The museum that lets blind people touch 18th-century sculptures

In museums, the rule against touching is not merely a regulation; it is a way of interacting with the exhibition space. On March 17, at the Cappella Sansevero Museum in Naples, that relationship changed, if only temporarily. Inside the space that protects the Cristo Velato — the sculpture made by Giuseppe Sanmartino in 1753, known for the technical precision of its shroud — a group of blind and low-vision visitors gained access under an exceptional protocol: the barrier was removed.

“The debate between conservation and access is often framed in the wrong terms,” says Maria Alessandra Masucci, president of the Cappella Sansevero Museum. “It is assumed that they are mutually exclusive principles, when museum accessibility is a method.” The statement is presented not as a theoretical stance but as an operational framework. “Removing the barrier, using gloves, regulating the time: every detail has been designed so that heritage protection and the right of access are not in conflict but complement each other.”

“Touch is its own language. It offers a different reading of forms, volumes, and surfaces,” Masucci explains. The assertion does not establish a hierarchy among the senses but instead organizes access to works from a new perspective.

Chiara Longobardi, one of the participants who lost her sight in adulthood, said the tactile visit allowed her to identify an element scarcely perceptible to the human eye: one of the nails that slightly raises the shroud. “It’s not touch that is different,” she explained, “it’s perception that changes.” Another of the guides described the experience in physical terms: “When you touch the veil, you feel the veins beating beneath.”

The sculpture, usually interpreted as an optical feat — the illusion of marble’s transparency — here shifts toward its material condition. “Marble has a temperature, a consistency,” Masucci notes. “On this occasion, that materiality became the substance of the experience.” The visits were led by people with visual impairments specifically trained for this experience. “They did not translate the works for an audience with disabilities,” Masucci explains, “they built a narrative that arises from a different experience of the world.”

The premise that structures the project is precise: “Not to think that we are all the same, but that we all have the same rights.” From that point on, the tactile exploration is accompanied by a narrative that does not describe from the outside but is constructed in parallel with the gesture. “It’s about allowing one to feel rather than to see.” The role of the explainer is redefined in that process. “A guide who interprets this work through touch tells us about a sculpture that we, used to looking at it, had not found,” Masucci says. Some sighted visitors who attended the session reported a shift in their own perception.

The initiative is part of a set of programs developed by the museum: tours with audio description, sign language content, adapted materials. “We consider this area a method, a mindset,” Masucci says.

“We live in an era in which cultural experience tends to become increasingly virtual,” she adds. “There is more looking and less seeing.” Restoring the bodily dimension is not proposed here as an alternative but as a condition of the experience. “Beauty is either a right for everyone, or it is a right for no one,” Masucci concludes.

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