IN EUROPE, old-master paintings can be admired in churches and country houses as well as in galleries, and the latter are greatly varied in character: in a matter of hours one can move from the National Gallery of Scotland, where a lavish Regency decor is revived, to Carlo Scarpa’s Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona, with its austere insistence on yesterday’s modernity. In the United States, where public art collections have less variety in their content, the styles of presentation are also far more uniform – worryingly so, when we consider that the display of a work of art is an act of interpretation. In this context, the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, which recently changed its name (ominously) to the Walters Art Museum, is to be congratulated on reasserting its idiosyncratic character. Its original Palazzo, designed by William Adams Delano and completed in 1909, reopened this autumn with a display of some of its Renaissance and post-Renaissance European art which provides a welcome contrast to the way in which masterpieces are presented in the American capital nearby and is refreshingly different from any of its rivals across the States.

The Italian collections at the Walters are on view properly for the first time in a decade, and among them are works that have not been seen by the public for even longer: a carved walnut mirror frame that was discovered in storage; a marble St Catherine, recently identified as by Ferrucci; a portrait of Cosimo III, now recognised as by Soldani. At one end of the Baroque gallery the paintings are hung as densely and as high as they would have been in an Italian palace, with the newly restored gilt scrolls of a console table providing a focus in the centre of one wall and the plasterwork of the coving supplying a climactic echo. There has long been a tradition of integrating painting, sculpture and the decorative arts in American museums (the legacy of Wilhelm von Bode transmitted by W.R. Valentiner), but the variations in tempo and the richness of texture here are truly original, and the juxtapositions have been contrived with exceptional wit and intelligence. The early Tiepolo, Scipio Africanus freeing Massiva, with its wheeling figures, is placed above a row of four precarious bronze groups by Francesco Bertos; the famous View of an ideal city is displayed above a chest of similar proportions; the mourning woman attributed to Ercole de’ Roberti flanks fragmentary terracotta heads from a group of the Lamentation; and ecclesiastical metalwork is arranged above a tapestry altar frontal.

In the Dutch cabinet galleries downstairs, paintings share the walls with goldsmiths’ work and blue-and-white porcelain, but the more surprising displays are entered through the Armor Hall. On one side there is a small study completely filled with showcases, a room designed to have a secluded, concentrated, even claustrophobic effect. In it some of the finest small sculptures in North America, in bronze, ivory and other materials, keep company with the numinous but often dubious antiquities which inspired them; an anonymous Netherlandish painting of Lucretia hangs above rows of timepieces; the miniature white reliefs of an especially fine pastiglia box are surrounded by enamelled jewels. On the other side of the Armor Hall is a larger ‘Chamber of Wonders’. Here hunting trophies hang alongside ancestral effigies; there is a cupboard containing shells, skulls and lumps of amber; another filled with art from Sri Lanka, China and Africa; and a third with cameos and rosary beads and other intricately made marvels. Dominating the centre of one wall – and some of the thinking behind the room – is Heemskerck’s panoramic view of the wonders of the ancient world.

Joanneath Spicer, the curator responsible for these rooms, has been influenced by the very different priorities of collectors several centuries ago, and of course by recent scholarly studies of the history of museums, but her creation is anything but pedantic. She offers a real challenge to the ideal of a display that looks as if it can be absorbed in a single visit. The works of art respond to each other, their relationships often more interesting than any label can convey. Labels are, in fact, dispensed with in these rooms (as also in the densely hung end of the Baroque gallery) and information is instead provided in handy binders. Visitors are more likely to look first and read later. They seem to find it thrilling to be intruders from another age and soon become explorers.

As the senior staff in most museums concentrate their attention on planning new buildings and devising money-spinning loan exhibitions, the truly stimulating ideas will perhaps be found in the imaginative pragmatism of curators who are allowed to rearrange the permanent collections. In one of the galleries of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, for example, works by Winterhalter, Monet, Kokoschka and Kirchner dance together with a Barye bronze, furniture carved by Frullini, Sarah Bernhardt’s inkstand, and Art Nouveau ceramics, uninhibited by the habitual divisions of art history. In this room, as also in Baltimore, there is no need of wall texts to explain the relationships between the objects, as is so often the case in the didactic ‘thematic’ displays which we have come to dread.

In contrast, the new display at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, despite some minor but subtle deviations from canonical orthodoxy, tells an old story: both the progression it presents within clean modernist spaces and the way it is hung provide a refined version of what has become, over the last decades, familiar, respectable, comfortable but also academic. Few artists in the early twentieth century – the heroes of MoMA’s collection – had any idea that their work would end up in this elegant clinic. To read the critical acclamations of MoMA is to become aware of the value, for example, of the Barnes Collection in its original location in Merion which embodies not only an intelligent and sensitive, but now completely alien, style of arrangement. We are reminded by the recent achievements at the Walters of just how much a display can foster alternative critical approaches.

In contrast, the new display at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, despite some minor but subtle deviations from canonical orthodoxy, tells an old story: both the progression it presents within clean modernist spaces and the way it is hung provide a refined version of what has become, over the last decades, familiar, respectable, comfortable but also academic. Few artists in the early twentieth century – the heroes of MoMA’s collection – had any idea that their work would end up in this elegant clinic. To read the critical acclamations of MoMA is to become aware of the value, for example, of the Barnes Collection in its original location in Merion which embodies not only an intelligent and sensitive, but now completely alien, style of arrangement. We are reminded by the recent achievements at the Walters of just how much a display can foster alternative critical approaches.