Q&A
What is the world’s oldest museum?
SHORT ANSWER
The Capitoline Museum has been around the longest… but not actually open the longest
LONG ANSWER
Ennigaldi-Nanna, daughter of a neo-Babylonian king in modern-day Iraq, is often credited as the first museum curator in history, building a collection of artefacts and presenting them, complete with explanatory labels, in c530 BC. Her museum doesn’t get many visitors these days, having been lost to the sands and only excavated in the 20th century.
Instead, the oldest still intact is in Rome – in fact, the top two are there. Pope Sixtus IV, builder of the Sistine Chapel and founder of the Vatican Archives, was a passionate patron of the arts. Ignoring the nepotism, scandal and involvement in assassinations that riddled his papacy, he helped Rome grow into a centre of the Renaissance, with a shiny new museum to prove it. The Musei Capitolini began in 1471 with his ancient bronze sculptures, including the Capitoline Wolf, the famous scene of baby twins Romulus and Remus suckling a mother wolf. Dedicated to the people of Rome, it claims the title as the world’s oldest museum, followed by the Vatican Museums in 1506. But while its collection of works swelled, it wasn’t open to the public until 1734. By then, other museums had sprouted up across Europe, including the Ashmolean in Oxford, unveiled in 1683.