In his 1650 book Musurgia universalis, Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680) describes some busts that he called statua citofonica, and which are explained in detail by Yakov Perelman: «huge acoustic tubes, embedded in the building walls, that collected the sounds of the street or the courtyard and carried them to the mouths of the stone busts that were displayed along the wall of one of the rooms. It seemed to visitors that the busts were mumbling or whispering something».
The statua citofonica are an appropriate poetic metaphor for the communicative capacity of the elements of the exhibition as a product of the museographic language, as well as the relevance of the contemporary museum to encompass all of human activity, regardless of disciplines.
