Who on earth invented the Art Gallery?

Wandering through SAM with my eldest the other day, we remarked on what an odd concept a gallery actually is. Wealthy people pop stuff on walls and then we walk by admiring them. Very ego. Who the heck came up with that idea? 

Turns out then when you visit a museum, you are walking through a holdover from the Renaissance describing a long, narrow covered passageway or balcony of a house that, in its larger editions, allowed wealthy people to stretch their legs during inclement weather. 

The compulsion to add art and other trinkets sprang from a broader socio-political trend that the historian Stephen Greenblatt has called “Renaissance Self-Fashioning”. An Elizabethan adaptation of a Roman phenomenon in which individuals consciously constructed public identities to channel prevailing power structures and correspondingly empowered ways of being. As such, galleries served a different and more personal purpose compared to their older cousin the museum (an entity created to house cultural artefacts, and whose origins date all the way back to 530 BCE Babylon.) 

The first ‘Gallery’ as we think of it, was the extraordinary Uffizi in Florence. Financed and commissioned by the all-powerful banker and politician Cosimo de' Medici, the Uffizi (literally “Offices”) were built as an administrative headquarters for the family’s extensive commercial and government operations. In addition to a ground floor of reception rooms and offices, and a second floor chock-full of underlings, the Uffizi contained a top floor for gatherings, conversation and perambulation featuring the family’s renowned art collection. 

Fast forward 100 years, with no heirs in site and an eye to posterity, the last of the Medici, Anna Maria Luisa, entered into a Patto di Famiglia, or pact, with the City of Florence that saw the Offices converted into a public institution. 

Now you have a better sense for what you’re walking in, consider what brought you here. According to Google, you’re looking to “experience authenticity, connect with time, slow down, learn and feel something.” 

I would go a little further. For me, a gallery ultimately holds out the possibility of relationship and of falling in love; a place of hearts and minds, potent and timeless, and worth wandering for.