It's really a museum that presents the history of man's fascination with animals. Its rooms are organized by animal: there's a room of wild boar, fox and stag, unicorns, birds, and of course dogs. Some rooms include a little cabinet that provide both biographical information on the animal, and poems dedicated to the animal. And of course each room is covered in paintings and tapestries:
It's not a big museum -- I think it took me less than an hour to see everything. But it's really great, how the museum intentionally mixes its messages. The ceiling of owls is crazy/silly but then it will give you scientific data to remind you that these animals are not for entertainment, they have a life outside human perception.
It's highlight is the big game room --
Which is followed, if one goes to the unfinished upstairs portion, with a general question of the actual scientific difference between human/animal. So, here we're made to feel bad, but of course not too bad (it's not like in the States where every natural science exhibit must be accompanied by a moralizing guilt trip, where you are made to confront the evils of your car-driving, plastic-consuming, tuna-eating ways. Not that I disagree with these evils, I'm just impressed by the America's ability to turn everything into a personal moral issue -- smoking, recycling, gas guzzling -- rather than a wider political-ethical concern.) In fact, the finale of the museum doesn't even make you feel bad. The punchline -- animals are like us (I almost wrote humans are animals, but I don't think the museum went there) -- maybe was the running theme throughout the museum as you look at all the different ways humans have occupied themselves with thinking and writing about, killing and painting animals.
Go visit.
3 comments:
That looks fabulous. And the big game room makes me think, I wonder if this place started life as one of the old-fashioned museum-as-trophy-room places? Like when you visit the Natural History Museum in Dublin, for example, it's like a Hunting Gentleman's showcase. Not real "educational," but more, "OMG look at the size of that bear!"
That sounds surprisingly dope. I am going.
That is amazing, Christina! I can't believe I missed it when I was there.
Don't know if you checked it out yet, but if not, be sure to get to the Gustave Moreau museum too. The studios are great, of course, but his apartments are also reconstructed and open. Bizarre turn-of-the-century bachelor domestica out the wazoo. I'm sure you'd love it.
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