Page:The museum, (Jackson, Marget Talbot, 1917).djvu/135

Rh days before the building of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, when Renaissance art was represented in Berlin by a room in the Altes Museum, is one which may well be copied in the present time. In that room were arranged paintings, sculpture, furniture, rugs, tapestries, and works of minor art; the one point in common being the period in which the objects were produced. The effect of this room was charming and may well be imitated. It is never under any circumstances, however, justifiable to treat an object of art and one worthy of a place in a museum as though it were a part of the decoration of the museum. It may by its nature be a decoration to the room, but it must be so arranged that for light and for space and for general effect it is shown to its best advantage. To cut a piece of sculpture, a painting or a tapestry, as a layman might do, to make it fit a given spot in a museum is to commit a crime. For instance, in a well-known European museum where a wooden figure was put for artistic effect into a corner in which it did not fit and cut to fit that place, the museum authorities were, to put it strongly, criminally culpable.

A collection, therefore, for cultural purposes should contain, as we have said above, casts of the finest sculpture of the different periods not shown in rooms where there are originals, and