MUSEUMS

MUSEUMS. Early modern museums were very different from the modern institutions that bear that name, so much so that some scholars suggest that museums per se did not exist before the eighteenth century. Many museologists believe that the true history of museums begins with the creation of institutions like the British Museum (1753) and the Louvre (1793). What came before the eighteenth century was a chaotic phenomenon, unrelated to the careful, scientific classification and exhibition of the natural and human-crafted world witnessed in modern art galleries and museums of natural history, civilization, and science and technology, among others. It is true that earlier collections lacked some of the basic features of modern institutions. The earliest were privately owned elite institutions not open to the general public. As a group they lacked the orderliness common in collections today, and they were frequently idiosyncratic in composition, focusing on the unusual, shocking, and even disturbing. Even the name "museum" itself was uncommon: it is more correct to refer to cabinets of curiosity (cabinet des curiosités; Kunstkammer) or wonders (Wunderkammer) well into the seventeenth century. But there are good reasons to discount the claims that such cabinets lack any place in the history of museum development.

Perhaps the most obvious reason to challenge the notion of an unbridgeable divide between the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinets on one hand and the modern museum on the other is the sheer ubiquity of collecting in the early modern period. This period witnessed an unparalleled upsurge in collecting throughout Europe that continues right through the modern era. It is here that long-standing collections emerge in the Italian peninsula, the Habsburg Empire, Switzerland, France, England, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Russia, many of which are the foundations of later national museums. Though early modern cabinets were privately owned—often by a noble, a ruler, or an institution of learning—it became increasingly common for their owners to grant admission to worthy guests. These cabinets lured natural historians and philosophers of the age who were striving to understand the workings of nature, but visiting such collections also became part of the educational tour of worthy young men from all over Europe. The demand for access proved so widespread that printed catalogs detailing the contents were created for those who could not visit them in person. Their popularity was enhanced when individuals lower down the social scale began collections in imitation of their social superiors, as they did in increasing numbers during the seventeenth century. It is in the sheer numbers of these collections and the constant traffic to them that some scholars now identify the first glimmers of the modern museum-going public.

The collectors and travelers were undoubtedly experiencing something very different from the modern museum visitor, however. Early collections could easily be described as chaotic because it was often the aim of the owner to encompass universal diversity in his cabinet, and the organization schemes would seem very confusing today. Though there were collectors who specialized in a single type of item, many simply included anything they deemed appealing, intriguing, rare, exotic, or valuable. Collectors might have particular interests, and their cabinets reflect those: the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand II (1529–1595) had an especial interest in arms and armor and dedicated three rooms of his four-room collection to them; Peter the Great of Russia (1672–1725) was interested in woodcraft and archaeology, among other things, and kept an extensive collection of tools and archaeological finds from Siberia and the Caspian Sea; England's Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) gathered printed matter. Other collectors specialized in coins, clocks, shells, biological or anatomical materials, books, or metal objects; the possibilities were as numerous as the collectors themselves.

Though most collections did not rigorously specialize, they did not necessarily lack any organizing impulse. Recent research and examination of individual collections suggests that there were organizational principles at work, though they are not methodologies at use in museums today: Pepys, for instance, organized his immense collection of books by size, not author. One particularly prevalent goal was the desire to create coherence from chaos. The collection of the Royal Society (founded in 1660) was meant, according to its first curator, Robert Hooke (1635–1703), to provide the opportunity for visitors and scholars to "peruse, and turn over, and spell, and read the Book of Nature." Following Francis Bacon's (1561–1626) proposed program of investigation, the mysteries of nature would be uncovered and explained through the careful examination of, in particular, her "miracles." It was, therefore, incumbent upon collections to focus on the anomalies even to the exclusion of examples of the mundane and regular. Although we can see here an emphasis that is different from modern museums, the explicit agenda certainly foreshadows the type of investigation that underpins modern museum exhibits.

Perhaps the failure to recognize the underlying structure of these collections stems in part from the fact that the cabinets might be very cramped; hundreds of items from various parts of the globe would necessarily be housed in very close proximity, creating a sense of astonishing and exuberant bounty. Whatever organizing principle was employed, the collector would be sure that it accentuated plenitude since the object was to awe (even overawe) the visitor, in the process increasing the collector's reputation and celebrity. In an era when ownership of physical things and consumerism was to become a basis for honor and prestige, the cabinet of rarities was very visible proof of an individual's status.

It is a consequence of the owner's desire for notoriety and eminence that the private cabinet became increasingly more public in the seventeenth century. Though a ruler might wish to defend the exclusivity of his or her personal collection, for the rising merchant, professional, or emergent scholarly group, publicity was desirable. The more visitors, the greater the potential for renown. (Of course, the opening of collections to the general public had the advantage of providing income as well.) Despite this apparently modernizing development, it was the "un-modern" character of the early modern collections that made them so popular; people traveled to see these collections precisely because they were filled with the singular, the anomalous, and the monstrous. When a collector chose to publish a catalog, he did so to highlight the breadth andtheuniqueness of the collection; educating theaudience, while often an important motivator, was usually ancillaryto stunning and amazing it. Museologists argue that it is this reversal of priorities and the lack of "rational" categorization and specialization that make such collections primitive and inferior. And yet for the early modern collector and his audience, such collections were the means to encapsulating and understanding a fecund and ingenious nature; without such collections and the study they enabled, nature's constitution, methods, and limits would remain shrouded in mystery.

MUSEUMS

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