The Princes Czartoryski Monastery – a ‘sanctuary’ of nineteenthcentury museology

The permanent exhibition in the Monastery (Klasztorek) wing of the Princes Czartoryski Museum was opened in June 2023, as the culmination of an overhaul of the museum that lasted several years. Preparations for the exhibition provided a pretext for an in-depth analysis of the collection, as well as of the history and architecture of the museum building itself. With conscious references to the nineteenth-century exhibition solutions and the new exhibition set up after the Second World War, the Monastery, in contrast to the modern exhibitions at the Princes Czartoryski Palace and Arsenal, perfectly fits the definition of a ‘sanctuary’ of nineteenth-century museology, of which relatively few are extant worldwide. This paper is an attempt to characterise the new exhibition in the Monastery, based on the narrative themes employed by its creators, arising from a century and a half of the museum’s continuous operation and from the intellectual legacy left by previous generations of curators and researchers of the collection. The description of the exhibition is preceded by a brief historical outline discussing the reasons and circumstances under which Władysław Czartoryski founded the Cracow museum.