MUSEUMS

Museums were among the most important cultural institutions to emerge in Europe during the long nineteenth century, both reflecting and shaping the secularization, nationalization, and democratization of European culture. Earlier, churches, royalty, and their wealthy imitators had kept collections of art, treasures, and natural objects, but only after the French Revolution were these gradually transformed into the form familiar in the twenty-first century: a public institution aimed at cultural uplift for the citizenry and the preservation of cultural and natural heritage.

varieties of museums

Early modern collections often included a wide range of objects, but by the mid-eighteenth century specialization was already occurring. Institutionally, for most of the nineteenth century, the public museum landscape featured three basic forms: state or official museums displaying art, treasures, furnishings, and antiquities, generally derived from royal collections; collections for teaching and research at state-run universities and academies, especially in natural history, comparative anatomy, and medical anatomy; and collections formed by local voluntary associations, such as patriotic clubs or natural history societies, intended primarily for the benefit of their membership but often open to the public for a few hours a week. Additionally, private, profit-oriented museums came and went; most successful among these, especially in the later nineteenth century, were the waxworks museums modeled on Madame Tussaud's in London. (Originally a traveling show, it gained a permanent location in 1835.)

From the 1870s to 1914, museums proliferated. Specialized museums were established for ethnography, science and technology, commerce, hunting, folklife, and the celebration of cultural heroes. Additionally, hundreds of museums dedicated to local history, culture, and nature sprouted across Europe's smaller towns and provincial capitals in the same period. Rather than focusing on high art and science, these emphasized the preservation of rapidly vanishing folkways and nature. This cultivation of collective local memory through objects in museums represented a profound cultural phenomenon of the late nineteenth century.

state cultural museums

With their inception in the late eighteenth century, public cultural museums borrowed not only from royal models but also from sacred ones. Much art displayed in royal and civic collections had originally been intended for sacred spaces; its removal to a secular context was part of a broader assertion of the authority of secular culture characteristic of the Enlightenment. Conversely, museums, and art museums in particular, became sites for ritual revering of great art and the classical heritage as that which represented the best of European culture. The Louvre in Paris provided the leading model of a cultural museum devoted to high art.

Although the Louvre had a history as a royal residence and collection dating to the Middle Ages, when it opened as a public museum in August 1793, during the French Revolution, it represented a new kind of institution: a national museum, open free to all. Its paintings and sculptures would serve as models of taste to French citizens and sources of comparison for art students. As Napoleon's armies confiscated artwork across Europe beginning in the mid-1790s and sent it back to Paris, the new museum also symbolized the imperial power of the nation. In 1799, following trends already quietly developing in princely collections across Europe, the Louvre reorganized its Large Gallery to show the historical development of schools associated with different master artists and geographical areas (e.g., the Flemish school, the Italian school). This art-historical arrangement of paintings would become standard, and the Louvre became the leading European national art museum.

Britain offered other prominent models of cultural museums. Although a National Gallery of Art was established in 1824, it was overshadowed by the British Museum. This institution, established in 1753, retained an Enlightenment ambition to maintain a "universal" collection. As official and private adventurers donated materials from expeditions across the globe, its collections multiplied rapidly, especially its books and manuscripts (the future British Library), natural history objects, and Near Eastern and Greek antiquities. The latter included decorations looted from the Parthenon in Greece (bought from Lord Elgin in 1816), and massive statuary from ancient Egypt (the first brought back in 1819). Such exhibits both displayed Britain's imperial might and situated Britain at the apex of a long heritage of civilization.

A second approach to cultural museums developed in Britain at midcentury. Building upon the 1851 Great Exhibition, cultural reformers established a museum of arts and manufactures (opened in 1857). Rather than seeking to elevate the taste of the masses by exposing them to high art, the South Kensington Museum (renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899) emphasized the decorative arts and the importance of aesthetic surroundings and furnishings in daily life. Controlling education policy for art and design across Britain, this museum provided a leading alternative to the Louvre in its vision for shaping citizens' aesthetics.

natural history museums

If cultural museums aimed at elevating the taste of the citizenry and instructing it on its place in the civilized order, natural history museums existed primarily for research. The goal of European natural history since the late eighteenth century was to determine the true and complete classificatory order of nature, and museums supplied its essential tools. Here again, the French took the lead, nationalizing the well-supported royal collections in 1793. The new Museum of Natural History in Paris, its collections enhanced by those of departed aristocrats, swelled further from the spoils of the Napoleonic Wars. Leading naturalists such as Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744–1829) and Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), Europe's foremost

naturalist in the early nineteenth century, earned a living as professors curating the museum's different departments. Following Cuvier's theory that the true order of zoology was best revealed by comparing animals' internal anatomico-physiological organizations rather than their surface features, the natural history collections, organized taxonomically, were supplemented by a comparative anatomy collection, organized by organ system. Natural history curators around the world envied and imitated this combination.

