Page:The museum, (Jackson, Marget Talbot, 1917).djvu/48

28 museum; Stockholm, Northern Museum, and many others.) Galleries for sculpture require greater height than galleries for pictures. Where one is working with a collection already established it is much simpler to decide upon the necessary proportions of the rooms, but where the collections are yet to be made the only thing for the architect and Director to do is to arrange a sufficient diversity in the size and shape of their galleries to provide for all classes of material. The commonest mistake is that of making the side-lighted galleries too high and the top-lighted galleries too low. Among the best proportioned and best adapted rooms used for the exhibition of paintings are the new picture galleries of the Vatican. For very large top-lighted rooms those in the Brera, Nos. Ill, IV, V, in Milan are very attractive, though it would be impossible to use the same height here (26 feet, 9 inches to skylight, no inner ceiling light) as the light is so different, and rooms 46, 61, 63, 29, 34 in the Kaiser Friedrich are also very effective. A masterly discussion of the question of proportion will be found in the Boston Museum Communications to the Trustees, No. 111, The Museum Commission in Europe. Nowhere else has this matter been studied so profoundly and nowhere have the results been so carefully tabulated as here.