The Museum

From its Origins to the 21st Century

Owen Hopkins

• Publisher: Frances Lincoln
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780711254572
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

This beautiful and visually immersive book charts the fascinating story of the institution of the Museum, from its origins to the present. Visited by millions around the world every year, museums are one of mankind's most essential creations.They tell stories, shape cultural identities and hold valuable insight about the past and about the future. This captivating works charts a path from the very first collection through to the latest developments in cultural curation, interweaving Using examples of the greatest cultural institutions to shape the narrative, historian and academic Owen Hopkins draws on his deep knowledge of the field to outline the history of the museum movement. Tracking the evolution from princely collections in Europe and the Enlightenment's classically inspired temples of curiosities, via the public museums of the late nineteenth century, on to today's global era of iconic buildings designed by the world's leading architects, this book is a vital work for anyone seeking to understand the development of the museum into what it is today. Over the course of five chapters filled with stunning imagery that highlights the beauty of thesevenerated buildings, the origins ofkey institutions are revealed, including:

• Louvre
• Metropolitan Museum of Art
• British Museum
• Tate Modern
• The Hermitage
• Guggenheim
• Smithsonian Institute
• Acropolis Museum

Also outlined are the motivations of the architects, curators and patrons who have shaped how we experience the modern museum, a cast that includes names such as King George II, Napoleon, Henry Clay Frick, Peggy Guggenheim, Andrew Carnegie, Alfred Barr, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers, Nicholas Serota and Zaha Hadid. By examining how these venues became intrinsic to our shared cultural experience, analysing the changing roles they play in society and questioning what the future holds in a digital age, this book is for anyone who has stood in awe at the spectacle of a museum.

1. ORIGINS

Frontispiece from the Museum Wormianum by Ole Worm, first published in 1655

Engraving of Ole Worm (1588-1654)

As to the display of curiosities in my museum, I have not yet completed it. I have collected various things on my journeys abroad, and from India and other very remote places I have been brought various things: samples of soil, rocks, metals, plants, fish, birds, and land-animals, that I conserve well with the goal of, along with a short presentation of the various things’ history, also being able to present my audience with the things themselves to touch with their own hands and to see with their own eyes, so that they may themselves judge how that which is said fits with the things, and can acquire a more intimate knowledge of them all.¹

Aside from the slightly archaic syntax, these words are a good description of the activities of collecting, display and furthering public understanding that characterize the work of museums today. In fact, they were written nearly four hundred years ago in a letter sent to one of his regular correspondents by the memorably named Danish collector, scholar and physician, Ole Worm. Worm’s Museum Wormianum, as he sometimes called it, has a claim to being the institution that comes closest to a museum as we might understand it in a modern sense – and is as good a place to start as any in this chapter exploring the origins of the museum.

While certainly novel, what Worm created was far from without precedent – and he himself was far from being a unique figure. Worm’s museum was an example of a ‘cabinet of curiosities’, or wunderkammer, the origins of which go back to the previous century. These were not usually cabinets per se, rather special rooms where collectors would arrange their collections of everything from specimens of the natural world and works of art, to the kinds of things that we might still regard as ‘curiosities’ today, such as strange contraptions and objects with some cult or mystical qualities. These collections were assembled by virtuosi – men of learning and curiosity with the means and connections to acquire diverse specimens and artefacts. Collectors included princes and the nobility, but also those of lower social rank such as Worm who collected from the point of view of intellectual endeavour and study.

Worm was born in the Danish town of Aarhus in 1588. The son of the town’s mayor, he attended a local grammar school before being sent to Germany to continue his studies, notably in theology at the University of Marburg. After returning to Denmark, he set off travelling around Europe, visiting cities in modern-day Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Italy. Worm’s travels as a young man were an early version of what became known in the eighteenth century as the Grand Tour. This saw the sons of nobility and the well-to-do tour Europe as a way of completing their education and enjoying a moment of freedom before returning to their responsibilities at home. Worm’s tour, however, appeared to be completely focused on study, culminating in him being awarded a doctorate in medicine at the University of Basel in Switzerland in 1611 before some time spent in London.

