These were wondrous abbreviations and formulae, recipes for civilizations, small amulets allowing one to take the nature of climates and provinces between two fingers. These were orders drawn on empires and republics, on archipelagos and continents. What more could caesars and usurpers, conquerors and dictators possess? Suddenly I recognized the sweetness of having power over countries, the sting of that avarice that can be satisfied only by the power to rule. Together with Alexander the Great I wanted the entire world. And not a hand’s width less than the world.
Bruno Schulz, The Spring1
This is the world, the buildings say, this is all you need to know.
One can hear this message quite clearly when one is standing in between the two great museums on Vienna’s Ringstrass boulevard, the grand gesture of a city that was once at the heart of a great empire. The Ringstrass symbolically unites all institutions that had brought greatness to Vienna and its dominions. It is more than a little reminiscent of the Great Patriotic Action, the elusive goal in Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities, in which a host of ineffectual dignitaries are trying to stipulate the essence and crowning glory of the emperor’s rule. Here the action has taken shape in stone. Apart from assorted ministries there is the stock exchange; the State Opera; the university, in Renaissance style embodying the rise of humanism; the City Hall, its Gothic arches recalling the proud medieval city states; the Burgtheater; the Parliament, splendidly neo-Hellenic. Coachmen are waiting for tourists at all hours of the day on the sweeping expanse of the Heldenplatz. Here is the new wing of the Hofburg, the imperial palace, and directly opposite this heart of the empire are its two museums. To the left the Kunsthistorisches Museum (the Museum of the History of Art), to the right the Naturhistorisches Museum (the Museum of Natural History), and, in between, a square with formal arrangement dominated by a large statue of Empress Maria-Theresia.
It is easy to dismiss these two huge neo-Baroque fantasies as from the patisserie school of architecture, but they are, in fact, rather beautiful in their nineteenth-century grandeur and their historicizing attention to detail: the plaster birds, crocodiles and other creatures on the ceilings of the museum of natural history, the themed grandeur (neo-Egyptian wall paintings in the Egyptian galleries, etc.) of the rooms in history of art, and the dignified secular saints on their façades: scientists, philosophers and artists. Originally designed to contain the burgeoning Habsburg collections, the buildings have been treated with great respect partly for their own antiquarian status, which has been retained for a long time: some galleries in the Museum of Natural History had electric light installed as late as 1992. Behind the scenes is a world that is eternally Habsburg; rambling and cavernous offices overlooking the courtyard in which the august plaster ornaments crumble from brick walls (restoration is in progress), offices in which some of the curators hold the rank of Imperial Court Councillor and sit behind mahogany desks. Computers and coffee machines look like guests from a sadder, poorer future. The female Court Councillor who received me, Dr Teschler-Nicola, was gracious and elegant and gave me the grand tour, the view from the roof, and the skull collection, thousands and thousands of them, assembled for comparison by a more racially minded generation of anthropologists than their predecessors and now filling ten-foot-high walls in a long corridor, part necropolis and part historical curiosity.
Today the arrangements in many of the exhibition rooms in the museum reflect new trends in museology and pedagogy; the upper floor, however, seems almost untouched by time, with its huge mahogany-framed glass cabinets filled with stuffed creatures of the wild: bears, antelopes, tigers and lions, apes and monkeys, all in lifelike poses, by turns frightening and endearing, overwhelming and pitiable in their glass-eyed realism. Opposite, in the Museum of the History of Art, the creatures are less savage and the greatest of them are not locked up behind glass: the Breughels, the Rembrandt self-portraits, the Rubenses. Only downstairs, where sculptures and other objects are kept, glass rules supreme. Here one can see last remnants of the utopian world that the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf II had constructed for himself in sixteenth-century Prague: collector’s cabinets, bezoars, sculptures and vessels in marble, gold and silver, isolated messengers of plenty.
Together the two buildings, with the statue of the empress keeping watch, used to talk in one tongue to imperial subjects and to foreign visitors alike who came to see these treasure troves, and their exhibits used to sing in a mighty unison. Everything is here, they say: culture and nature, ordered and displayed by experts, enshrined in glass cabinets and hung along the walls, cleaned, classified and explained scientifically, dusted regularly; all overseen by government. This is the world, this is all you need to know.
