Museums Dedicated to Religious Art

Collections and museums are dedicated to the accumulation and care of religious art for multiple historical and pastoral reasons—reasons that shift over time as institutions change governance and focus. Most museums holding primarily religious art today are the result of long historical processes in which earlier collections of objects intended for religious purposes and functions have been transformed into collections now available to the public. Few such collections remain close to intact, though many enjoy a continuous tradition deriving from their presence in their original locations and their ongoing religious use. Other collections demonstrate how outside forces impact the legal and cultural foundations of collections and institutions, forcing them to change function. Perhaps the largest distinction one can make between different types of museums and collections dedicated to religious art is between those managed by religious institutions and those which are not, though the latter may once in their histories have been administered by religious institutions. Although it is not a hard and fast rule, religious entities tend to house collections of a more local nature, stemming from their own institutional collecting histories and reflective of the lived religion of their constituents. Nonreligious entities are more likely to house works reflecting a wider geography based on thematic acquisitions, though there are many exceptions to these rules, most notably museums within religious institutions deriving from missionary collections or those which have amassed many foreign objects in their treasuries as a result of pilgrimage or extensive trade. Since the distinction between sacred and secular collections is a relatively recent one—a consequence of Enlightenment Europe’s desire to categorize objects and thought as sacred or secular—collections and individual objects formed before this period often resist such neat categorization. Sacred collections of objects in religious institutions have always been visited with attitudes that betrayed interests beyond religious ones, and royal palaces housed collections considered to be as holy as the individuals for whom the palaces were built, and many objects themselves that eventually came to partake of collections within religious institutions may not have initially been produced for a religious context but rather came to enjoy second lives as religious offerings.