'Art museums are funky places. The very name comes from a Greek word meaning “shrine to the muse,” so the casual or not-so-casual flirtation with pagan form is central to their conception and design. What the Vatican’s “Profane museum” enacted were what I take to be some of the crucial conceptual detachments that gave birth to the modern. Visual materials were detached from textual materials. A museum detached from a Library. The museum went public even as the Library became more protective and more private. And along the way Art detached from Religion. So we go to museums in search of a very modern muse—for illumination, spiritual awakening, visual epiphanies. Museums enact the distinctively modern quest for the sacred, which is not quite the same thing as religion.'
Read more: Papal Profanity: The Vatican’s Pagan Museum
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