I know there is a Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia, but it’s for kids. How many times have you viewed an artwork, particularly sculpture, and really wanted to feel it?
Many, for me, most recently at the Metropolitan Museum’s* Renaissance Portraits exhibition. (I didn’t.)
But I, and those of you who feel the same way, should try to visit Baltimore between Jan. 21 and April 15, while The Walters Art Museum presents Touch and the Enjoyment of Sculpture: Exploring the Appeal of Renaissance Statuettes. I hope it lives up to its billing, which is:
This groundbreaking focus show explores the implications of tactile perception for enjoying sculpture by melding the research of a Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist studying how the brain reacts to tactile stimuli and a Walters curator interested in the increased appreciation of tactility as an aspect of European Renaissance art–a period marked by a new availability of small “collectibles” meant to be held. Did artists anticipate a reaction to tactile stimulus in shaping sculpture, specifically statuettes of female nudes?
Visitors can hold and register their evaluations of replicas of “appealing” statuettes, as well as variants assumed to be unappealing. Displays illustrate the Renaissance attitudes towards touch, the sensation of touch being stimulated without actual contact and the neural processing and perception of objects during touch.
Ok, so it’s a little disappointing that visitors aren’t allowed to touch a Donatello. But I’m hoping the brain stimulation is the same for visitors, and the very exposure to these sculptures and this research makes up for that.
There’s more in the press release.
If museums are going to experiment with new exhibitions, this one strikes me as far more interesting and far more related to the core missions than the frou-four shows we’ve seen elsewhere. I hope it’s a crowdpleaser.
Photo Credit: Anonymous (Italian), Modest Venus (Venus Pudica), ca. 1500, Courtesy The Walters Art Museum