Musical iconographies and the construction of historical narratives: the Museo Oriental of Valladolid

Abstract

Exhibitions are often organized as a practical way of showing valuable materials in a certain order, both on panels and in display boxes, but despite this being the very essence of the museum, the displayed materials and panels promote a particular historical speech toward which the visitor is lead, credulously assuming that the historical truth must be the basis of the narration. Consequently, understanding the underlying discourse of an exhibition and its configuration is not only necessary in order to liberate the materials from a particular narrative, but it also permit us to understand the socio-political and cultural context of the museum’s creation and reveals its hidden agendas. This has been one of the main goals of the academic criticism towards the museums during the last decades. In this paper, we will offer an interpretation of the historical narratives that underlie the display of objects at the Museo Oriental of Valladolid, the largest collection of Asian art in Spain, established by the Order of Saint Augustine in 1874, in order to show the objects collected by the Augustinian friars since 1565. Under the evocative name of “Museo Oriental” the presentation of the collection follows a specific Roman Catholic narrative of the historical process occurring within the missions in the Far East, together with a particular view of the Other that suits some of the key notions of Said’s Orientalism (1978).