'ALL over England it became the fashion to decorate galleries in dingy shades of putty and aqua sporca, emulating the depressing galleries of the Uffizi .. .' These words may read like the opening to a diatribe by one of our new, design-conscious museum directors,. writing of gallery decoration in the 1950s. In fact it is an Editorial from The Times of 3rd June 1929 commending the new decor in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, where rooms which had pioneered the widespread imitation of Corrado Ricci's 1880s decoration of the Parma Gallery in grey paint had been re-hung with green damask and 'a warm crimson moire like that of the Tribuna at Florence'. Confronted as we now are with discussions of the merits of 'authentic decor' in museums (which usually take the Tribuna as their historical starting point) it is curiously comforting to realise that we have been here - many times - before.

These reflections are prompted by Timothy Clifford's spectacular refurbishment of the National Gallery of Scot- land, opened to the public last summer, the aim of which is avowedly 'to return these interiors to something of their appearance during their heyday and to display the col- lections . . . following the artistic ideals of Playfair and Hay'. The ground-floor galleries have been stripped of their twentieth-century room-dividers, restoring Playfair's double enfilade of octagonal rooms, opening into one another through a sequence of depressed arches. The paint- ings have been placed, sometimes in a double, or even triple hang, against a deep, somewhat harsh, red felt wall covering. Cornices and skirtings have been painted in oak graining and a grey-green fitted carpet laid on top of the 1960s Scandinavian flooring. A good deal of furniture, not always of the highest quality, has been arrayed against the walls, and busts positioned on high scarlet plinths. The general effect is grand, opulent, a trifle overwhelming.

'The overall plan is based on historical accuracy', an- nounces Mr Clifford in his egregious 'guide to the present restoration and display', which details with almost loving precision the decorative aberrations of previous directors ('The rooms were approached by an oval staircase with the treads of the steps covered with grey pig's bristle carpet attached by metal strips and rubber nosings' he writes of the 1971-72 upper extension).' He concedes dis- armingly, however, that the decoration and furnishing of the new lower floor galleries are not just based on a revival of Playfair, but incorporate ideas from other places and times (even including - for the spotlighting - the second halfofthe twentieth century). A comparison ofa nineteenth- century view of the Gallery painted within twenty years of its opening with a photograph of a similar view taken today is instructive (Figs. 1 and 2). The Victorian hanging was much more crowded, with small pictures extending down to the skirting; it has been replaced with 'a more classical, symmetrical arrangement as one might expect to see when such pictures were displayed in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries'. The only seats visible in the nineteenth-century view are the copyists' plain deal boxes, punched with holes for easy carrying. Now florid gilt chairs, console tables and tatty cassoni proliferate: by a few subtle alterations the effect aspires to that of the country house, rather than the public gallery, justified on the grounds that the latter is the heir to 'the parade rooms' of the former. The suspicion that this opulence is rather un- Scottish is confirmed by a close reading of Ian Gow's excellent history of the construction and original decoration of the building. Although Playfair's decorator, David Ramsay Hay, 'the first intellectual house painter', pre- ferred dyed red cloth as a wall covering, money did not run, at the time of the gallery's opening, to more than painted boards. The overall effect of austerity was not solely due to lack of funds, but also expressed a sober belief in rational design. Moreover, Hay's adherence to 'claret' walls was not a whim of taste, but arose from a con- viction that it was scientifically demonstrable that these were the best foil for gilt-framed old master paintings, with their 'often damaged pigments'. Oddly, this optical truth is not evident in the ground-floor rooms: although the Turners and Raeburns look splendid against the dark red, the Sutherland Titians and Tintoretto seem curiously bleached and diminished by it. Is it a coincidence that those works painted nearest the time of the decor imitated here seem most comfortable with its revival?

Other elements of the Edinburgh refurbishment cannot be supported on 'authentic' grounds. The Poussin Sacra- ments are now hung in one of the smaller octagons on the ground floor - not the first time this eminently sensible arrangement has been adopted. Quite new, however, are the polychrome marble floor, the post-modern banquette and the 'dimly glowing' lamp, copied from the paintings themselves to evoke a sacred, Poussinesque interior - a grotesque piece of decorator's whimsy, and a frivolous parody of the profundity of Poussin's greatest works.

