Taking into account the various ways in which our understanding of Renaissance art has been shaped by its modern reception, I focus in particular on the impact of the institution that embodies the modern age: the public museum and the special exhibitions that accompany its emergence. In the case of these first transformations of royal or court collections into public museums towards the end of the eighteenth century - the Uffizi, the Kunsthistorischesmuseum in Vienna and the Louvre - the founding formulas and first narratives can be analyzed from the point of view of their approaches to the classification and exhibition of works, necessarily evocative of particular values, and which serve as models for the study of art history in the modern era. The aim of the Kunsthistorischesmuseum, which later became the Louvre, was to project a "visible history of art". What did this history consist of?
If Raphael was perceived as a historical turning point, as the artistic paradigm of this new museum space, the masterpieces that preceded the canonical works of the High Renaissance were soon - for a variety of reasons, which we examine - collected in their turn. We also look at Napoleonic institutions such as the Brera in Milan and theAccademia in Venice, as well as the art museums founded between 1820 and 1830 in Germany: theAltes Museum in Berlin and theAlte Pinakothek in Munich. In the case of the Musée Napoléon, a group of works of art from conquered lands was exhibited for the first time in 1814 under the heading of "primitive schools", a designation that deserves some thought. As a historical category, indeed as the starting point of a narrative sequence, these "primitives" fuelled an idea of progress that would mark the efforts of art historians in developing a path for the visual arts.
In England, where art museums were founded later and did not build on pre-existing collections, circumstances were different. Nevertheless, plans for the National Gallery quickly incorporated the acquisition of samples from these " Early Schools ". What was the English perspective on collecting such pre-High Renaissance works? What were the perceived values inherent in these paintings, and what role was attributed to them, especially once they were destined for the public eye? We also look at the creation, around 1870, in the heart of a new English-speaking world, of that illustrious triumvirate represented by the Metropolitan, the Boston Museum and the Philadelphia Museum. Like the National Gallery in England, these institutions had to build their inventories from scratch. Given the tabula rasa that was the American nineteenth century in terms of the presence of Renaissance art, our task is to reconstruct the complex network through which such works came to be requested, located, known, shipped and finally exhibited, far from their origins, on American soil.