On his return to Denmark, Worm continued his studies at the University of Copenhagen and it was there that he established what became his museum. Initially it was formed mainly from the few disparate objects that he had acquired on his travels. But it was soon complemented by objects assembled through the extensive network of contacts and correspondents that he had established across Europe. It was this aspect of Worm’s activities that help mark out his museum from those that had come before it.

Worm belonged to a new generation of scholars that had emerged and quickly come to prominence across Europe during the seventeenth century. Their influence and importance derived not from the deference and prestige of the monarch or nobility, nor from the spiritual authority of the Church, as it had in the medieval period. Instead, their distinctly modern agency issued from their intellectual endeavours and their desire to see and try to understand the world at first-hand. This, moreover, crossed political and geographical borders as scholars across Europe shared their knowledge and research via frequent correspondence.

It was this spirit of collaboration and empiricism – constantly challenging received wisdom and knowledge – that defined what’s now called the Scientific Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, which saw the establishing of the modern scientific method, and paved the way for the eighteenth-century philosophical movement known as the Enlightenment. In this context, Worm’s museum did not exist simply to bolster the status of its founder – although this was no doubt a welcome byproduct – rather, it was driven by the genuine pursuit of knowledge and the desire to understand all of God’s many creations.

Worm’s collection no longer survives in its original form. After his death it was bought by Frederik III, the King of Denmark, and some of it can now be found in the Danish royal collection and the National History Museum of Denmark. We can, though, gain a sense of what it was like to experience the museum, not just from Worm’s correspondence, but from the catalogue he created of it, which contained numerous illustrations of the natural history specimens in particular. The most famous illustration is the catalogue’s frontispiece where we look, as if through a window, into Worm’s cabinet. In it we see a veritable menagerie of different animals: tortoise shells, reptiles and lizards of all types, birds, fish, even a bear hang from the ceiling. Lower down we see a range of smaller objects and specimens: various metals, roots and fungi, both from Europe and the New World of North and South America. At the end of the room, we see something perhaps stranger still: a miniature figurine, the presence of which signals the numerous man-made artefacts or artificialia that are also contained within the room, many of which are equally as ‘exotic’ in origin as the objects from the natural world.

Old University, University of Marburg, Germany

University of Basel, Switzerland

University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

Woodcut c. 1870 showing an imagined view of the interior of the Library of Alexandria, Egypt

It is without doubt a highly congested scene, with every surface apart from the floor and windows covered by some object or other. And we may reasonably question whether it is an accurate depiction of Worm’s cabinet or a partly fictionalized version intended to show off its best qualities. However, if we look beyond the apparent chaos there is a remarkable degree of order. Every object is carefully grouped and labelled, so that if we were actually standing on its tiled floor surrounded by objects on every side, we might quickly make sense of what we see and discern the categories and hierarchies through which Worm organized and arranged his collections.

This sense of order comes across even more clearly in the catalogue itself, the final version of which was published in 1655, just after Worm’s death. Here, objects are categorized into four books of increasing importance: mineral, plant, animal and the fourth devoted to artificialia, or humankind’s creations. Within each book are various subcategories according to material or type of specimen with particular emphasis on the most unusual.

In both collection and catalogue, we get an abiding sense of Worm’s desire not only to centralize and classify, codify and contain – in a sense to create a space that acts as an encapsulation of the wonder of nature and humankind – but also to point to all that lies beyond, to all that remains to be discovered. And critically, it is through the very act of accumulation of objects, studying them and situating them in relation to others that this process takes place. By bringing together what we know and understand, we also bring to mind the vast extents of what still lies outside, yet to be brought into the cabinet’s – or museum’s – o...