In the nineteenth century faith in the ability of collections to be symbolic worlds, to encompass the understanding of the world and of man’s place within it, both in space and in time, in a particular place and as part of a particular history, made museums much beloved by Europe’s newly formed nation states. They satisfied a need for national history and mythology, especially as displays could be arranged and rearranged to suit prevailing orthodoxies. The museion, the place of the muses, housed in temple-like buildings and celebrated like shrines, lent a form of justification and of validity to imperial ambition, national histories, and to traditions that had been invented recently, that was otherwise beyond the reach of even the most canny politician.
The transition from exclusively private or royal collections to public museums was slow, made possible only by a huge conceptual leap in the thinking about the relationship of the private and the public sphere, and by the emergence of the modern state. Semi-public museums belonging to a private collector, to a ruler or ruling house had existed for a long time: Rudolf II was happy to show ambassadors and other dignitaries round his treasure troves at the beginning of the seventeenth century; the Tradescants’s was one among many collections that charged entry to the public; Peter the Great stipulated very specifically that ‘it is fitting that those desirous of the experience should be educated and made welcome, and not made to pay money’,2 and that ‘coffee and zucherbrods’, along with vodka, should be served to the nobility.
As the Enlightenment took hold, rulers throughout Europe began to make their collections accessible to their peoples and to a scientific approach that had until then been the domain of natural collections. In 1710, the Pfalz-Neuburger Regent Elector Johann Wilhelm II organized his Düsseldorf gallery, the first public picture gallery in Germany, for the first time according to historical principles. Another milestone was Christian von Mechel’s chronological arrangement in 1781 of the Habsburg picture collection in the Belvedere in Vienna.3 In France, the opening of the royal collections to a wider public was overtaken by history. The royal palace of the Louvre was supposed to be converted into a museum for the nation during the reign of Louis XVI and architects were commissioned to draw up plans for the conversion. The royal bureaucracy, however, all but ground the project to a halt, as it had delayed another plan: the demolition of the Bastille and the building in its place of a pleasure garden for the people of Paris, to be surrounded with colonnades which were to bear the inscription: ‘Louis XVI, Restorer of Public Freedom’. Here, too, the royal architects came too late, and the fortress, which by then housed no more than seven prisoners (one of whom was the Marquis de Sade), became a focus of revolutionary anger, its storming a symbol of the Revolution itself.
France’s new masters turned the former royal repository of artwork into a public museum only nine days after the fall of the monarchy on 10 August 1792. When it opened exactly one year later, the revolutionary spirit and the ideal of education and elevation of citizens’ minds, however, were nowhere to be seen, and the exhibition spaces looked, according to the playwright Gabriel Bouquier, like ‘the luxurious apartments of satraps and the great, the voluptuous boudoirs of courtesans, the cabinets of the self-styled amateurs’4; all the trappings, in other words, of the lives of those the citoyens had so resented, which the Revolution had set out to sweep away in the first place. Something had to be done, and by 1794 efforts were made to bring the displays in tune with revolutionary ideals. Religious works went into storage and were replaced by more heroic, historical canvases. The greatest change took place in 1803 when Napoleon appointed a new director for the museum, one Dominique Vivant Denon.
It had taken a revolution to create the first great museum that did not make access dependent on social status, patronage or the whim of curators and noblemen. Now war intervened to transform the former royal palace into a collector’s dream.
