When the Altarpiece Reached the Wall

On 10 August 1793, a year to the day after the crowd stormed the Tuileries and the monarchy fell, the Louvre opened as a public museum. The date was chosen. The pictures on the walls had belonged to the king, and now they belonged to the nation, and the nation was invited in to look at what it owned.

It is often called the first public museum, and it was not. The Ashmolean in Oxford opened in 1683. The Capitoline collection in Rome, given to the people of the city by a pope in 1471, opened to visitors in 1734. The British Museum admitted the public from 1759. What was new in Paris was not the open door but the claim behind it. The older institutions were gifts, from a collector or a pope or a parliament. The Louvre was a confiscation presented as a homecoming: the people taking back what had been kept from them.

And the confiscation did not stop at the royal collection. The Revolution had nationalised the property of the Church and seized the property of nobles who had fled abroad, so altarpieces, devotional panels and family portraits arrived in the galleries alongside the king's pictures. Then the armies sent more. The Treaty of Tolentino in 1797 obliged the Pope to hand over a hundred works of art. Veronese's Wedding at Cana came from the refectory of a Venetian monastery the same year. By 1803 the building had been renamed the Musée Napoléon and held one of the largest gatherings of European art ever assembled under one roof.

Much of it went back after 1815. Not all: the Wedding at Cana is still there, on the wall facing the Mona Lisa.

That is the political history, and it is well known. The more interesting history is what happened to the objects themselves, because it happened to every one of them and it is still happening.

Take an altarpiece. It was made for a particular altar, in a particular church, to be seen from the nave, at a distance, from below, lit by candles and whatever daylight the windows allowed, during a rite in which it played a part. Its scale, its gold, its perspective and the direction of its figures' gazes were all calculated for that position. It was an instrument, and it was doing a job.

Now hang it in a gallery. It is at eye level, evenly lit, a few feet from your face, between a painting by its maker's teacher and one by his rival. It has stopped doing a job and become an example: of a school, a period, a hand. You are invited to compare it, to assess its quality, to notice its technique. That is a different activity from the one it was made for, and the museum offers it without remarking that anything has changed.

The objection was made at the time, and made well. Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, a French writer on art and architecture, published a set of letters in 1796 arguing against the removal of works from Rome. His case was not only that the French were plundering. It was that the works belonged to their places. A statue in Rome was part of a city that was itself the museum, bound to its buildings, its ruins and its history, and to carry it off to Paris was to keep the marble and lose a large part of what made it what it was.

He lost the argument in practice. The museum became the normal home of art, and most of what hangs in any large European collection was made for somewhere else: a chapel, a refectory, a council chamber, a bedroom.

He did not lose it in principle, and you can test it on any visit. Find the label. It will give you the artist, the date, the medium and perhaps the donor. It will rarely tell you where the thing was meant to hang, at what height, in what light, for whom, and that is the fact that would most change how you look at it.

None of this is an argument for closing museums. They preserved a great deal that would otherwise have been lost, and they made it visible to people who would never have been admitted to a royal palace or a monastery refectory. It is an argument for knowing what you are looking at. A painting in a museum is a survivor, removed from the life it was made for. The museum gives you the object. The occasion you have to rebuild for yourself.