| Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon | |
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| Established: | 1801 |
The Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon (French: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon) is a municipal museum of fine arts in the French city of Lyon. Located near the Place des Terreaux, it is housed in a former Benedictine convent which was active during the 17th and 18th centuries. It was restored between 1988, and 1998, remaining open to visitors throughout this time despite the ongoing restoration works. Its collections range from ancient Egyptian antiquities to the Modern art period, making the museum one of the most important in Europe. It also hosts important exhibitions of art, for example the exhibitions of works by Georges Braque and Henri Laurens in the second half of 2005, and another on the work of Théodore Géricault from April to July 2006. It is one of the largest art museums in France.[1]
Until 1792, the buildings belonged to the Royal Abbey of Saint-Pierre-les-Nonnains, which was built in the 17th century. The abbess always came from the high French nobility and here received the personalities of the kingdom. The institution had a particularly aristocratic slant, as is shown by its renovation by Louis XIV of France in the 17th and 18th centuries. The present state of the palais Saint-Pierre is largely down to these renovations, which included the construction of the baroque refectory and monumental honour-staircase, said to be by Thomas Blanchet. Since then, the refectory has been renovated and now serves as the reception for group visits, as well as housing two monumental paintings on the subject of dining, The Multiplication of the Loaves and The Last Supper, both by Pierre-Louis Cretey. The rest of its current layout was designed by Nicolas Bidaut and Simon Guillaume and is made up of sculptures.
The expulsion of the nuns and the destruction of the église Saint-Saturnin date to the French Revolution, though the abbey's other church (the église Saint-Pierre) still exists and now houses 19th and 20th century sculptures. After the Revolution, the remaining buildings housed the Palais du Commerce et des Arts, at first made up of works confiscated from the clergy and nobility but later becoming more multi-disciplinary. For example, it gained archaeology and natural history collections and those of the Académie des Sciences et des Lettres. The imperial drawing school was created in 1805, in the Palais du Commerce et des Arts to provide Lyon's silk factories with designers, giving birth to the famous Lyon School. In 1860, the Chambre de Commerce left the Palais Saint-Pierre and the establishment became the Palais des Arts. From 1875, the museum's collections underwent a major expansion and had to be expanded — the staircase by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes dates to this era.
The collections were opened up considerably at the start of the 20th century, leading to the Palais des Arts becoming the Musée des Beaux-Arts. The building acquired its present layout in the mid-1990s, after the completion of several restoration projects.
The paintings department has European 14th- to mid-20th-century paintings. They are arranged chronologically and by major schools in 35 rooms. The collection features :
Most of the collection is displayed in two sections: on the ground floor are Medieval and Renaissance sculptures and stuccos of the old baroque refectory; and in the abbey's church are sculptures from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
At the heart of the abbey, the former cloister is now a municipal garden, right in the centre of the town, on the peninsula. It is decorated with several 19th century statues:
Ancient Egypt is the main theme of the museum's antiquities department, due to the historic importance of egyptology in Lyon, encouraged by men like Victor Loret, whose family gave over 1000 objects to the museum in 1954. From 1895, the musée du Louvre provided nearly 400 objects (unguent vases, funerary figurines etc.) to form the foundation of the department; other objects (canopic vases, jewellery, material from Antinoöpolis) were added later to complement this initial donation, and were augmented in 1936 by objects from the artisans' village of Deir el-Medina.
The highlights of the collection are its display of sarcophaguses and the gates of Ptolemy III and Ptolemy IV from the temple of Medamud dug by the Lyons archaeologist Alexandre Varille in 1939 and donated by the French Institute of Oriental Archeology of Cairo. The remaining objects shed light on everyday life in ancient Egypt.
The collection has 600 works displayed in 9 rooms, in a thematic and chronological sequence:
One room contains cylinder seals, clay tablets and bas-reliefs from the Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian civilisations, as well as Luristan bronzes, ceramics and statuettes from Cyprus and a fine collection of Syrian objects (including an anthropoid sarcophagus and a marble bas-relief).
A single room is devoted to the main work in this department, the 6th century BC marble kore from the Acropolis of Athens. A second room is dedicated to ancient Greece, containing a series of Attic vases in black-figure or red-figure, bronzes and terracotta Tanagra figurines. Finally, a small room is devoted to Magna Graecia, with many ceramics and bronze helmets.
Roman sculpture is also presented across several rooms - marble statues (a torso of Venus, a child on a cockerel, statues of draped figures etc.) and also small bronze figurines of Gods from the Roman Pantheon such as Mercury, Venus, Mars etc.
The Gallo-Roman collections of the city of Lyon, previously presented at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Antiquarium, were transferred in 1975 at the Lugdunum museum on the hill of Fourvière near the Roman theatre and Odeon.
This department's collection ranges from the Middle Ages to the 20th century and includes:
Lyon's "médaillier" is the second largest one in France after that in Paris, with nearly 50,000 coins, medals, seals and other objects. It is known at a European level and has held a prominent place in the numismatic world from its beginnings in the 19th century to recent discoveries of the treasuries of the Terreaux and the Célestins.[3]
This department was created at the start of the 19th century and includes works on paper - drawings, prints, engravings, watercolours etc. - based on line rather than colour. In all it more than 8,000 works, including ones by Filippino Lippi, Parmigianino, Fra Bartolomeo, Leonetto Cappiello, Nicolas Poussin, François Boucher, Ingres, Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, Camille Corot, Honoré Daumier, Odilon Redon, Puvis de Chavannes, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger and a remarkable study by Albrecht Dürer.
On the initiative of René Jullian, in 1952 the Bulletin des musées lyonnais was created, and 8 years later changed its name to Bulletin des musées et monuments Lyonnais. In 2003 it changed to an annual publication and again changed its name, to Cahiers du musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon.
Abbey of Saint-Pierre-les-Nonnains