GALLERIES, primarily buildings or rooms dedicated to art and used for the ex hibition of works of art; hence, secondarily, im portant public or semi-public collections of art objects. In ancient Athens the marble hail that formed the north wing of the Propylaea con tained works of celebrated painters and was called the Pinacotheca, gallery of pictures. But in Rome, at the time of Augustus, a wholly different plan was adopted. The design of Augustus and his successors was not to as semble works of art in a single great building, or a number of such buildings devoted exclu sively to that use; rather it was to make Rome itself a true Pinacotheca, and to give the utmost publicity to both paintings and statues by plac ing them where they would be seen of all men, in porticos, along the promenades, and wher ever public meetings were customarily held. Thus even the Roman Forum was brilliant with paintings, and the porticos of Philip, Octavia and Pompey were literally covered with, them. Later, when Constantine made Byzantium the imperial capital and assembled there from all parts meritorious statues and paintings, "the idea did not occur to him," as has been well said, "to shut them up in a single locality i he made them serve for the decoration of various edifices and promenades of the city," which thus became, as Rome had been, one immense museum of art. During the Middle Ages, when art sought ecclesiastical protection, the churches were the only museums of sculpture and paint ing; but toward the close of that period kings and nobles, as well as powerful ecclesiastics, formed collections which eventually became nuclei of many of the great public European art galleries of the present day. In this sense the collections of the Medici family became the art galleries of Florence; the collections of the Popes constituted the Vatican galleries; the Farnese collection was the starting-point of the Studj at Naples; and it is well known that the Louvre embraces collections of several other sovereigns beside those of Francis I and Louis X IV.
Now, although it may be truly said that, so long as they remained princely or royal proper ties, these galleries were as a rule opened freely to artists, we must bear in mind the vicissitudes to which they were exposed. The privilege of visiting them might be withdrawn by their owners at any time. Morever a politi cal revolution might occasion their dispersal the fate that actually overtook the magnificent collection of King Charles I of England. It was only after the French Revolution that art galleries and museums became to such an ex tent genuinely public institutions that, although still in certain countries dependent upon the power of the Crown, the collections were at least inalienable and not subject to important modifications without the consent of the repre sentatives of the nation; and, as we shall presently note, this change was accompanied by a partial return to the old Roman ideals of publicity, accessibility, utility. Toward the end of the 18th century France set an example to other countries, making the Louvre the first truly national art-institution in Europe. To gether with the less important art galleries or art museums of the French capital and provinces, the Louvre became absolutely the nation's property, and as such open to all; and soon the observation was made that not alone artists, tourists and cultivated persons of the leisure class visited the democratized galleries, but that they rapidly grew to be favorite "places of pilgrimage" for the laboring class; that they were becoming higher schools of in dustry, so to speak, and in this way rendered much practical service to the State. The utili tarian influence of the art galleries of Paris was so thoroughly appreciated that many de partmental institutions of a similar character were established, such as those of Dijon, Lyons, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Toulouse, Orleans, Rouen, Avignon, Arras and Grenoble.