Diaeta” from the Short Histories of Art Museum Architecture

Abstract

Do we really enjoy, as art lovers, visiting an art museum? Is it possible, ever, to experience Picasso’s Guernica, Francisco Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra, Velázquez’s Las Meninas and many other personal and worldly favourites, while we share the experience with hundreds of others simultaneously, all standing still in front of the masterworks in crowded and unclear expectation? Can we imagine a time when the art museum as we know it today didn’t exist yet? Can we reconstruct the various spaces for displaying and contemplating art throughout history, alternative to the today’s notion of art museum architecture? What can we learn from them? “Short histories of Art Museum Architecture” is consisted of excerpts of such reconstructions of various spaces for displaying and contemplating art throughout history that revive the alternatives of the modern art museum. In this paper, the renaissance “diaeta” was being reconstructed as based upon the humanist ideal of leisure as precondition of good and healthy life. Architecturally, it was built upon the literary sources on the ancient Roman urban villa and promoted cohabitation of the arts and the nature.