Visual Order to Organizing Collections

Great book collections, as well as large museums, have absorbed within them previous collections. The Vatican Library took pride in its role as a preserver of and successor to previous cultures. Sixtus V (r. 1585–1590) commemorated that tradition by commissioning fictive fresco images of some of the libraries contained within his collecting project. The graphical design shows the arrangement of images of great libraries of diverse peoples and the great council meetings that set church doctrine. Works that in private hands might cause an accusation of heresy against their owner were safely stored in the closed cabinets five feet high on the perimeter wall and around the columns of this rectangular great hall, 184 by 57 feet.

The neo-Gothic library of the London Guild House also has visual renditions of earlier libraries. Starting with the Louvre in the late eighteenth century, great museums sought to collect works from a succession of great civilizations: the Egyptian, the Greek, the Roman, the Christian, the Italian Renaissance, the French Classical, and so forth. With changing tastes in the nineteenth century, curators added additional works of medieval art and of Northern Renaissance art.