But if you visit the Sarasota, Fla., estate that is home to the newly reopened Ringling Museum of Art, you’ll see not only a world-class institution—the official art museum of the state of Florida—but the ornate Cà d’Zan mansion; university-level facilities for conservation and education, including museum studies courses; an 18th-century theater brought over from Italy and yes, a circus museum. In fact, for the moment, two.

Only seven years ago, the Ringling was effectively on institutional life support after more than six decades of neglect. Legendary circus impresario John Ringling had bequeathed the museum, his mansion and a collection of more than 600 artworks to his adopted state in 1936, along with an endowment of $1.2 million. Florida did little with this windfall, however. By the turn of the century, the mansion was closed, the Historic Asolo Theater was condemned, the museum’s leaking roof damaged the architecture and threatened magnificent artworks, the antiquated security system no longer provided adequate protection and the endowment had only grown to $2 million.

But 64 years after Ringling’s death came a remarkable rebirth and reinvention. In 2000, governance of the Ringling passed from the state to Florida State University (FSU). Two years later, the state gave the museum $43 million for new buildings—on the condition that within five years the board of directors raise $50 million for an endowment. When that deadline arrived in February 2007, more than $56 million had been donated or pledged, and the last of four new buildings opened its doors.

Moreover, FSU’s ownership brought with it a striking array of opportunities for cultural and educational impact. Though the Ringling is 300 miles from the FSU campus in Tallahassee, it has become a key partner in the university’s arts and museum programs, including museum studies courses, teacher certification and a research library serving everyone from scholars to schoolchildren.

All of this grew out of the philanthropic dreams and a few financial schemes of a circus man from Baraboo, Wisc.

Sarasota is a city of about 53,000 on central Florida’s Gulf Coast, overlooking Sarasota Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. It is responsible for the area’s nickname of “Florida’s cultural coast,” strongly supported by the many wealthy people who retire or spend winters there.

John and Mable Ringling played a key role in sparking that moneyed migration starting in the 1920s. Mable was from a small farm community in Ohio. John, a tall, powerfully built but reserved man, was one of the famous Ringling brothers, creators of “the Greatest Show on Earth.” This purveyor of entertainment for the masses rose from humble origins to become one of the wealthiest men in the country, with investments in oil, railroads and real estate. He moved the winter quarters of his circus to Florida, began buying up real estate—he eventually owned 25 percent of the city—and sought to establish a cultural center that would attract those who would buy property from him. And as Marjorie Schwarzer writes in Riches, Rivals & Radicals: 100 Years of Museums in America, Ringling sought to join the ranks of museum founders who housed art collections in “palaces that, to them, communicated wealth, status and longevity. . . . Using off-season circus performers as his construction crew, he built a sprawling complex on a former alligator-infested swamp. . . .” Schwarzer notes that “Such a move was philanthropic but also had its practical side. For the founder it represented a great increase in social stature.”

Ringling’s commitment to acquiring art and leaving a cultural legacy, however, was sincere and passionate. He became a knowledgeable and voracious collector of the finest works Europe had to offer. When he opened an art museum on his estate in 1931, he said, “I hope this museum . . . will promote education and art appreciation, especially among our young people.”

What led this impresario of the itinerant, rough-and-tumble circus life to the rarefied world of fine art? In part, it was the circus itself. Each of the five Ringling brothers who ran the business (there was also a sixth brother and a sister) had his own area of responsibility. John was the advance man who dealt with railroad administrators, city officials and other prominent men in cities around the country. He admired their lifestyle and began to emulate it, and his travels to Europe to scout for circus acts had a similar effect. He educated himself by scouring art books and by relying on such advisers as German art dealer Julius Böhler. Developing a particular passion for Baroque art and Italian culture in general, he became a regular at New York and London auctions, buying works by Rubens, Velázquez, van Dyck, Titian, El Greco and Gainsborough. His acquisitions also included the contents of whole rooms; he bought the Astor Salon and Library just before New York’s Astor mansion was demolished. He even bought a collection of Cypriot antiques from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Upon his death in 1936, Ringling left his property to the people of Florida. But he had fallen into debt, and creditors would delay the settling of his estate for a decade. Even after the probate was settled, John Ringling’s dream did not come to fruition until the 21st century.

