Multimedia 9th Louvre - DNP Museum Lab Presentation: El niño azul, Goya and Spanish Painting in the Louvre

The Louvre - DNP Museum Lab project is a collaborative venture between the Louvre and Dai Nippon Printing Co. Ltd (DNP), designed to explore new approaches to art appreciation. The theme chosen for the ninth presentation is portraiture in the work of the great Spanish painter Goya.

Friday April 27 to Sunday October 28, 2012

Faced with a work of art, each individual sees it from a different perspective: whether collector, researcher, curator, artist or just art lover visiting the Louvre, our personal interests and knowledge influence our response. For this ninth Museum Lab event, multimedia resources were developed to allow visitors to discover Goya’s Portrait of Luis María de Cistué from all these different perspectives, the ultimate goal of the presentation being for each participant to create his or her own relationship with the painting on display.

From June 2013, two of the resources designed for this presentation will be reinstalled at the Spanish painting section at the Louvre in Paris.

The ninth presentation hinges on two different kinds of space – the private and the public. Purpose-designed multimedia displays invite visitors to discover the different ways of approaching a work of art, in both the private and the public sphere.

The private space
The ‘private space’ is usually the preserve of a limited number of people such as collectors and researchers, who can approach the work in a more direct and intimate way.  
At Museum Lab, face to face with the Portrait of Luis María de Cistué, visitors are introduced to the history of the painting and its various owners, and can imagine the more intimate settings in which it was displayed prior to its arrival at the Louvre.
Then, in a space resembling a museum laboratory, they learn to observe the work from the scientific perspective of the researcher.

The public space
For the vast majority of people, access to artworks tends to be within the ‘public space’ of a museum. This part of the Museum Lab presentation recalls the main room in the Louvre’s Spanish painting section, where El niño azul is usually exhibited; its aim is to investigate the significance of this work within the Louvre’s Spanish collection.