Denon (1747–1804) was a figure with less than perfect revolutionary credentials, a former diplomat in the service of the king, a passionate collector and gifted engraver, writer, wit and socialite. He had weathered the murderous storms of the Revolution in Venice, a fact that almost certainly saved his head, for Denon was the very kind of person the Committee for Public Safety was eager to drag to the guillotine. A son of minor nobility from Burgundy, he had come to Paris initially to study law, but he was soon bored by it. Instead of the future his father had had in mind for him, the purchase of a good position in the civil service and an advantageous marriage, the young man found artists’ workshops and the theatre far more diverting; his friendship with a group of actresses even enabled him to have a play of his put on at the Comédie-Française, though the play was a comprehensive flop and put a damper on any plans he might have had regarding a career as the new Molière. Undeterred he went to Versailles and, in the absence of any letter of recommendation from a highly placed personage, took it upon himself to make his own introduction to the king during one of the monarch’s walks through the endless formal vistas of the park. Louis XV, bored witless by his courtiers and more than likely astounded by the young man’s audacity, found the incident quite amusing and appointed him keeper of a collection of gem stones left to the crown by Madame Pompadour. Soon after this, Denon was appointed gentilhomme ordinaire de la chambre du Roi, a title which gave him permanent access to the king. From then on there was no stopping his career. Perhaps the court began to bore Louis, too; perhaps he had the good sense to recognize ability when he saw it; in any case, the gentilhomme chamberlain was soon travelling the breadth of Europe on diplomatic missions. Between 1772 and 1785 he undertook journeys to Frederick II’s court in Berlin and from there on to Catherine the Great in St Petersburg, to Stockholm and, finally (when Louis XVI had already acceded), to Switzerland. Here he took the opportunity to visit the ageing Voltaire, one of the great monuments of the Grand Tour. Sickly and unwilling to be disturbed in his rural idyll, the philosopher declined to see him, whereupon Denon claimed the right to an audience under royal prerogative. Voltaire, amused, yielded to this persistence and received him, only to find himself caricatured by an engraving from Denon’s hand, which quickly went into circulation in Paris. Voltaire was stung by such insolence and declined to see the artist-courtier again despite Denon’s promise to make a better life drawing.
In 1776 Denon became chargé d’affaires in Naples, a difficult and thankless post considering the anti-French bias of the Neapolitan King Ferdinand IV. Unwilling to let work spoil what was promising to be a very good time under the Mediterranean sun, surrounded by the beauty of ancient relics and young women, Denon relished the local attractions as best he could, both the female companionship and his frequent excursions to Pompeii, Herculaneum, Rome, Greece, Sicily and Malta. There was another reason for these travels: he had developed a passion for antiquities, especially vases, and missed no opportunity to add to his collection specimens that seemed to grow out of the ground as abundantly as olive trees. As he was to recount:
A journey to Calabria and Sicily awakened my passion for the arts and made me take up my pen once more and to undertake some excavations in Campania and Apulia. The discovery of a Greek vase or of any vase of new, unknown shape seemed to me a great service on my part to good taste, and I came back to France so laden with pottery that I had not the faintest idea where to put it all.5
He found a place, needless to say. Diplomatically, though, his mission had not been a success, though that was put down to circumstance rather than to a lack of diligence on his part. He received an honourable discharge, an ex gratia payment of 10,000 livre and an annual pension of 2,000. At thirty-eight, Denon was financially secure, fancy free, and able to pursue his interests at his own pleasure, which is exactly what he did. The years had not been wasted. More than any activity on the political stage perhaps he may have savoured an episode which he had dealt with very discreetly during his time in His Majesty’s service; this concerned the writing of a slim novella entitled ‘Point de lendemain’ that had appeared in the Mélanges Littéraires ou Journal des Dames in 1777. It was an elegant but rather explicit short story about an encounter between a young man and a countess, written in the best possible taste and avoiding all vulgar words, and published under a pseudonym, M.D.G.O.D.R., which was not deciphered until well into the nineteenth century. It simply stood for Monsieur Denon gentil-homme ordinaire du Roi. This work of aristocratic piquanterie has given its author a reputation as a pornographer, but he was no more guilty of any lapse in taste than that great Enlightenment wit, orator, politician and other writer of erotic novels, his compatriot the Comte de Mirabeau.
Meanwhile, in Paris, honours and diversions filled Denon’s days. He was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts as an engraver and had a comfortable life. The pleasures of Italy, however, lingered in his mind, and in 1787 he took himself to Venice, where he quickly found access to the better circles of society and intended to write a universal history of painting from the beginnings to his own day. He amused himself by showing the sights to his compatriots, Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun among them, who had already met him in Paris and who wrote about their meeting:
His ésprit and his knowledge of the arts made him a wonderful Cicero [i.e., guide] and I was enchanted to see him again … Thus I was led around by one of the most lovable countrymen we have – though not in respect of his physical appearance, as Monsieur De Non had not been beautiful even as a young man, a fact that did not keep a great number of pretty women from liking him.6
When the Revolution raged through France, Monsieur De Non (the aristocratic-sounding spelling of his name he had used until then) was safely ensconced in Italy, thinking about the history of the arts and charming the local beauties. He was isolated, unable to return home and regarded with suspicion in Venice, where all Frenchmen who were not exiled dukes were thought to be revolutionaries. In 1793, however, hearing that his fortune was to be impounded along with that of other exiles, he took the great risk of travelling to Paris to save the collection he had left behind in his apartments. Fortunately none other than the painter of the Revolution, Jacques Louis David, vouched for his political reliability, a life-saving lie under the circumstances. From the close proximity of some of Europe’s most senior crowned heads, now France’s most bitter enemies, Denon, who had absorbed the article ‘de’ into his name, making it sound less suspiciously noble, found himself being consulted by Robespierre himself on the contribution the arts might make to the reform of public morals and the furthering of virtue.