When you visit Sarasota by plane, you will immediately see signs saying that you have landed on “Florida’s Cultural Coast.” And you won’t have to go far to get to the heart of it: The Ringling Museum looms to your right as soon as you exit the airport grounds.

As you enter a gate with “Florida State University” on one side and “Ringling Museum of Art” on the other, you soon see that the Ringling estate is part of an even larger arts complex. In front of the inner gate is the FSU Center for the Performing Arts, comprised of the Cook Theater, Mertz Theater, FSU Asolo Conservatory and Asolo Repertory Theater. Your first stop inside the estate is the year-old John M. McKay Visitors Pavilion, which brings together under one roof the Historic Asolo Theater, the museum store and the Treviso restaurant.

The Asolo receives significant credit for bringing opera, dance and other fine arts to the area. A. Everett “Chick” Austin, the museum’s Harvard-educated, flamboyant first director, brought the theater—or, more precisely, the panels that decorate its U-shaped balconies and its stage—from Asolo, Italy, where it was built in 1798. Many of Sarasota’s performing companies were born there, then moved on as they needed more space. Dwight Currie, curator of theater programming, calls the 280-seat theater “almost acoustically perfect.” Former FSU President Sandy D’Alemberte had a vision for how the Ringling would add to his university’s programs, and it included making the Asolo Theater part of his “Lincoln Center of the South.” Its partners range from the local Sarasota POPs Orchestra to California’s Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe, whose Black Nativity enjoyed sold-out performances in December.

When you exit through the other side of the Visitors Pavilion you step onto 66 acres of tropical landscape with palm trees and a grove of banyan trees with roots high above ground. The horticulturally minded can also visit Mable Ringling’s rose garden—no mean accomplishment in Florida—and the miniature holdings of the Dwarf Garden. Most of the estate’s facilities are situated around a roughly oval loop traveled by foot or by trams that resemble multi-seat golf carts.

Off to the left is the art museum, modeled on Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. Its 21 galleries form a “U” around an expansive courtyard filled with copies of Greek and Roman sculptures. Ringling focused on collecting Old Masters, including five prized giant Rubens paintings, 14 by 19 feet. The collection now includes more than 10,000 objects, having branched out not only to modern art but, thanks to two major gifts, a world-class Asian collection that will have its own wing in three years.

Executive Director John Wetenhall is proud of the esteem in which major European museums hold the Ringling’s collection. He notes that “We get a lot of [loan] requests from Europe—the Louvre, the Vatican, the Tate Gallery. We’re currently preparing a work from the collection for the city of Turin.”

Given the Ringling’s ties to Florida State University, its education programs are central to the new organization. The 68,000-square-foot Education/Conservation Building opened last fall; it also provides space for the professional staff, formerly dispersed among various buildings, rented spaces and trailers, on and off the estate. The previous offices were cramped, dark and redolent of mildew. The art library’s 70,000 books were once stored in a room built to hold half that number. And most problematic of all, the art storage vaults and archives were located below the flood plain. The new facility provides extensive space: classrooms for graduate seminars and the new Ringling/FSU Cultural Institute for Adult Learners, meeting rooms for teacher training and professional certification programs and one of the finest art libraries in the southeastern United States. A conservation lab with large windows invites visitors and students to watch conservators at work.

The Ringling’s education department has the expected programs targeting children and families (for example, the Handz-On Family Program), adults (workshops with curators and specialists), students (free school tours) and teachers (Saturdays for Educators). But it also offers university-level courses, such as FSU’s “Special Topics in Interior Design,” a museum studies practicum to expose students to different professional functions and “The Business of Museums,” taught by Wetenhall.

Lynn Berkowitz, director of education, explains the extended mission that came with joining FSU: “We are the state art museum of Florida, so our programs draw teachers from three and four hours away who come every month. They get in-service credit. We use the state standards. We put art to work to help teachers teach to the standards, but in a fun, sort of guerrilla-tactics way. They don’t know they’re doing a math exercise—we’re looking at art, right?”

