Renewal of stones which tell a story
Issues for a modern lapidarium
MúzeumCafé 43.
It can seem that collecting stone carvings, tombstones, sculptures, fragments of monuments and buildings is in vain if visitors barely know where to start when historical stone remains are exhibited together. Museums rarely come to their aid. It’s the standard practice with exhibitions only to indicate the era of the displayed objects and their place of origin, with perhaps some information about who fashioned them and for whom. It’s only from catalogues – aimed mainly at the profession – where you can learn about everything else, how they can be used as historical resources, how the decorations on the stones and the texts reveal the eras. Yet there are only few exhibitions where on the basis of reliefs you can form a picture about contemporary burial practices, clothing, everyday life and family relations, while you can deduce something about political, economic and military events from the texts. What makes the situation and work of museologists harder is that you have to apply different perspectives to lapidariums displaying Roman and those displaying medieval objects, and there are also different possibilities in terms of exhibiting fragments of former buildings, stone carvings, altars, tomb structures, sarcophagi and reliefs, particularly when there is a desire to display all of these in one exhibition space. It is also unfortunate when a lapidarium is allocated space in a museum corridor or courtyard. A well-considered conception is of no avail – only with difficulty does the visitor feel like being at an exhibition. Similar problems are involved with reconstruction drawings, models and similar approaches, which time and again with new research results become outdated. You can find only a few museums where in the course of introducing the stone remains an insight is given into museum history.