Newsletter - Fall 2000

Current Exhibitions

The Micro-Museum: "A World of Wonders in One Closet Shut"

While the real Art Museum is closed for expansion, the Williston Library courtyard will become home to the Micro-Museum, a modern "cabinet of curiosities." Every few months, a new micro-exhibition will appear there, featuring rare, marvelous, curious, even mysterious objects from the collections of the Art Museum and the Skinner Museum.

The diverse objects featured in the Micro-Museum will range from unusual works of art and material culture to scientific instruments, industrial artifacts, and natural oddities, reflecting a tradition that originated in 16th-century Europe with the Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities. It was this Renaissance concept that served as the basis for the modern museum as we know it.

The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum was founded in 1876, only a few years after New York's Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. And among its earliest acquisitions were historical objects, specimens sent back to the college by its early missionary graduates, and other rarities, in addition to paintings, sculptures, and plaster casts. These objects have all been preserved in the permanent collection, providing a unique opportunity to study the history of 19th-century taste and collecting here on campus.

The Skinner Museum, just up the street from South Hadley's town common, is a fascinating anachronism, a modern wunderkammer containing more than 5,000 items assembled by industrialist Joseph Skinner around the turn of the century. Like his Renaissance predecessors, he was obsessed with the notion of gathering together a wide variety of natural specimens and man-made artifacts he acquired during trips abroad and explorations closer to home. Following in their footsteps (and in those of artist Charles Willson Peale, who in 1784 established a similar museum in Philadelphia), Skinner's goal was to create a microcosm of the expanding world-with an emphasis on American material culture and industry-designed to advance public knowledge through an enjoyable process of learning-or, as Peale called it, "rational amusement."

In keeping with this tradition, the Micro-Museum will present displays designed to enlighten, provoke, and even astonish. The first of them will feature a selection of unusual Native American artifacts from the Skinner Museum, unresearched until Katherine Williams ('00) undertook a project to study them last spring. Her findings will be presented in the form of text labels that will discuss the origins, authenticity, use, and history of these historical items.

Other future exhibitions will focus on a remarkable collection of Chinese embroidered silk shoes made for women with bound feet, a ritual necklace from the South Pacific, and a mysterious iron object from South Carolina that viewers will be invited to identify.

The Medieval and Early Renaissance Collection in Boston

With the galleries closed, there are no special exhibitions at the museum this Fall. However, other college museums in the area have agreed to house components of the permanent collection, and the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College has organized an exhibition focusing on Mount Holyoke's holdings of medieval and early Renaissance art. The show examines the effects of the Gothic North and the Byzantine East on the formation of Italian Renaissance art. Although a renewed interest in the heritage of ancient Rome was the primary catalyst for the 14th-century Renaissance in Italy, the courtly northern Gothic tradition and the abstract spirituality of the eastern Byzantine style were also fundamental components of the visual language developed by early Renaissance artists.

Mount Holyoke's collection of Romanesque capitals demonstrates the international nature of Europe and European art as early as the 11th century, setting the stage for the fluidity and diversity of cultural influence during the early Renaissance. This abstract Romanesque style was eventually replaced by the more elegant, refined vocabulary of the Gothic. The Gothic style was developed in France in the 12th century and rapidly became the standard fashion for noble courts across Europe. The 14th-century fragment of a tomb slab, illustrated on this page, exemplifies the Italian reaction to this aristocratic style.

The exhibition also explores the importance of Byzantine art in Italy. A series of early Italian paintings illustrate not only the adoption of iconic Eastern traditions, but also the combination of this imported style with the decorative sensibilities of the Gothic. This fusion of northern Gothic and eastern Byzantine styles would serve as an important source for the future development of Italian Renaissance art into the 16th century.

For further information about the exhibition, see the interview with McMullen Museum director, Nancy Netzer, and the curator of the exhibition, Ross Bresler on the cover of the Newsletter. If you plan to visit the McMullen Museum, please call 617-552-8100 in advance to verify open hours.

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