Despite being the state art museum, Berkowitz notes, the Ringling isn’t required to address the state standards. “Not specifically,” she says; “I think it’s by intention. We look to the mission, we teach to the mission, we do our programming to the mission. But we look at the needs of our audience, and our audience tells us what they need. To be blunt, in the reality of the school programs, it used to be you took field trips to culturalize the students and to make them part of your community. We know that’s not possible, for the most part, with public schools, and private schools to a degree, and home-schooled kids to a degree.” So the education program has adapted. “It’s got to be math and the museum; we’re looking at doing science programs and reading and language, and we get the aesthetics in through the back door. That of course is having an impact on how and why we do what we do.”

Wetenhall, who was elected to the AAM board of directors while this article was already underway, serves as an FSU dean. He holds a PhD in art history and an MBA—part of a resume that also includes a second-degree black belt in Ju Jitsu and a pilot’s license. In the “Business of Museums” course that he teaches every summer, he says, “I try to offer students a way to bridge the sometimes-foreign languages of culture, academic studies, budgets, timetables, project management, strategic planning, all of those things. The goal is to really change people’s way of working. Most academic graduate programs are taught to individuals as individuals. Most museum work is in groups. So all the projects in this course are in groups. It’s based on the model of a business school.”

Leaving the main building and heading to the bayfront, you encounter the only building besides the art museum left from John Ringling’s day: his mansion, the Cá d’Zan. Its name means “House of John” in Venetian dialect, though Mable’s close management of its design and décor is suggested in the architectural plans, labeled “the home of Mrs. John Ringling, Sarasota, Florida.” The exterior is stuccoed, with multi-hued tiles, extensive symbols and a mix of Italian and French architectural influences. The interior is extensively decorated with pieces from Ringling’s art collection, under ceiling murals by Ziegfeld Follies set designer Willy Pogony. The master bedroom contains furniture similar to that of Napoleon III. The Cá d’Zan, with its panoramic view of Sarasota Bay, makes the grand statement its owners intended.

Completed in 1926 for $1.5 million and furnished for $400,000, the mansion offers a lesson in the dangers of deferred maintenance. It deteriorated to the point where it appeared in a film version of Great Expectations as Miss Havisham’s decrepit ruin. After six years and $15 million, however, it reopened in 2002 and immediately resumed its role as a star attraction, raising attendance nearly 50 percent in its first year.

Here as elsewhere, John Ringling saw a practical side to the opulent beauty. Looking across the bay to Longboat Key, Chrissy Kruger-Gruendyke, director of marketing and communications, observes, “Everything you see belonged to John Ringling. It’s said that John used the view from the tower to show his guests the beauty of his holdings and make his ‘ask.’”

On a tour of the house, theater curator Dwight Currie says, “People get so reverential. John and Mable Ringling were a couple of farm kids who suddenly had more money than God. I just imagine them saying”—he mimes pointing—“I want me one of those!’” Such indulgence may have produced the Cá d’Zan, but the Ringlings always intended to leave it as an art gallery. The museum has since chosen to respond to the public’s interest in house museums by displaying it as such, but it continues to serve John and Mable’s desire to display their artworks.

The estate that John Ringling left to Florida did not include a circus museum. Chick Austin, the first director, had it built in the 1950s. Current director John Wetenhall has observed that Ringling himself would not have built it.

“One would never, in that era, display the origins of their wealth. It was simply not something one would do, any more than Frick would build a tribute to steel manufacturing next to his museum. It was a later sensibility that brought the circus to [the estate].” Debbie Walk, the Tibbals curator and Ringling archivist, adds that single-topic museums were unusual in Ringling’s day. And “to him, the circus was alive, not something to memorialize.”

