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  3. "Museum" is a slippery word. It first meant (in Greek) anything consecrated

"Museum" is a slippery word. It first meant (in Greek) anything consecrated

游客2024-05-05  5
问题     "Museum" is a slippery word. It first meant (in Greek) anything consecrated (献给) to the Muses: a hill, a shrine (神殿), a garden, a festival or even a textbook. Although the Greeks already collected detached (分开的) works of art, many temples — notably that of Hera at Olympia — had collections of objects, some of which were works of art by well-known masters, while paintings and sculptures in the Alexandrian Museum were incidental (伴随的) to its main purpose.
    The Romans also collected and exhibited art from disbanded temples, and they plundered (抢劫) sculptures and paintings (mostly Greek) for exhibition. Meanwhile, the Greek word had slipped into Latin by transliteration (音译) and museum still more or less meant " Muses’ shrine".
    The inspirational collections of precious and semi-precious objects were kept in larger churches and monasteries — which focused on the gold-enshrined, bejeweled relics of saints and martyrs. Princes, and later merchants, had similar collections, which became the deposits of natural curiosities: large lumps of amber or coral, irregular pearls, unicorn (独角兽) horns, ostrich eggs, fossil bones and so on. They also included coins and gems — often antique engraved ones — as well as, increasingly, paintings and sculptures. As they multiplied and expanded, to supplement them, the skill of the fakers grew increasingly refined.
    At the same time, visitors could admire the very grandest paintings and sculptures in the churches, palaces and castles; they were not "collected" either, but "site-specific", and were considered an integral part both of the fabric of the buildings and of the way of life which went on inside them — and most of the buildings were public ones. However, during the revival of antiquity in the fifteenth century, fragments of antique sculpture were given higher status than the work of any contemporary, so that displays of antiquities would inspire artists to imitation, or even better, to emulation (竞争). The Medici garden near San Marco in Florence, the Belvedere and the Capitol in Rome were the most famous of such early " inspirational" collections. Soon they multiplied, and, gradually, exemplary (可仿效的) "modern" works were also added to such galleries.
    In the seventeenth century, scientific and prestige collecting became so widespread that three or four collectors independently published directories to museums all over the known world. But it was the age of revolutions and industry which produced the next sharp shift in the way the institution was perceived: the fury against royal and church monuments prompted antiquarians (古董收藏家) to shelter them in galleries, of which the Musee des Monuments Francais was the most famous. Then, in the first half of the nineteenth century, museum funding took off, allied to the rise of new wealth: London acquired the National Gallery and the British Museum, the Louvre was organized, and the Munich galleries were built. In Vienna, the huge Kunsthistorisches and Naturhistorisches Museums took over much of the imperial treasure. Meanwhile, the decline of craftsmanship inspired the creation of "improving" collections. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London was the most famous, as well as perhaps the largest of them. [br] Which is the main idea of the passage?
选项 A、Collection and collectors.
B、The evolution of museums.
C、Modern museums and their functions.
D、The birth of museums.
答案 B
解析 可定位在全文。题干问文章主旨是什么，从内容可知本文介绍了“museum”一词词义的演变过程，以及"museum"一词现代意义的由来，即“博物馆的历史沿革”(The evolution of museums)，故正确答案为B，而其他三项都只是在介绍"museum"一词的意义变化时提到的例子，不能作为全文主旨。
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