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Museums: Leisure between State and Distinction
please art lovers and serve as a school to artists,” in the words of the Minister of
the Interior, who continued:
It should be open to everyone. This will be a national monument. There will not be a
single individual who does not have the right to enjoy it. It will have such an influence
on the mind, it will so elevate the soul, it will so excite the heart that it will be one of the
most powerful ways of proclaiming the illustriousness of the French Republic. 34
In 1803, the Louvre was renamed the “Musée Napoleon” in honour of the Emperor’s
contribution to its formation. The layout of the collection now fell in with the
procedures established in the Enlightenment and followed by other museums.
Pictures were organized into schools (Italian, French, Dutch, and Flemish), each
work was given an explanatory text and a catalogue was provided – the first to be
aimed at the average citizen, according to Hudson. 35 France now had a museum
which appeared fully secular, public, and national: a monument to democracy,
civilization, and international cultural domination. As a “Universal Survey
Museum” the Louvre recodified the exhibition space to suit the visibility of the
French Republic by transforming the signs of luxury, status and splendor of the
ancien régime into objects of a universal spirit (genius), embodied most gloriously
in the particulars of French art. 36
A visit to the Louvre was “scripted” accordingly as a ritual of national glorification,
with the interior space forming “an ensemble that functions as an
iconographic programme.” 37 The visitor was now addressed as an idealized citizen
of the state and inheritor of the highest values of civilization. The visitor was the
recipient of the nation’s most profound achievements, beneficiary of the state’s
ideals of democracy, not the subordinate of the prince or lord. Social relations
between the visitor and the collection had shifted, in other words, away from those
pertaining to the absolutist space of representation, where the visitor was the
prince’s guest, towards notions of equal access, giving every citizen, in principle,
universal rights to art. In short, the state, as an abstract presence, replaced the king
as host, and stood as “keeper of the nation’s spiritual life and guardian of the most
evolved and civilized culture of which the human spirit is capable.” 38
Such was the Louvre’s influence on other nations that museum-building
accelerated markedly from the early nineteenth century, often with the consent of
heads of state in those nations. Napoleon’s excursions into Spain, Italy, and The
Netherlands provided a climate in which new national galleries could be formed
in subject cities such as Madrid, Milan, Naples, and Amsterdam, founded on
French-inspired principles of nationhood. In the Netherlands, the foundation of
the Rijksmuseum dates from 1808, the year in which Napoleon’s brother transferred
his court from Utrecht to Amsterdam with the aim of making it a center for
art and learning. On Dutch independence the museum was once again elevated
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