Critics and scholars have long debated the significance, charge, and scope of modern museums, variously considered as temples to the fine arts, monuments to science, repositories of history, showcases for political authority, social institutions marketing an image of cultural hegemony, instruments of nationalist propaganda, and, most broadly and pervasively, as a set of “disciplinary” practices engaged in controlling, classifying, and containing objects through explicit architectural means. Although the public institution as we understand it today emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, many museums had already been established by private individuals prior to the epistemological break ushered in by the French Revolution.

However, the Enlightenment concept of a museum differed in significant ways from the predominantly nationalist, political phenomenon that flourished after 1790. In 1706, for example, The New World of Words: or, Universal English Dictionary, compiled by Edward Phillips, defined a museum as “a Study or Library; also a College or Publick Place for the Resort of Learned Men.” Understood as a place for the shared pursuit of “true” or normative knowledge, this museum was an introspective site of contemplation that was disengaged from display.

The Ideal Museum

Both prongs of Phillips’s definition point to the longstanding association of the museum with the lyceum, a place for collective study with particular emphasis on the arts and sciences patronized by the nine Muses and fostered by their mother, Mnemosyne (Memory). Describing Aristotle’s Lyceum at Athens, John Milton wrote:

See there the olive-grove of Academe,

…where the Attic bird

Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long;

There

,…the sound Of bees’ industrious murmur, oft invites

To studious musing.

Paradise Regained, 1671, IV.253

To “muse” in this idyllic garden was to absorb nature’s lessons through all the senses, thereby accessing privileged knowledge ranging from musical and mathematical harmony “in tones and numbers” to the deep contemplation of poetry and philosophy.

Such broad intellectual aspirations made Aristotle’s Lyceum an important model for the Hellenistic Musæum of Alexandria, a scholarly community that also shared features in common with Plato’s Academy. As an academic body held inside a building conducive to gathering and conversation, the Musæum of Alexandria was conceived as the necessary complement to the equally celebrated Library of Alexandria, to which the men of the Musæum contributed and from which they learned.

Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, as well as eighteenth-century editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a profusion of other scholarly sources, regularly offered the Alexandrian project as the primary and even uniquely correct denotation of the Latin term musæum and its German, French, and Italian derivatives museum, muséum, and museo. Via its historical roots, the word museum itself consolidated “study,” “library,” and “academy” together, thereby emphasizing idealist aspirations to universal knowledge that could be attained through close attention to natural phenomena in tandem with textual authority. As a result of this inheritance, the ideal Enlightenment museum was heterogeneous in content but compact in size, striving after the impossible but tantalizing ambition to fit the “boundless Musæum of the Universe”  into a single mind, a logical series of printed volumes, a rational suite of rooms, or a freestanding neoclassical building.

In 1704, for example, a design for a museum submitted by Leonhard Christoph Sturm specified rooms for antiquities, natural history, precious metals, and works of art. A series of French architectural projects initiated after 1770 likewise endorsed the “universal” ideal: in 1774, the Académie des Beaux-Arts called for “a muséum or an edifice dedicated to the letters, sciences, and arts.” In 1778, another competitive project defined the museum as “an edifice containing the records and achievements of science, the liberal arts, and Natural history.” In 1779, the annual Rome Prize requested a design for a museum, which the Academy defined as a repository intended to hold objects from the sciences, liberal arts, and natural history. In 1786, the École des Ponts et Chaussées requested a “Museum with four Academies” for its own competition. In 1791, Armand-Guy Kersaint explained that “one understands by this word [museum] the bringing together of everything nature and art have produced.”

He submitted his proposal for a Muséum français with designs by the architectural team of Jacques Molinos and Jacques-Guillaume Legrand, whose building plans assigned rooms to painting, sculpture, drawing, architecture, botany, chemistry, mineralogy, metallurgy, medicine, surgery, pharmacy, zoology, anatomy, antiquity, and agriculture. The fullest resolution of the ideal museum-library-academy was imagined by the French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée, who in 1783 designed a museum with a circular “temple to fame” at its center.

This influential drawing was followed in 1785 by his design for the Royal Library in Paris, which directly conjoined the production of knowledge (museum) with its preservation as text (library). Inside a starkly geometric interior lined with endless rows of books, Boullée placed an assembly of men that quoted Raphael’s fresco, The School of Athens (1509–1511), in which Plato and Aristotle stood united at the center of a gathering of philosophers.

