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All were exquisitely painted, rich with symbolism. They depicted a variety of scenes: the Annunciation, the Baptism of Jesus, the Coronation of the Virgin.
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The paintings were intended not just as beautiful images, but as altarpieces, backdrops for the consecration of Christ’s Body and Blood. I had somewhat better luck in the National Gallery, where I was struck by the great beauty of the paintings, but even at the time, it was hard for me to say whether my response was devotional as such. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that I am Christian, the images in the Field Museum left me cold, but so did the santos in the Palace of the Governors, despite the best efforts of the museum designers to make the display resemble a church.
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where I found altarpieces depicting scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary and Christ-testing myself to see whether I could muster up some kind of devotional response. Not one to give up easily, however, I took myself on a tour of various museums-the Field Museum in Chicago where I found statues of Bastet and a corn goddess and a Buddha and an ancestor spirit, the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe where I found an exhibit on “Tesoros de Devoción,” the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Indeed, given the history of many museum collections, it would be easily possible to argue that they were designed specifically so as to prevent such responses in the presence of relics or devotional images or the gods of other religions. The objects are grouped according to exterior, academic categories of chronology or type, and they are labelled in such a way that their display is clearly about ‘conveying information,’ not about encouraging any sort of spiritual response. Everything about their arrangement and display of objects mitigates against most any other response. Museums are not typically very good places for having any experience other than the most intellectually aesthetic. No, I have never had such an experience in a museum, and if I did, I would not have felt comfortable. In particular, she wanted to know whether I had ever had an epiphany while looking at religious art in a museum and whether it felt comfortable having that response: “Do you think museums appropriately acknowledge and interpret the deeply personal and spiritual meaning had in their original contexts?” 1 Some years ago, a friend who works in the museum world asked me to write something about the experience of looking at devotional art in museums. She is the author, most recently, of Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought (Columbia University Press, 2017). Rachel Fulton Brown is associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.