Diploma Lecture Series 2013 Revolution to Romanticism: European Art and Culture 1750-1850

Collecting and the Birth of the Museum

Dr Christopher R. Marshall, University of Melbourne

25/26 June 2013

Lecture summary:

This lecture investigates the rise of the public museum in from c.1750-1850. Founded during the Renaissance and Baroque for the display of princely and aristocratic private collections, the museum was redefined during this period as a platform for the articulation of new notions of civic identity and national pre-eminence. In the process, museum professionals were required in turn to develop new methodologies of education and public programming to foster increased public engagement with a newly defined museum culture. These attempts to redefine museums and their audiences were made yet more complex by virtue of the dynamic period of growth and change that characterized the Enlightenment to Revolutionary to Napoleonic periods. The lecture will consider a range of significant case studies including some of the most influential and paradigmatic examples of the period, including the Galleria degli , , the Museo Archaeologico Nazionale, Naples, the Museo Canoviano, Possagno, the Sir Museum and the British Museum, , and the Musée du , . It will conclude by underscoring the importance of this period for giving rise to new definitions of the museum in the modern sense in which we understand it today.

Slide list:

Johan Zoffany, Tribune of the Uffizi, 1780, oil on canvas, Queen’s Collection

Hubert Robert, View of the of the Louvre, 1796, oil on canvas, Louvre

Etienne-Louise Boullée, Project for a Museum at the Center of which is a Temple of Fame containing the statues of great men, watercolor, 1783, Louvre

William Henry Prior, View in the old Elgin room at the British Museum, drawing, ca. 1833-37, British Museum

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Johan Zoffany, Tribune of the Uffizi, 1780, oil on canvas, Queen’s Collection

Hubert Robert, View of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, 1796, oil on canvas, Louvre

View in the old Elgin room at the British Museum William Henry Prior, , drawing, ca. 1833-37, British Museum

Etienne-Louise Boullée, Project for a Museum at the Center of which is a Temple of Fame containing the statues of great men, watercolor, 1783, Louvre