The eighteenth-century architect thus linked the cultivation of mind to object collections and placed both beneath an immense barrel vault that signaled the overarching political and intellectual ambitions of the project, which encompassed past and present as well as the diversity of the terrestrial globe.

The Museum in Actuality

Actual Enlightenment museums were necessarily less dramatic in scale, but still remarkably eclectic. As “publick” places invested in various academic models, they combined the sociability of the aristocratic salon with the privileged contents of the Kunst- and Wunderkammer, library, and cabinet.

Objets d’art, shells, birds, fish, mammals, minerals, fossils, coins, optical devices, musical instruments, military arms, clocks and other machines, manuscripts, books, and all manner of rare and curious objects were at the core of prominent museums such as the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, begun in 1678, which featured the naturalist and explorer John Tradescant’s “Closet of Curiosities.” The Ashmolean Museum opened in its own building in 1683, and, unusually, charged an admission fee. Numerous eighteenth-century collections were set up as museums, such as the Museum Veronense established by Count Scipione Maffei in Verona in 1749, or the Museum Fridericanum in Kassel, built for Frederick II by Simon Louis du Ry from 1769 to 1777. Some were institutionally linked to academies, such as the Capitoline Museum and Accademia (1734) in Rome. Most featured a collection of curiosities as well as a library, the most prominent example being the British Museum in London, formally created in 1753 by an act of Parliament out of the object collections amassed by Sir Hans Sloane and the manuscript collections of Sir Robert Cotton and of Robert Harley, earl of Oxford.

These collections were settled in Montagu House in 1759. Other museums included the Charleston Museum in South Carolina (now the oldest American museum), assembled in the 1770s as a collection of curiosities; Sir Ashton Lever’s Museum in London, a collection of animals and other natural rarities placed in Leicester House in 1774; the American painter Charles Willson Peale’s Museum in Philadelphia, which opened in 1782 and was later housed in Independence Hall; the Prado in Madrid, initiated in 1784/1785 by Charles III as a museum of natural history inside a building designed by Juan de Villanueva, but finally opened in 1819 as the Royal Museum of Painting; and Scudder’s American Museum in New York, assembled by the Tammany Society at the close of the century as a museum of natural curiosities, art, and antiquities, and curated by John Scudder until his death in 1821.

Various sorts of published compendia also offered themselves as “museums,” including those that cataloged the contents of established object collections, such as John Tradescant’s own Musæum Tradescantianum (1656); the Musæum Kircherianum (1709), which described Egyptologist and antiquarian Athanasius Kircher’s renowned collection in the College of the Jesuits at Rome; and Laurentius Theodorus Gronovius’s Museum ichthyologicum (1754–1756), a study of fish and reptiles. Other scholarly volumes invoked the title to signal the intellectual breadth of their compressed contents: Musæum Metallicum (1648), an important early mineralogical study by Ulisses Aldrovandi; Musæum hermeticum (1749), an anonymous work pertaining to alchemy; and Musæum lapidarium Vicentinum (1776–1804), a three-volume catalog of epitaphs and inscriptions. All three printed works could operate under the authoritative rubric of “museum,” a claim presumably justified because of the closed or secretive character of the information amassed in their pages. By the late eighteenth century, even a British auction catalog listing the collections of Ralph Thoresby could exalt itself with the title Musæum Thoresbyanum (1764).

In 1792, the neoclassicist A.-C. Quatremère de Quincy, later the perpetual secretary of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, complained bitterly about the “abuse” of the term museum, which had not only been appropriated by such catalogues but had also been wrongly applied to places full of “objects that are foreign to study & the cult of the Muses.” To understand Quatremère’s irritation, it is helpful to take the representative example of Peale’s Museum. This was a respected museum of art that expanded into natural history, and its collections subsequently included “a chicken with four legs and four wings, a turnip weighing 80 pounds, [and] the trigger-finger of a convicted murderer.” Quatremère argued that the title should be restricted to the Alexandrian Musæum, and all other applications of the term should exclusively refer to serious collections of art such as those held in the Vatican in Rome and the Uffizi in Florence. Yet in his desire to preserve the clarity of the classical inheritance, Quatremère’s attempts to constrain the term’s proliferating avatars by distinguishing ancient from modern usage, and breaking art away from science, also reflected the rising emphasis on disciplinary specialization and social categorization that was an expressly contemporary position. A new understanding of museum was emerging that demanded it serve the rationalist cause of “legitimate knowledge” by sacrificing a Renaissance-derived mode of wonder and curiosity, and suppressing the desire to include the entire world synoptically under one roof.