After the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, evolutionary theory gave new meaning to taxonomic collections, uniting them conceptually into a tree of life, but did not change their basic organization. Natural history museums divided over whether to include humans; in Britain and France they did, but German museums were more likely to relegate humanity to separate ethnographic museums aimed at showing not the continuity of "primitive" humans with animals but the unity and diversity of humankind.

the new museum idea

Although the official position of many state museums was that they "belonged" to the people, for most of the nineteenth century, such museums mainly served a much narrower audience of connoisseurs, offering no concessions to the ignorance of lay visitors. Most museums were open to casual visitors for only a few hours a week, typically including a Sunday afternoon, when middle-class visitors came seeking rational recreation. (Anecdotal evidence suggests that working-class visitors tended to find natural history museums more appealing than cultural museums, whereas middle-class visitors flocked to both.) As transportation networks thickened across Europe, museumgoing increased, producing pressures to make museums more accessible. In the last quarter of the century, reformers succeeded in making the museum a more truly public institution aimed at educating citizens with no specialized education in art or science.

Beginning in the late 1870s, museum directors across Europe (and America) enthusiastically adopted this new orientation. Museums expanded their opening hours, lowered their fees for at least some days, and cultivated school groups and classes of the new adult education movement. Culling overcrowded walls and cases to allow the visitor to focus undistracted on a smaller number of objects, curators removed most holdings to storage, available only to specialists upon request. This separation of "display" and "research" collections made manifest the idea that the museum served two audiences with fundamentally different needs, a principle christened the "New Museum idea" in 1893 by reformer Sir William Henry Flower (1831–1899), director of the British Museum (Natural History). Newer museums, especially local ones, often devoted themselves wholly to a general public audience.

The new public orientation encouraged museum curators to experiment with exhibit forms. Most striking is the spread in northern Europe of displays of objects recontextualized in their "natural" settings. Fin de siécle natural history museum directors led the way. Having removed their duplicates and variations to storage, the risk-takers among them supplemented their remaining classificatory exhibits with displays of animals in action, such as the dramatic exhibit of a pack of wolves attacking a small herd of elk at the Altona (Germany) City Museum, or niche-based dioramas showing animals in their native habitats, a form epitomized by the Biological Museum in Stockholm, Sweden (opened 1893). By 1914, most natural history museums had at least one such habitat display.

This shift from a classificatory goal to one setting objects in their "natural" context was not confined to natural history museums. The "period room" gained space in museums of arts and crafts; the "village kitchen" scene appeared in museums of folklore and local history; waxworks figures were used to re-create scenes from the lives of "primitives" in ethnographic museums, and from myth and history in popular waxworks museums (or "panopticons," as they were called on the Continent). Open-air museums, pioneered in Scandinavia in the 1880s, took the re-creation of a scene one step further, allowing visitors to enter an entire building landscape of a bygone era and thus step into its culture. By 1914, natural and cultural heritage had become the dominant themes of museums, simultaneously reflecting the centrality of "heritage" to the museum concept and the centrality of museums to the self-representation of European culture.

See alsoEducation; Leisure; Libraries; Popular and Elite Culture.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Balcarres, Lord (David Alexander Edward Lindsay). "Museums of Art." In Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. 19, 60–64. New York, 1911.

Flower, William Henry. Essays on Museums and Other Subjects Connected with Natural History. Freeport, N.Y., 1972. Reprint of the 1898 edition.

Holland, William Jacob. "Museums of Science." In Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed., vol. 19, 64–69. New York, 1911.

Martin, Philipp Leopold. Die Praxis der Naturgeschichte. 3 vols. Stuttgart, 1870–1882.

Secondary Sources

Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London, 1995. A provocative analysis of the social meaning of museum spaces, with an emphasis on Britain and its colonies.

Duncan, Carol, and Alan Wallach. "The Universal Survey Museum," Art History 3 (1980): 448–469. Analyzes the ritual functions of the museum and their origins.

Great Museums of Europe: The Dream of the Universal Museum. Introduction by Antonio Paolucci. Milan, 2002. A beautiful picture book of eight European art museums with historical essays on individual museums.

Preziosi, Donald, and Claire Farago, eds. Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum. Aldershot, U.K., 2004. A comprehensive collection of essays representing the latest scholarship on museum history and theory, emphasizing art and culture.

Sandberg, Mark B. Living Pictures, Missing Persons. Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity. Princeton, N.J., 2003. A deeply thoughtful study of museums and modernity in Scandinavia at the turn of the twentieth century.

Sherman, Daniel J. Worthy Monuments: Art Museums and the Politics of Culture in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge, Mass., 1989. A pioneering analysis, with emphasis on cultural and institutional politics.

Lynn K. Nyhart