Welcome to Vergil’s blog. Someday soon, we expect this space to feature cutting edge interviews, reviews and expositions of all things related to the Artworld, historical and contemporary. However, this first post will go into greater detail explaining who I am, and why I am launching Vergil.

My name is Leo Doran, and at the time of writing this, I am on the cusp of graduating from Georgetown University with a degree in Art History. As a DC native, I have been visiting the cities’ museums for over 10 years. I am passionate about art and museums. I find museums to be both a font of inspiration and a sanctuary from exterior turbulence. However, during my time visiting, and interning in some of these museums, I have noticed two unhappy trends.

First, I contend that the average museum visitor is not unlocking the best experiences that museums have to offer. Too often, I have noticed visitors outwardly expressing boredom as they amble through galleries of masterpieces without looking at anything closely. Museums should be our intellectual playgrounds. This means not only making them accessible, but also making the tools to decode art’s sophisticated language more available.

Second, students of art history are woefully underpaid and assigned positions in museums that have little to no bearing on any art itself. I have personally taken an unpaid internship in a major museum where my daily duties were tangential to art at best. We should be aggressively supporting young people in the humanities, and using them as interlocutors and advocates for art, rather than filing them away into cubicles.

To solve for both of these trends, I am launching Vergil. From the mission statement:

Vergil is a student-conceived initiative with goal of changing how we interact with the cultural artifacts that compose our collective heritage. Vergil is a network that connects students and recent graduates trained in art history with consumers interested in a better museum experience. Using Vergil, museum visitors will receive on-demand, quality, private and affordable guided tours of selected collections. In turn, guides will be paid for meaningfully engaging with actual works of art. Vergil is committed to developing its student guides into professional interpreters of art and art historical criticism for the lay-public. Furthermore, experienced guides will be given opportunities to design, oversee and profit from the implementation of new tours.

Cheap or free audio-guides do not foster dialogues or answer questions. Public, docent led tours lack quality control, and siphon from the intimacy of the museum experience. Private tours by academics are phenomenal. However, these are almost universally prohibitively expensive. Vergil aspires to give private, academic level tours at a price point competitive to audio-guides.

The name itself, “Vergil,” is inspired by my long study of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Vergil, the Classical poet and author of the Aeneid, acts as the ultimate terrestrial guide, leading Dante through the Inferno and the Purgatorio. However, the reader will notice that Vergil does not accompany Dante to the Paradiso. That role is reserved for a higher wisdom, in the form of Beatrice.

Similarly, I am not an expert in Art History. My guides are not experts in Art History. There are many things we do not know, and we encourage interruptions that spark dialogue. We are, however, well read on the scholarship regarding the objects we present. We are well equipped to guide the layperson on the first few steps towards meaningful aesthetic experience. Our Beatrices are our professors, and if nothing else, we share in their mission of spreading their joy of critical looking as widely as possible.