When “Musée” first appeared as a headword in the fourth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française in 1762, the accompanying definition was succinct: “a place dedicated to the study of the Fine Arts, the Sciences, and Humanities [Lettres].” If the kind of permanent exhibition spaces that we recognize as museums today were only nascent in the 1760s, a museological spirit was nevertheless thriving. The antiquarian craze driven by the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii in the 1730s in particular demanded new spaces for evaluating and displaying artifacts. Intellectual spaces in the form of reference books took shape thanks to a scholarly appetite for disseminating archaeological findings, while performance spaces like the opera house animated Greco-Roman culture in three dimensions. In practice, the Académie's implicit notion of a physical “place” (lieu) in fact encompassed numerous cultural forums and media. From its very beginnings, the Enlightenment museum was as much a creative conceptual enterprise as a matter of bricks and mortar, as much a transnational cultural phenomenon as a local site drawing spectators from far and wide.

In our Entrance Hall, we explore three of the Enlightenment's most significant interlocking antiquarian spaces: the museum, the encyclopedia, and the opera house. In each of these forums, arts, letters, and music take shape and are shaped by the demands of a space relentlessly configured by political pressures and aesthetic priorities. By way of introduction to our two main exhibits on Mitridate and Idomeneo, this introductory room delves into the antiquarian zeal that was a crucial backdrop for the Enlightenment's cultural activities but that also became the setting for a political dispute among all the fine arts.

Modern Antiquarian Spaces

Despite the lack of consensus around where and when Europe's first truly public museum was founded, the Kingdom of Naples was undoubtedly a focal point of Enlightenment museological activity. The logistics of restoring and displaying the artifacts discovered at Herculaneum gave rise to new institutes, such as the Accademia Ercolanese, designated for the study and preservation of objects of antiquity. Alongside these local spaces, printed compendia such as the eight-volume Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte (Antiquities of Herculaneum Exposed, published between 1757–92) disseminated the Neapolitan archaeological findings across Europe.