But later visitors wanted to know about the circus, and a museum was built in 1948, exhibiting artifacts such as clown props. This museum will eventually be torn down when the new Tibbals Learning Center, which opened in 2006, is expanded. Currently, the Tibbals tells the history of the circus from its roots in ancient Rome to today’s Cirque du Soleil. The new building will add the history of circus acts, says Wetenhall. “You’ll learn about the people on the back lot and the sideshows.”

Walk is excited about enlarging the Tibbals Center. “The circus grew as America grew,” she says, and she looks forward to telling much more about their interwoven stories. “How did you become the man on the flying trapeze? Who created it? Wonderful music was created for the circus—it’s an American form. R&B and blues music—the line goes through circus music as well. We have to tell about circus history in ways people don’t expect.”

The most striking exhibit at the center is the 3,800-square-foot miniature “Howard Bros. Circus,”created by Howard Tibbals on a scale of ¾ of an inch to the foot. He and local contributors raised the $6.5 million necessary for design and construction; it took a year to install. The exhibit is accurate to the tiniest details, even the ones visitors can’t see. The 44,000 pieces include 1,300 performers, musicians and workers—plus a tiny, striding John Ringling—800 animals and 900 sets of minuscule silverware on tables in the dining tent. All aspects of life on the road are on display, from nameless workers taking a break to the long lines of wagons, which had to be loaded onto trains with great precision—in fact, military officials came to study the real-life Ringling circus’s logistics when it came to Europe.

The exhibit evokes the excitement that happened when the “city without a zip code” came to a small rural town. Visitors are moved to wonder about the lives of its people: Did those who ran away to join the circus find a better life? What demimonde did the scantily clad female performers inhabit? African American workers are portrayed traveling, working and resting with white counterparts. How and why did circus life differ from what went on elsewhere in American society?

Walk points to three goals that have guided the museum’s planning: “‘Wow’—we want people to come in and get excited about the circus and for them to respect our stakeholders, the circus community. We want to create not only a new generation of museum-goers but also circus-goers—so that people see these incredible people doing things in real time.”

Clearly, the Greatest Show on Earth is still putting on a great show. So why did the Ringling sink so far down?

Wetenhall cites a lack of leadership. “I think it was a responsibility that no entity was willing to fulfill. The state legislature felt it was Sarasota’s responsibility, and then the Sarasota community, with some exceptions, felt it was the state’s responsibility, and all parties watched the institution deteriorate despite heroic efforts of staff, board members and local people.” Moreover, “The deferral of maintenance was such that when new monies were raised, they would merely go into bringing the institution back to where it already was. And while it was doing that, it wasn’t growing. It was only when the merger came through that the state and the local community joined together. The state funded a lot of the renovation and the buildings; the local community took responsibility for a $50 million endowment campaign.”

It all culminated in what he calls a story of “riches to rags and back to riches.”

A dynamic group of individuals with a shared vision came together. State Sen. John McKay was key to providing funding to restore the original buildings and erect new ones. Then-FSU President Sandy D’Alemberte saw what the Ringling and his university could do for each other, and departments within the university were supportive. Howard Tibbals was seeking a home for his model circus. And in John Wetenhall, the museum found a vigorous executive director with a resume of fixing up troubled museums.

Another factor was a staff willing to put up with a lot during the transition. “We had four trailers with offices and 30 people in temporary sites,” says Wetenhall. “There were six places on and off the estate.”

There were also community philanthropists, many of whom served on the board. Coming up with $50 million in five years was no small feat. Wetenhall attributes it to “a combination of urgency—we were required to do so, as part of the agreement—and the board rising to their responsibilities. Exceeding their responsibilities, really, to spearhead a campaign. With no planning.” Kruger-Gruendyke agrees that they “had no planning materials, no campaign materials, nothing.”

All in all, Wetenhall describes the confluence of support as “a perfect storm in reverse. It wasn’t [previous] management’s fault. The structure was wrong in the old days. Now we’ve got the right structure and the university leadership to help.”

