Imagined interiors – imagined collections

Cabinet paintings showing an (art) collection in an interior developed as a genre in the early seventeenth century in Antwerp. The depicted collection could be the actual art collection in an imagined, idealized interior, or, more metaphorically, it could also be an imagined, fictional collection of paintings, sculptures, scientific instruments, silverwork, textiles, and naturalia such as flowers or shells. Jan Bruegel the Elder (1568–1625) and Pieter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), among others, used this genre in a series illustrating the five senses. These imagined interiors also influenced the caprices by Panini and Piranesi of a cityscape that is a collage of buildings, ruins, and archaeological fragments. In this essay, we relate these fictional representations of collections – objects as well as architectural and archaeological fragments – with the collections and scenography of (house) museums. We consider two house museums in particular: the house of the architect and collector Sir John Soane in London and the Museum of Innocence by writer Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul. House museums traditionally expose collections aside from a museological scenography but in their historical, domestic setting – “frozen” in another context and epoch. The two selected cases, however, were initially conceived as museums and contain an eclectic collection, presented as a pastiche, with a domestic setting that is strongly theatrical or even artificial.