currently investigating the afterlife of the antique Tower of the Winds in Athens. In 2017, he held the PP Rubens Chair at the University of California Berkeley.