In the Service of Knowledge

With the founding of the Musée du Louvre (1792), the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle (1793), the Musée des Monuments Français (1795–1816), and the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers (1794) in revolutionary Paris, the institutional shift from wonder to reason commenced in earnest.

Dedicated to works of art, to natural history, to national history, and to technological progress, respectively, these revolutionary museums rejected universality in favor of specialization in the name of social “utility.” Moreover, earlier museums had been either princely or private collections housed in their own buildings, and correspondingly understood to have a public component, but they were not open to the public in the modern sense of the term. By the 1790s, this elitist structure could be sustained neither within the political arena nor inside the museum’s walls. Its demise initiated what Germain Bazin has described as the “museum age”: the age of the public institution that stood as the cultural property of the nation. Museums subsequently proliferated, each tending to stress a programmatic collection that had been selected according to discipline or genre in increasingly refined degrees. However, the corresponding conceptual shifts were not accomplished without a great deal of negotiation. For example, when the Constituent Assembly first debated converting the Louvre palace into a museum in 1791, it was understood to encompass the “monuments of the arts and sciences”; actual specialization to works of art was not accomplished until a decade later. Later civic “temples to art,” such as the Glyptothek in Munich (1816–1830) and the Altes Museum in Berlin (1825–1828), adopted Enlightenment idealism to support a stance of aesthetic transcendence, holding themselves out as bastions of high culture in an era of burgeoning materialism.Even as the activities of the modern museum gradually assumed an extroverted pedagogical role that underscored its newfound social obligations, echoes of the Enlightenment quest for knowledge continued to reverberate throughout the nineteenth century. In 1790s Paris, courses of public lectures were given by noted naturalists such as the comte de Lacépède and Louis Daubenton, who were among the resident professors at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle.

Known as the Jardin des Plantes throughout the eighteenth century, this site was renamed the Muséum during the Revolution. Having already risen to prominence in the mid-1700s by endorsing the encyclopedic urge to comprehend and collect the natural world, the nineteenth-century Muséum continued to sustain the lyceum-museum model, retaining a resident academic body inside an extensive garden setting that, like Aristotle’s Lyceum in Athens, inspired “studious musing.” Professors at the Lycée (also known as the Athénée), founded in Paris in 1786, likewise delivered daily public lectures on literary and scientific subjects, perpetuating the oral mode of transmission and promoting open intellectual exchange. These efforts were complemented by textbooks such as the Lycée, ou Cours de littérature ancienne et moderne (1798/1799–1810) by Jean-François de la Harpe, the Lyceum der schoenen Kuenst (Lyceum of Fine Art, 1797), and the Lycæum of Ancient Literature; or Biographical…Account of Greek and Roman Classics (1809), compiled by Okey Belfour—all texts that put canonical scholarship directly into the hands of an interested and growing readership. Scientific, medical, and literary societies in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth regularly took the name lyceum, such as the Lyceum Medicum Londinense, the Lyceum of Natural History of New York (later renamed the New York Academy of Sciences), and the Baltimore Medical Lycæum. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other notable figures lectured for the influential American Lyceum movement founded by Josiah Holbrook in 1831, in order to establish local lyceums for the popular dissemination of knowledge and the promotion of civic-mindedness through learned lectures and artistic performances. The movement led to the establishment of museums and libraries in urban communities across the United States. (To underscore the permeability of the lyceum-museum connection, the Lyceum established in 1839 in Alexandria, Virginia, is presently its museum of history.) After that final flourishing, lyceums gradually lost popularity; not so museums, which have since become emblematic of political struggle over cultural property and the vulnerable position of nature within history. Nonetheless, the complexities of the museum’s history and its lingering encyclopedic ideals continue to shape current debates regarding its definition and responsibilities in the present.

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