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Museums: Leisure between State and Distinction
My pace grows reverent. My voice alters to a pitch slightly higher than in church, to a
tone rather less strong than that of every day. Presently I lose all sense of why I have
intruded into this wax-floored solitude, savouring the temple and drawing room, of
cemetery and school . . . Did I come for instruction, for my own beguilement, or simply
as a duty and out of convention? Or is it perhaps some exercise peculiar to itself, this
stroll I am taking, weirdly beset with beauties, distracted at every moment by masterpieces
to the right or left compelling me to walk like a drunk man between counters. 5
And he is clearly not alone in his loneliness before art, in his veneration for the
vastness of the galleries. The first visitors to museums in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries were struck with a similar reverence within the new
temples of art. When Goethe visited the Dresden gallery in 1768, for example, his
impressions were that of a man caught in the “profound silence that reigned . . . a
solemn and unique impression, akin to the emotion experienced upon entering a
House of God.” 6 The processional routes, the monumental architecture, the great
stairs, all circulated the requisite values of this new secular temple – a cultural
sanctuary which, by the nineteenth century, had been set aside from everyday life
and culturally appointed for a special kind of contemplation and decorum.
Museums, in short, were imposing places, caught in a logic that belonged to
previous centuries of dynastic splendor and religious contemplation. Their origins
in historical models such as monastic libraries, churches, cabinets of curiosities
and princely galleries, fostered conditions of consecration and solemnity which
placed the visitor in the position of subaltern before the auratized ensemble. 7
Before the nineteenth century, for instance, princely collections like those of Philip
II of Spain and Cardinal Mazarin, were visually ordered according to a principle
of quantity and excess, a “spectacle of treasures” that interiorized the personal
worldview of the prince. Pictures were arranged, floor-to-ceiling, in a tapestry-like
style, manifesting the magnificence of the ruler in a system of superabundance.
The visitor – in effect the prince’s guest – viewed this spectacle in relation to the
symbolic presence of the prince, rather than to the objects themselves. 8 Accessibility
was therefore secondary. Although some collections were open to the public
before the mid-eighteenth century (usually on payment of a fee or by strict appointment
and on restricted days only), visitors, as Hudson affirms, “were admitted as
a privilege, not as a right and consequently gratitude and admiration, not criticism
was required of them.” 9
By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the gradual transformation
of the princely gallery and other museological precursors into the public art
museum fed off, and into, the struggles between competing social groups.
Museums were, after all, the storehouses of Western civilization’s most cherished
objects, set aside for scientific progress, civil refinement and moral betterment.
The upheavals of the French Revolution were the clearest and most dramatic locus
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