"A Visible History of Art": The Forms and Preoccupations of the Early Museum

“A Visible History of Art”: The Forms and PreoccupationszyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIH of the Early Museum P A U L H O LD E N G R A B E R As the unquestioned exemplarity and educative value which the classi­ cal text provided to the fortunate few spread during the eighteenth centu­ ry to a larger class of readers, the common reader, “l’honnete homme” of the eighteenth century (as Robert Darnton has portrayed him), read Rousseau, not “in order to enjoy literature but to cope with life.”1 And thus, as Darnton writes, “Rousseauistic readers fell in love, married, and raised children by steeping themselves in print.”2 The work of Rousseau fulfils, in an exemplary manner, one of the ideals always assigned to liter­ ature, but more personal and widespread during the enlightenment: to edu­ cate. Rousseau’s correspondence shows that many readers felt that their lives had been transformed by the reading of La Nouvelle Heloise, felt, afterwards, that it had made them, in the words of an anonymous ad­ mirer, better people.3 While the widening educative function of books during the century was only one aspect of their value, while one could read in order to learn to enjoy literature as well as to cope with life, the museum, as it came into being in the second part of the eighteenth century, had as its founding principle a primarily educative role.4 In material terms, the progressive idea of generalized education, which had expressed itself in the seventeenth century with the opening of libraries to the public, expressed itself now in the construction of separate buildings devoted solely to the arts. There had already been, during the second half of the eighteenth century, sever­ al building competitions for the Prix de Rome, set by the Academie Royale d’Architecture (later to be renamed “Ecole des Beaux Arts”), 107 1 0 8 / H O L D E N G R A B E R zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA competitions which had the museum as their theme. Many of the architec­ tural drawings that resulted would not have been suited to practical needs and were, in the words of Helmut Seling, “innocent of utility,”5 not giving, for instance, the slightest indication of how they were to display works, much more infatuated by their intended symbolic value as Temples of Art. Dominique Poulot has pointed out that “the idea of the museum during the enlightenment had first been that of a monumental building.”6 Muse­ ums were monuments like any other monument. Only in 1814 would clear indications be given in the drawings of the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts competitions as to where paintings and sculptures should be housed in these projected institutions, indications which gave these drawings the spe­ cificity they had lacked. But the early competitions do point to a public concern in the second half of the eighteenth century with the creation of a new space for displaying works. Whether it was, for example, the Museum Fridericianum at Cassel built by Simon Louis du Ry between 1769 and 1779, or the Museum Pio-Clementino built by Michelangelo Simonetti and con­ tinued by Giuseppe Camporesi from 1773 to 1786, these buildings belonged to the Goethe era, “the great period of fedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Bildung with its faith in the educa­ tional, elevating power of the arts in the widest sense —including, that is, the beaux arts as well as what comes under a faculty of arts.”7 The eighteenth century extended the pedagogical model for reading to seeing itself, to the kind of seeing that took place in these new spaces built to promote a wider visibility of the work of art. The belief that one could learn, in an orderly way, from seeing led the museum to be formed in such a way that it could serve as a tool for instruction. This belief in the inherent pedagogic power of the eye did not have its origins in the eight­ eenth century. The museum’s seemingly systematic materialization of ideas about learning had a long past. During the sixteenth century, the Jesuits had developed elaborate methods of visual education. Images and engrav­ ings were the necessary complement to the written...