It seems quite natural to today’s museum visitor that classical Egyptian, Greek and Roman art will be found in an archaeological museum, while western art from about 1300 onwards is in a gallery dedicated primarily to painting and sculpture.
Why is this? Why are Egyptian sculptures and paintings regarded as archaeological artefacts while medieval depictions of Christ on the cross are categorised as art? Christopher Whitehead’s contribution to Duckworth’s lively Debates in Archaeology series is a detailed examination of that moment in the 1850s when art and archaeology went their separate ways.
It is a book of two halves – the first examining how museums “construct knowledge” and create disciplines. What, asks the author, is art? “Why should it be seen, studied, experienced differently, or sited in isolation from, any other mass of knowledge or material?” And where are the boundary markers between the world of art and that of archaeology?
The second (and the most interesting) focuses on what Whitehead describes as “a key moment in museum history in mid-19th-century Britain”. It was a time when museums began to come of age, finally casting aside the cabinet of curiosities model that still cast a shadow, albeit a rapidly fading one, on collecting and collections, to one that attempted greater order and logic.
It wasn’t a change that swept rapidly across the nation. Writing in 1888, museums campaigner Thomas Greenwood lamented the jumbled collections in small towns. He urged curators to recall Dryden: “Set all things in their own particular place/And know that order is the greatest grace.”
The 1850s were indeed a Dryden moment for the nation’s major museums. There were several reasons for this. The acquisition of the Parthenon marbles in 1816 had sparked debate about their categorisation – archaeology or art? A select committee, created in the same year, found them to be in “the very first class of ancient art”.
Simultaneously, a discussion about Egyptian “art” centred on the colossal bust of Ramesses II, from Thebes, which in turn prompted comparison with the classical works in the British Museum’s Townley Gallery.
And then there was the creation of the National Portrait Gallery in 1856 and the possibility of a new building for the not-long established National Gallery, itself the subject of a succession of select committees around the question of what should go where.
It was indeed “a messy situation” and made even more so by the arrival of an ambitious young upstart, the Museum of Manufactures, soon to become the South Kensington Museum and later the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A). Aggressively led by Henry Cole, the nascent V&A chipped away at the boundaries that separated the collecting policies of the National Gallery and the British Museum.
This was a full-bodied debate, involving prime ministers, the lord chancellor, first lords of the treasury and admiralty, judges, senior cultural figures, even the archbishop of Canterbury. Nor was it a matter to be rushed through. Between 1848 and 1861 there were five government enquiries into the management and development of the National Gallery.
In 1857 another national commission was asked to report, among other things, on the “desirableness of combining the Fine Art and Archaeological Collections of the British Museum”. This unleashed a new debate about a fresh concept –
of two museums of art and archaeology – one “pagan” and one “Christian”. Cultural maps were drawn and redrawn. How different it all might have been!
Whitehead’s book is a revealing account of a critical decade that set the context, and the ways, in which we look at objects in museums. In the end it seems it was politics, “wider cultural forces” and physical limitation that ultimately shaped the cultural geography.
Whitehead’s final explanations of the outcome of all this discussion are less satisfactory than his analysis of the debate – but hopefully that’s the subject of another book.
Timothy Mason is an arts and heritage consultant
Why is this? Why are Egyptian sculptures and paintings regarded as archaeological artefacts while medieval depictions of Christ on the cross are categorised as art? Christopher Whitehead’s contribution to Duckworth’s lively Debates in Archaeology series is a detailed examination of that moment in the 1850s when art and archaeology went their separate ways.
It is a book of two halves – the first examining how museums “construct knowledge” and create disciplines. What, asks the author, is art? “Why should it be seen, studied, experienced differently, or sited in isolation from, any other mass of knowledge or material?” And where are the boundary markers between the world of art and that of archaeology?
The second (and the most interesting) focuses on what Whitehead describes as “a key moment in museum history in mid-19th-century Britain”. It was a time when museums began to come of age, finally casting aside the cabinet of curiosities model that still cast a shadow, albeit a rapidly fading one, on collecting and collections, to one that attempted greater order and logic.
It wasn’t a change that swept rapidly across the nation. Writing in 1888, museums campaigner Thomas Greenwood lamented the jumbled collections in small towns. He urged curators to recall Dryden: “Set all things in their own particular place/And know that order is the greatest grace.”
The 1850s were indeed a Dryden moment for the nation’s major museums. There were several reasons for this. The acquisition of the Parthenon marbles in 1816 had sparked debate about their categorisation – archaeology or art? A select committee, created in the same year, found them to be in “the very first class of ancient art”.
Simultaneously, a discussion about Egyptian “art” centred on the colossal bust of Ramesses II, from Thebes, which in turn prompted comparison with the classical works in the British Museum’s Townley Gallery.
And then there was the creation of the National Portrait Gallery in 1856 and the possibility of a new building for the not-long established National Gallery, itself the subject of a succession of select committees around the question of what should go where.
It was indeed “a messy situation” and made even more so by the arrival of an ambitious young upstart, the Museum of Manufactures, soon to become the South Kensington Museum and later the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A). Aggressively led by Henry Cole, the nascent V&A chipped away at the boundaries that separated the collecting policies of the National Gallery and the British Museum.
This was a full-bodied debate, involving prime ministers, the lord chancellor, first lords of the treasury and admiralty, judges, senior cultural figures, even the archbishop of Canterbury. Nor was it a matter to be rushed through. Between 1848 and 1861 there were five government enquiries into the management and development of the National Gallery.
In 1857 another national commission was asked to report, among other things, on the “desirableness of combining the Fine Art and Archaeological Collections of the British Museum”. This unleashed a new debate about a fresh concept –
of two museums of art and archaeology – one “pagan” and one “Christian”. Cultural maps were drawn and redrawn. How different it all might have been!
Whitehead’s book is a revealing account of a critical decade that set the context, and the ways, in which we look at objects in museums. In the end it seems it was politics, “wider cultural forces” and physical limitation that ultimately shaped the cultural geography.
Whitehead’s final explanations of the outcome of all this discussion are less satisfactory than his analysis of the debate – but hopefully that’s the subject of another book.
Timothy Mason is an arts and heritage consultant
By Christopher Whitehead, Duckworth, £12.99, ISBN 978-0-7156-3508-7
