Rethinking and Remaking the Seventeenth-century Galleries at the Nationalmuseum
The renovation of the Nationalmuseum took place between 2013 and 2017. The exhibits from the collection were installed during 2018, with the museum opening to the public on 13 October. The concept for the chronological display was to show paintings, sculpture and applied arts together rather then keeping to a strict division into national schools. Martin Olin headed a team including the curators Carina Fryklund, Eva-Lena Karlsson, and Micael Ernstell as well as the scenographer Henrik Widenheim. Together they selected seventeenth-century works and decided how they were to be shown. This paper will discuss the process, discarded ideas, problems, solutions, further developments, and the diverse principles and thoughts behind the present exhibition at the Nationalmuseum.

Martin Olin

Nationalmuseum, Stockholm
Martin Olin is the director of collections at the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, and an associate professor of art history. Between 2013 and 2015, he served as assistant director of the Swedish Institute in Rome. He was responsible for the seventeenth-century galleries in the exhibition of works from the collection at the re-opened Nationalmuseum (2018). He has published on early modern architectural drawings, with special reference to Nicodemus Tessin the Younger; Swedish portraiture; seventeenth-century French and Italian drawings; and nineteenth-century Scandinavian painting and its historiography. In 2020, he curated the exhibition Arcadia: A Paradise Lost at the Nationalmuseum, which focused on the classical landscape in painting, drawings, and prints from the Renaissance to Neo-Classicism.