The world's largest gallery

Posted: 16 Jan 2012  |  By: Patricia Anderson - Editor

In 2008, the Turkish Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk, writing The Museum of Innocence, created a fictional museum in which, over decades, he assembled every scrap and memento — from hair slides, salt shakers to cigarette butts — associated with a lover during a haunting and ultimately doomed affair. Three years later he bought a four-storey building in Istanbul in order to turn this fiction into a fact — planning to display eighty-three wooden boxes of objects, each representing one of the eighty-three chapters in his book.

Has the august international publisher Phaidon created something similar? While promotional chat from publishers is often tedious and predictable gush, Phaidon has taken a novel approach: “This imaginary museum created and curated by Phaidon … is open twenty-four hours a day and 365 days a year … the world’s first truly accessible art museum.” The reader is informed that to see all of these works he or she would need to take eleven flights, twelve trains, fourteen bus journeys and taxi rides — all over hundreds of thousands of kilometres. The gallery metaphor is reinforced with each section having a frontispiece resembling a long hall which recedes into infinity.

Thus the book is a whole new experience of informed armchair travelling — and the rekindler of passions for works once seen in the flesh and now accessible in the intimate atmosphere of one’s own domain. Art students of a certain age will have fond memories of Helen Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, the staple of high school art classes from the inception of the Wyndham Scheme in 1962. It was this book which introduced a generation of art students to the wonders beyond our shores and provided many a first-time traveller with a subliminal dossier. Images stored for decades on the hard drives of our own soft grey matter are brought alive again, along with many more works created nearer to our own times.

One thing which becomes abundantly clear is that in the world of antiquity, works have been judged on their quality, beauty and rarity, not their medium, thus ceramics, bone and wood carvings, glass, furniture, tapestries, jewellery and seal stones occupy the same elevated position along the aesthetic spectrum as painting and sculpture. Would it be so in our contemporary world where, alas, excellent examples of the former too often find themselves cloistered in craft museums.

One large illustration — a vast Roman mosaic from modern Palestrina — seems to encapsulate the entire consciousness of the ancient world in a seething series of vignettes: menageries of wild animals, hunters, herders, rowers, revellers, orators, gladiators, travellers, hermits, villas, ruins, reed dwellings, islands, fast flowing rivers and rocky outcrops. It could stand as a metaphor for the splendid accumulations of the entire Phaidon project, which is possibly thumbing its nose at crass commercial realities.
In the opening pages of the book there is a patchwork page of twenty-five coloured rectangles, each representing a different period or culture and assigning a number of rooms (pages) to it. For example, the stone age has three rooms, the ancient Near East has ten, Central Asia has five, native American cultures sixteen, Neo Classicism has six, Africa has nine, 1900–1950 has forty rooms — and so on. There has clearly been a broad international consensus among scholars, curators and connoisseurs about what should find its way onto the pages and the reproductions are so fine that the lines of cuneiform text on the tunic of the Assyrian King Ashurnasirpil are perfectly legible.

Of the 3000 works illustrated, the most celebrated and better known are not necessarily given the largest page space. For example, Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci and Lady with an ermine are given more page space than the over-familiar La Giaconda (the Mona Lisa).

One surprise, which must have been added quite close to the book’s production time, are some of the gold and garnet treasures from the remarkable Staffordshire Hoard, a trove of 1246 pieces discovered in 2009 which are encouraging scholars of the early ‘dark ages’ to redefine their accepted knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia in middle England. Another surprise is the inclusion across double pages of celebrated rooms such as Robert Adams’ hall at Osterley Park, Middlesex, England, and the interior of the Hôtel Soubise in Paris.

The single chronology which places cultures from opposite corners of the globe in sequence creates the occasional epiphany. For example, the reader turns from the Andean and South American ‘rooms’ of sober ceramic vessels and intricate anthropomorphic gold figures, and walks straight into the feverish and embellished narratives of Baroque Italy favouring satin-draped heroes of mythology and the biblical world.

Apart from all the main historically significant periods worldwide, Phaidon has also included the Arts and Crafts movement, botanical drawings, Japonisme, early photography, Aboriginal burial poles, land art, performance, conceptual process and video art. Even the Easter Island statues find a chronological niche. This splendid volume will enrich everyone who reads it.

Images from top:

Johannes Vermeer, Woman with a Balance, c.1664, oil on canvas, 40.3 x 35.6cm.

Lascaux Cave, Hall of the Bulls, c.18,000BC, pigments on rock, c.10m.

Mansart and Le Brun, Galerie des Glaces, Versailles, 1674–84, 73m.

Ceremonial Knife (Tumi), South America, c.1000–1300, gold and turquoise, 33cm.

The Master of Nauburg, Ekkehard and Uta, 1245–60, limestone and polychrome, 1.9m.

Alexander Sarcophagus, c.320BC, marble, 3.18m.

Edmund de Waal, Signs and Wonders, 2009, porcelain, diameter of plate 35cm.