'If authenticity is the guide, as it should be', wrote a re- cent commentator musing on what the National Gallery, London, should do with its dreadful northern extension, 'then the work of the 1970s should be as sympathetically treated as the work of the 1870s'.2 It cannot then be long before the purist architectural historians demand that the National Gallery of Scotland go the whole hog's bristle, and tear out the marbled skirting, dados, cornices, pseudo- Victorian carpet, fringed corduroy ottomans and violently coloured Lyons silk wall-coverings which Timothy Clifford has recently inserted in the 1970s mezzanine extension, disguising its 'original' appearance, and draining colour even from the Van Goghs. Here the only painting that survives is Sargent's portrait of Lady Agnew, but even she is almost overcome by the ormolu. A preservation order, on the other hand, should surely be placed on Clifford's northern access staircase, where groups of eighteenth-century plaster copies of antique busts have been dramatically placed on huge scroll brackets jutting out from the oval walls, these last painted to simulate stone. The effect is somewhat alla Cinecitta - Federico Fellini crossed with Mario and Franco, the great London restaurateurs of the late 1960s.

The main priorities in the redecoration of picture gal- leries are surely that the paintings should be clearly visible and at ease in the building, which (ideally) should be legible as a complete spatial and historical experience. Such an effect has recently been achieved at the Art Institute of Chicago with the re-installation of its European paintings galleries (opened in 1987). The main rooms run round the first floor of the 1893 building and connect with an inner corridor of smaller spaces. In a 1950s remodelling all architectural detailing had been removed from the rooms, which were painted off-white and paved in white tiles, the pictures being hung low according to the aesthetic of the period. A subsequent historicising installation of the old master paintings had been attempted in the 1970s, with marblised doorways, red walls and a triple hang in the manner of the Palazzo Pitti, embellished with pieces of sculpture, furniture and objets de vertu - resulting in a con- fusing experience for the visitor moving from the earlier to the later galleries, where the Impressionist and post- Impressionist paintings were still hung at knee-height. One of the many merits of the new installation is that unity and coherence has been restored to the historical sequence, with no artificial break in the nineteenth century.

The Art Institute is fortunate in its rooms, which are top-lit and not excessively high (a perennial problem for the single hang). A good distance between sky-lights and lay-lights allowed the insertion of ultra-violet filters and a 'waffle' layer which refracts natural light. Every picture is completely visible. Mouldings and door surrounds have been restored throughout and painted a pietra serena grey. Over a slightly textured scrim the walls are painted in discreet and agreeable colours which vary according to period - pinky brown for the Venetians, soft-blue-grey for the French eighteenth century. The effect is almost subliminal. Only the choicest pieces of sculpture have been retained and the selection of old masters has been honed down to include only the best examples. (The disadvantages of this are obvious: at Edinburgh, a greater proportion of works is now on show, although field-glasses are needed for skied pictures.)

The most inventive and inspiring new idea at Chicago is the use of the darker ring of corridor rooms to exhibit selec- tions from the Institute's fine print collection, together with a few drawings, enabling one to step straight from a paint- ing to a graphic work by the same artist. The selection of works on paper is, of course, changed at three-month intervals, involving close consultation between the two departments. This intelligent installation demonstrates how an old building can be exploited for new educational purposes without destroying its original character.

The current vogue for authentic decor and historicising picture hanging is just one manifestation of the contemporary uncertainty about aesthetic values as we approach the second millennium. Historical relativism unites the right-wing architectural historian and the left-wing cultural pessimist. While the one takes refuge in the past, the other rejects the 'art object' altogether. If historicism prevails, the individual work of art is locked in its period, and cannot break out to meet the contemporary eye, as Proust pointed out in a comment on an earlier manifestation of today's fashion:

'Our age is infected with a mania for showing things only in the environment that properly belongs to them, thereby suppressing the essential thing, the act of the mind which isolated them from that environment. A pic- ture is nowadays "presented" in the midst of furniture, ornaments, hangings of the same period, a second-hand scheme of decoration in the composition of which in the houses of today excels that same hostess who but yesterday was so crassly ignorant, but now spends her time poring over records and in libraries; and among these the master- piece at which we glance up from the table while we dine does not give us that exhilarating delight which we can expect from the public gallery, which symbolises far better by its bareness, by the absence of all irritating detail, those innermost spaces into which the artist withdrew to create it.'