Advisory Board Chairman Alice Rau adds, “The board is still comprised of many of the people who went through an agonizingly difficult time” in earlier years. “So the passion and enthusiasm of these respected and long-serving board members—before it became the board—are now greatly recognized. That’s where a lot of the money came from.” She also points to the efforts of “a little committee of local people called Ringling Renaissance, people who recognized what was happening to the museum and the need that was there and had already started, with the previous board of trustees, looking at a master plan. So there was tremendous involvement. I thought in my lifetime it would never be completed.”

The board and FSU have worked out an accommodating modus operandi. Wetenhall notes, “Many college museums don’t have advisory boards. It’s not a common model at all.” Rau says of FSU that “They have been very sensitive to the fact that this was a governing board at one point. I cannot think of any instance in which they have involved the board when they have not followed its advice.”

“Essentially,” says Wetenhall, “the board has a great deal of political authority that nobody wants to test legally, and the university has a great amount of legal authority that nobody wants to test politically. As long as everyone does what they should, it can work out well. It could conceivably fall in on itself; I don’t think the model is particularly stronger than any other model. It’s dependent on the leadership of the people involved.”

In his view of the Ringling’s renaissance, “The astounding part in my mind is not that it all happened. The vision here is a 15-year vision. It’s that it happened in five years.”

And what does being “the official art museum of the state of Florida” actually mean? Chrissy Kruger-Gruendyke explains that “We’re all FSU employees. That’s where our paychecks come from.” John Wetenhall calls the university “extremely supportive. They’ve provided us with human resources, legal counsel, facilities management—a lot of the nuts-and-bolts infrastructure that a smaller museum would struggle to maintain.” Long-term plans, he says, include graduate education, an adult institute, a children’s institute and perhaps undergraduate education. Currently, the Ringling offers intern programs and one-year fellowships “to create a springboard opportunity for careers, particularly at the beginning of professional careers.” A summer program offers a museum studies certificate. “The model is based on a teaching hospital. You do rounds. Every morning you’re in a department conservation, curatorial, guard duty, store duty, marketing.” True to FSU’s vision, “Because it’s such a large museum, we can afford students an opportunity with all the functions.”

State art museums seem to be relatively rare, unlike, say, state history museums. But Wetenhall notes, “It gives us a wider mandate, beyond the local community.” The Ringling enjoys partnerships with other state academic institutions, such as the New College of Florida, the Ringling School of Art & Design, the University of South Florida and Manatee Community College. And Wetenhall says that “there has been no aesthetic micro-management [from FSU] at all. It was feared when the merger took place, but none of that has come to bear.”

Given the Ringling’s unusual contrast of fine art and the circus, one could imagine that it would be difficult to brand—to convey succinctly to the public exactly what the Ringling offers. The official name of the entire entity is the Ringling Museum of Art—not, for example, the Ringling Estate or the Ringling Museums and Mansion—per John Ringling’s will.

Tibbals curator Debbie Walk says, “I don’t see the tension between [the art and circus museums] at all. I see them as a wonderful story unfolding. We have a wonderful art museum, a wonderful house museum. But as I tell people, how many places in the world can you see a circus museum?”

Curator of Collections Stephen Borys concurs. “Every-one talked about him wanting to rise above [his background]. But he always loved the circus. It was his roots, his first fortune—there was no effort to separate himself. He was going full speed in a number of directions.”

The Ringling plans to continue its reinvention. Some projects are confirmed, such as the Dr. Helga Wall-Apelt Gallery of Asian Art; others are still on the drawing board—for example, a regional conservation laboratory, run as a business, that will serve a large region.

Though a state museum, the Ringling is thinking nationally and beyond. “We’re now in a position to collaborate with neighbors in North America and with Europe and Asia through our Asian galleries,” says Wetenhall. “We can start to create relationships with peer institutions. Not necessarily the Louvre and the National Gallery of London but important museums of like size, quality and collections.

“I don’t see museums of this size always having to do major blockbuster exchanges. In our case, we’re looking to exchange one or two master works. And one or two people. It’s a different model. I think many museums in North America in the next 10 to 20 years are going to find themselves in collaborative relationships with partners abroad. It has to happen. It should happen. We’ll work to establish models, at least for ourselves.”