We tend to assume that art has always hung on a wall waiting to be looked at. For most of its history it did not. The public exhibition, the simple idea that pictures and sculptures should be gathered into one room for anyone to come and judge, is younger than the works it displays, and the story of how it arrived tells us a great deal about who art has been for, and who has been allowed to decide what counts.

Patrons, guilds and a craft without an audience

For centuries there was no audience to speak of. Art was made to order. The church, the aristocracy and wealthy private patrons commissioned the works they wanted, and a painting was destined for a particular chapel, palace or family rather than for general view. Artists themselves were organised in guilds and ranked among craftsmen, valued for skill rather than celebrated for vision.

The first crack in that arrangement came from the academies. When Cosimo de Medici and Giorgio Vasari founded the first formal art academy in Florence during the Renaissance, the aim was to provide instruction and to raise the professional standing of the artist above that of the artisan. That ambition, the sense that an artist was something more than a tradesman, would eventually need a public to confirm it.

The first public showings

Italy and France did the early work of inventing the exhibition. In Rome the first displays were bound up with religion. During the first half of the seventeenth century paintings began to be shown inside churches on saints feast days, and during the Holy Years of 1650, 1675 and 1700 a lay society of artists mounted juried exhibitions of paintings in the portico of the Pantheon. Great private collections of old master paintings were brought out of the palazzi and hung in church cloisters for the occasion.

The academies pushed the idea further. The Accademia di San Luca began showing student work in 1607, and those displays gradually widened to include established artists, turning an internal teaching exercise into a public event. The Uffizi in Florence began as offices for the Medici government, became a private gallery of Medici treasures in the late sixteenth century and opened to the public in the eighteenth century, making it one of the earliest great public galleries. The pieces were in place. What was needed was an institution willing to make exhibition a regular habit.

The Salon and the age of the jury

That institution was the Paris Salon, and for almost two centuries it was the centre of the western art world. From 1667 the French monarchy supported periodic exhibitions of work by members of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, held in the Louvre in a room called the Salon Carre, which gave the event its name. At first the showings were sporadic. By 1737 the Salon had become an annual fixture, and by 1748 a jury of academicians voted on which works deserved a place on the wall.

Its authority is hard to overstate. For roughly a century and a half the Salon was the most prestigious recurring art event in the world, and it shaped style, taste and reputation across Europe. As many as five hundred thousand visitors might pass through during a two month run, with thousands of paintings stacked frame to frame from the floor to the ceiling, an arrangement so characteristic that we still call it salon style hanging. Opening night, the varnishing day, was one of the great social occasions of the Paris calendar.

Power that concentrated invites resentment. The jury favoured conservative subjects, history painting, mythology, allegory and portraiture rendered in a polished realist manner, and an artist whose work was refused lost almost the only chance to reach collectors, dealers and critics. The Revolution had opened submission to all French artists, but the jury, established in 1748, rarely broke with tradition. By the middle of the nineteenth century the gap between what the Salon would accept and what the most original artists wanted to make had become a chasm.

The birth of the modern exhibition

In 1863 that tension produced something new. The Salon jury rejected about two thirds of the works submitted, and the outcry was loud enough that Napoleon III ordered a separate show of the rejected pieces, the Salon des Refusés, so the public could judge for itself. It was meant as a safety valve. It became a turning point. Hanging there were Edouard Manet and James McNeill Whistler, among others, and the ridicule the show attracted did not bury the work so much as legitimise it. Many regard 1863 as the moment modern painting begins.

More important than any single canvas was the precedent. Artists realised they no longer had to wait for official approval. They could organise their own exhibitions. In April 1874 a group did exactly that, showing at the studio of the photographer Nadar two weeks before the official Salon opened. A satirical critic, seizing on a Monet title, mocked the group as impressionists, and the insult became the name of a movement. Seven more such shows followed through 1886. The monopoly was broken, and the independent exhibition had been born.

Spectacle and the great exposition

A parallel tradition was unfolding on a far larger scale. The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London drew more than six million visitors into the Crystal Palace, a vast structure of cast iron and plate glass built for the purpose, which housed some 14,000 exhibitors and more than 100,000 objects gathered from across the globe. The great international expositions mixed art with industry and treated display itself as a marvel, and in doing so they taught audiences to expect spectacle, scale and a sense of nations measuring themselves against one another.

The biennial is born

The lessons of the salon and the exposition met in Venice. In 1893 the city council resolved to create a biennial exhibition of art, and on the thirtieth of April 1895 the first International Art Exhibition of the City of Venice opened its doors. It was an immediate success, welcoming more than two hundred thousand visitors and showing artists from sixteen countries. From 1907 the model that would define it took shape, as nations began building their own permanent pavilions in the Giardini, starting with Belgium and followed within a few years by Hungary, Germany, Britain, France and Russia.

Venice gave the art world a template it has copied ever since. The biennial, a recurring international survey of contemporary work, remained a relative rarity for most of the twentieth century. Then, in the 1990s, the form exploded, growing from a handful of events to more than two hundred and fifty around the world, as cities from every continent reached for the prestige and tourism a biennial promises.

Shocks, museums and the blockbuster

Once artists controlled their own shows, the one off exhibition became the engine of the new. A single event could introduce a public to everything it had not yet imagined. The Armory Show in New York in 1913 delivered European modernism to America in one overwhelming visit, and the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, along with its delirious Paris successor in 1938, turned the gallery itself into a stage, complete with an ivy covered automobile, ranks of altered mannequins and a ceiling hung with coal sacks.

Museums, meanwhile, learned to draw crowds. They had mounted large loan exhibitions of historic art since the late nineteenth century, but the modern blockbuster, with its queues around the block and its heavy illustrated catalogue, is usually traced to the touring Tutankhamun exhibitions of the 1970s. From that point the major show became an event in the civic calendar, a thing people travelled to see and lined up for, as much an experience as an education.

The curator steps forward

In recent decades the figure who arranges the exhibition has moved from the back room to the front. The curator is now understood as an author, someone whose selection and framing carry an argument of their own. The change is visible in Venice itself, where the 2003 edition was built as ten linked exhibitions by different curators, with a deliberate opening toward the art of Africa, Asia and Latin America that the previous year’s Documenta, under Okwui Enwezor, had pushed to the centre of the conversation. The exhibition had become not just a place to see art but a way of making an argument about the world.

From the wall to the world

Read in one sweep, the history of the exhibition is the slow opening of a closed door. Art moved from the private chapel to the academy room, from the academy to the salon, from the salon to the artists own breakaway shows, and from there to the museum and the global biennial. Two arguments run the length of the story and have never quite been settled. One is the contest between the gatekeeper and the artist, the jury and the rebel. The other is the uneasy marriage of commerce and culture, the fact that almost every exhibition has had to sell something, even if only an idea.

What has not changed is the basic wager. To exhibit a work is to believe it deserves to be seen, and to trust a stranger to come and look. Every gallery wall, from the Salon Carre to the pavilions of the Giardini, is a version of that same hopeful gesture, repeated across four centuries and still, today, being made anew.