In the gallery: priorities today

Abstract

How do visitors make sense of displays? What should curators be trying to achieve with them? Some 70 experts and students spent a day on these and related issues at the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge University, on 23 September last, to celebrate the completed rearrangement of its Greek & Roman gallery. That project provoked much of the discussion but comparisons were drawn from the current development of Oxford Universitys Ashmolean Museum and from elsewhere in Britain and overseas (James 2009, 2010). Short lectures by Kate Cooper and Lucilla Burn, of the Fitzwilliam, and by Rick Mather, architect of the Ashmolean’s rearrangements, were followed by eight panellists’ remarks on technical and methodological issues; and the day was rounded off with the Museum’s Severis Lecture for 2011,Dimitrios Pandermalis on The new AcropolisMuseum: project and realization’ (Figure 1).