Spaces for Shaping the Nation: National Museums and National Galleries in Nineteenth-Century Europe

As spaces of knowledge, the national museums and galleries of nineteenth-century Europe played an important role both in the shaping of nation-states and the education of their populations. In this context, such institutions sought to convey the history of the people, for example by displaying pictorial cycles of important scenes from their history, exhibiting objects associated with certain formative events, or arraying period rooms to promote a specific impression of the past. The contributions to this volume examine the purposes and educational strategies of national museums and national galleries via case studies from Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Christina Strunck (Prof. Dr.) is chair of the Institute of Art History at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. She has published extensively on the architecture and decoration of early modern galleries and palaces, questions of national identity and methodological approaches to image-space ensembles. Between 2018 and 2023 she directed the research group »Shaping Cultural History: The Example of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum and Curatorial Lessons for the Twenty-First Century«.

Marina Beck (Dr. phil.) is lecturer and habilitation candidate at the Institute of Art History at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Between 2018 and 2023 she coordinated the research group »Shaping Cultural History: The Example of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum and Curatorial Lessons for the Twenty-First Century«. In her habilitation project, she investigates how the image and sculpture programmes and the display strategies of army museums contributed to the creation of a national identity and thus to the process of nation-building in the nineteenth century. Her recent publications focus on display strategies in army museums, state museums and art museums.