What does a museum mean? Open-air sculpture display in the Brussels Botanical Gardens

摘要

The decoration of the Brussels Botanical Gardens is one of the most important sculpture programmes ever carried out for the city gardens in Belgium. Because of its scale, it raises some interesting issues for nineteenth-century sculpture, and especially for public sculpture. In 1992 and 1993, Hugo Lettens and Pierre-Paul Dupont published two important articles about these sculptures. They mainly studied the iconography of the sculpture programme and stressed the way the sculptures were commissioned.This paper does not propose to rewrite the history of the sculptures, but rather to examine their typology through the idea of decorative sculpture.