The Fitzwilliam Museum Re-opens its Doors

In July, the Fitzwilliam Museum re-opens after a long campaign of building and renovation. At the heart of the project lies the Courtyard Development, a new four-storey block inserted into wasted space, a residue from successive, twentieth-century extensions to a museum which opened on its present site in 1848. 

 

Designed by George Basevi and continued after his death in 1845 by C.R. Cockerell, the Founder’s Building, with its high, stepped base and pedimented portico, epitomises the nineteenth-century notion of the museum as a temple for the arts. At the same time its pervasive Neoclassicism recalls the founder’s century, the eighteenth, with that allegiance, of which the Grand Tour was the most obvious manifestation, to the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome.