MUSEUM FOR SEEING

THROUGH the ages, artists have insisted on proper light to work by, picked their studios accordingly. But as their canvases moved into the hands of collectors and into museums, such meticulous care was rarely taken. Paintings have been plastered on walls from floor to ceiling, hung in dark corners, sometimes illuminated by smoking candles. Even today the museumgoer in Europe can find himself trapped in darkness in Madrid's Prado,* engulfed in fog in London's National Gallery or lost in Florence's unlighted Pitti Palace on a rainy day.

One of the newest and most successful museums to face the problem is Italy's Capodimonte National Museum (see color page), an 18th century palace outside Naples that was built for the Bourbon kings in 1738 and reopened only last year as a treasure-filled art museum--100 galleries lined with canvases by such old masters as Bruegel, Goya, Mantegna, Masaccio and Titian. In converting the palace, Naples' Art Director Bruno Molajoli faced not only the staggering task of cleaning and identifying some 600 stored paintings (including two Correggios found in a case marked "rubbish"), but also laying out a modern, well-lighted museum.

Which, When & Where? Museum Director Molajoli rapidly found himself in the middle of one of the most vociferous of the debates that engross the international museum fraternity: how to light a painting. From the Renaissance to the 19th century, side-window lighting was the principal solution, with now and then a smoking torch to light a royal procession through a gallery. The Louvre's Grande Galerie, begun by Napoleon, introduced the skylight roof on a grand scale, and with it natural overhead lighting--but without bright success. In 1857 London's Victoria and Albert Museum experimented with fishtail gas jets, lighted by a traveling pilot light that was propelled along a track by a clockwork motor; in 1877 the Victoria and Albert made the first experiment with indirect lighting when military searchlights were reflected from an overhead muslin screen to illuminate paintings. Today, says New York's Metropolitan Museum Director James Rorimer. "the big question is. do you use daylight or electricity?" The obvious answer--"both"--only broadens the debate to problems of how much of each, when and where.

Faced with a range of choices from Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, which shifts its Bruegels around on easels to catch the changing light, to Manhattan's glass-walled Museum of Modern Art, which shuts out all direct sunlight, Capodimonte Director Molajoli chose an elaborate mixture of the best of all systems, combined natural with both filament and fluorescent light, automatically mixed to maintain level, shadowless lighting.

Rich & Bright. First the old palace roof was torn off and a three-tiered system installed in its place. At the top is a glass covering (cooled by water jets in summer). Beneath are set a series of aluminum louvers automatically regulated by a photoelectric mechanism that opens them to the sky on cloudy days or at dusk, gradually closes them as the sun brightens. (This system is similar to that of the superbly lit Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass.--TIME, May 7, 1956.) The natural light is next deflected by a synthetic-wood barrier-to the side walls of the gallery below, passing through ceiling panels of glass wool sandwiched between sheets of glass to diffuse it evenly over the pictures. Artificial light concealed above the translucent ceiling panels supplements the natural light. To finish off the galleries, now filled with a steady, shadowless illumination, the floors were paved with contrasting Carrara marble (in the Titian Room) or left with plain, unwaxed brick.

Pleasing, well-lighted and rich in art, the new museum in its first year is drawing well over 1,000 visitors a day. Most distinguished: Florence's nonagenarian Renaissance Art Expert Bernard Berenson, who summoned up strength to visit Capodimonte, stayed for more than half an hour before Masaccio's Crucifixion (high on "BB's" list of world masterpieces), then left, overwhelmed.

* Long ranked as Europe's darkest museum, the Prado has begun the long-overdue installation of a scientific scheme of lighting (mixture of blue, yellow and rose neon to approximate sunlight). Predicted Prado Director Fernando Alvarez de Sotomayor: "By next year I think we will be able to say, 'Now the whole museum is illuminated.' "

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