How would you assemble a museum of trees? Well, Carl Schildbach (died 1816), a manager of an estate near Kassel, Germany, came up with an ingenious solution.
Each specimen in his 546-volume wood library was constructed from a strip of sapwood on the right, a mature sample on the left, and the tree-trunk's cross-section along the bottom. This frame was then filled with a selection of further elements: a cube of heart wood, seeds, pistils, leaves and fruits at various developmental stages.
Schildbach is just one of the extraordinary characters in Arthur MacGregor's book. There is also the painter George Garrard who made plaster models of cattle, sheep and pigs: rare breeds that were beginning to disappear in early 19th-century Britain.
Elsewhere, he uncovers the particular aesthetic concerns of shell collectors, who intriguingly masked "nature's faults" with the aid of a paintbrush. Rather less endearingly, we also find out about the "small army of misformed humanity" who tended Peter the Great's Kunstakamera.
After death, they were anatomised, preserved in alcohol and publicly exhibited. Full of intriguing tales, this survey of museums and collectors is also refreshingly broad in both chronology and geography.
But in truth, the grand sweep of MacGregor's story is relatively familiar. Pliny's natural history, the Alexandrian Museion and, most influentially, the church, all helped usher in the Renaissance invention of the museum. As an institution, it occupied a unique role, but it also shared much with other semi-public spaces such as libraries, apothecaries' shops, zoos and laboratories.
Aspiring to present the universe in a carefully selected microcosm, several rare, dazzling and transgressive exhibits, such as unicorns' horns, alligators and mummified flesh, could be found in just about every curiosity cabinet.
Towards the end of the early period of curiosity, MacGregor identifies a drift towards increasing specialisation and "whimsy", the latter of which he clearly does not approve.
By now, art collections were growing increasingly apart from other types, defined by a different gaze and public attitude. From the mid-18th century, the emerging state stepped in.
Every major country in Europe set up a national art museum, with the relatively well-known story of how the Louvre was founded providing the most heroic but also the most shockingly rapacious narrative. The 18th century also saw the emergence of a strong didactic role for medical and science museums in particular.
By the 19th century, museums had further become a tool in regional politics, with most major towns and cities bolstering their civic pride with a local museum.
There is a vast amount of material gathered here, and faced with the daunting question of how to arrange it, MacGregor, himself a senior curator, resorts to a museological method honed to perfection during the enlightenment: namely taxonomy. He divides the book's basic sections chronologically.
Chapters covering the later meatier periods are instead classified by collection type - painting and sculpture, anatomy, antiquities, science and technology, and natural history. The last is chopped up again into shells, zoology, plants, and minerals. Just occasionally, one wonders if MacGregor knows too much to enable him the freedom of asserting a bold speculation.
The cultural and social meaning of the museum movement, and the question of how much it has changed since the 16th century, is not his subject: neither Walter Benjamin nor Michel Foucault, for example, appear in the bibliography. Nor does he proffer many reflections about the light this history might shed on contemporary issues.
What readers get instead is a richly detailed and handsomely illustrated investigation into how the successive concepts of curiosity and enlightenment became materially substantiated throughout western collections. That alone guarantees that this book will quickly establish itself as a landmark study.
Ken Arnold is the head of public programmes at the Wellcome Trust
Each specimen in his 546-volume wood library was constructed from a strip of sapwood on the right, a mature sample on the left, and the tree-trunk's cross-section along the bottom. This frame was then filled with a selection of further elements: a cube of heart wood, seeds, pistils, leaves and fruits at various developmental stages.
Schildbach is just one of the extraordinary characters in Arthur MacGregor's book. There is also the painter George Garrard who made plaster models of cattle, sheep and pigs: rare breeds that were beginning to disappear in early 19th-century Britain.
Elsewhere, he uncovers the particular aesthetic concerns of shell collectors, who intriguingly masked "nature's faults" with the aid of a paintbrush. Rather less endearingly, we also find out about the "small army of misformed humanity" who tended Peter the Great's Kunstakamera.
After death, they were anatomised, preserved in alcohol and publicly exhibited. Full of intriguing tales, this survey of museums and collectors is also refreshingly broad in both chronology and geography.
But in truth, the grand sweep of MacGregor's story is relatively familiar. Pliny's natural history, the Alexandrian Museion and, most influentially, the church, all helped usher in the Renaissance invention of the museum. As an institution, it occupied a unique role, but it also shared much with other semi-public spaces such as libraries, apothecaries' shops, zoos and laboratories.
Aspiring to present the universe in a carefully selected microcosm, several rare, dazzling and transgressive exhibits, such as unicorns' horns, alligators and mummified flesh, could be found in just about every curiosity cabinet.
Towards the end of the early period of curiosity, MacGregor identifies a drift towards increasing specialisation and "whimsy", the latter of which he clearly does not approve.
By now, art collections were growing increasingly apart from other types, defined by a different gaze and public attitude. From the mid-18th century, the emerging state stepped in.
Every major country in Europe set up a national art museum, with the relatively well-known story of how the Louvre was founded providing the most heroic but also the most shockingly rapacious narrative. The 18th century also saw the emergence of a strong didactic role for medical and science museums in particular.
By the 19th century, museums had further become a tool in regional politics, with most major towns and cities bolstering their civic pride with a local museum.
There is a vast amount of material gathered here, and faced with the daunting question of how to arrange it, MacGregor, himself a senior curator, resorts to a museological method honed to perfection during the enlightenment: namely taxonomy. He divides the book's basic sections chronologically.
Chapters covering the later meatier periods are instead classified by collection type - painting and sculpture, anatomy, antiquities, science and technology, and natural history. The last is chopped up again into shells, zoology, plants, and minerals. Just occasionally, one wonders if MacGregor knows too much to enable him the freedom of asserting a bold speculation.
The cultural and social meaning of the museum movement, and the question of how much it has changed since the 16th century, is not his subject: neither Walter Benjamin nor Michel Foucault, for example, appear in the bibliography. Nor does he proffer many reflections about the light this history might shed on contemporary issues.
What readers get instead is a richly detailed and handsomely illustrated investigation into how the successive concepts of curiosity and enlightenment became materially substantiated throughout western collections. That alone guarantees that this book will quickly establish itself as a landmark study.
Ken Arnold is the head of public programmes at the Wellcome Trust
By Arthur MacGregor, Yale University Press, £45
ISBN 978 030012 493 4
ISBN 978 030012 493 4