Their acquaintance was necessarily brief, but Denon had little time to mourn the citizen’s demise: this year, 1794, proved to be the beginning of an exciting new phase of his career. Moving in the highest political circles, he met the man of the moment, the young and ambitious general Napoleon Bonaparte, possibly at a dinner in the house of the formidable Foreign Secretary Talleyrand, where the urbane Denon would have had little trouble putting the awkward Corsican at his ease. Their encounter resulted in Denon being offered the chance of accompanying the French army expedition into Egypt in 1801. He jumped at it. Seeing Egypt had always been his life’s desire, he said.
In 1802, he published his Egyptian recollections, which won him instant and great public recognition, as Egypt was very much en vogue in imperial France and Denon knew to mix scientific fact and gossip, offering both elegant illustrations of the glories on the Nile and exciting titbits, like a story of his shooting a local who had been about to attack him while he was working on a landscape study. Napoleon rewarded Denon’s services during the campaigns with an appointment that seemed daring, but turned out to be inspired: he made him Director General of Museums, a position that put the nobleman and newly minted Republican in charge not only of the former royal treasures, but also of the fabulous loot from France’s victorious campaigns throughout Europe.
Denon was as delighted as he was daunted by this ultimate of collector’s tasks. He wrote to the emperor:
I spend my days trying to familiarize myself with all the things which I have been made master of, hoping that in future I may live up to your opinion of me which you expressed in choosing me, and every time I discover a possible improvement I apply myself to the task wholeheartedly in order to show my gratitude to you.7
The fact that the new arrivals at the museum were without exception abducted from other collections did not unduly perturb Denon or his colleagues. On the contrary: ‘the reclamation of works of genius and their safekeeping in the land of Freedom would accelerate the development of Reason and human happiness’,8 the French Minister of Justice opined in 1803. In 1794, Jacques-Luc Barbier had found even stronger words to justify the emptying of collections in the Netherlands:
These works of famous men shall find their peace in the hearts of free peoples; the tears of the slaves are not worthy of their greatness, and the honour of kings does nothing but disturb their peace. These immortal works shall no longer be in a foreign land; today they have arrived in the fatherland of the arts and the genius, liberty and equality, in the French Republic.9
The collection being amassed cart after ox cart in the Louvre presented its director with an unprecedented opportunity. Denon could create displays of staggering quality that collectors before or since could only dream of. Two weeks after his appointment he invited Napoleon to view the newly designed Raphael Gallery: ‘It is like a life of the master of all paintings. The first time you walk through this gallery you will find that this brings a character of order, instruction, and classification. I will continue in the same spirit for all schools … one will be able to have … a history course of the art of painting.’10 Instead of writing his universal history of art, Denon was now in a position to arrange it within a museum. In doing so, he was pleased to take an active part in Napoleon’s martial acquisition policy:
Sire, there should be in France a trophy of our German victories equal to those we brought back from Italy. If your majesty allows, I would like to draw your attention to some objects … in the Kassel collections, which could yield at least forty paintings, such as those by Albrecht Dürer, Holbein, and others, which so far are totally absent from the museum. In Upper Austria there is a collection of medals containing a number of portraits that is available nowhere else. This collection, which one can visit only with great difficulty, would be a welcome addition to the Cabinet impérial of your majesty.11
Denon’s European travels were coming in handy.
His tenure as Director General of Museums was not just a personal dream come true, it also signified a landmark in the history of displaying works of art, as he arranged the works according to art-historical ideas and methodology, not randomly or purely according to the curators’ tastes, as had been the case before. He focused on chronology, on national schools and on the evolution of styles. The grand système of the natural sciences had communicated itself to the display of artistic work.12 One of the most important influences on Denon’s arrangements was Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a German historian of art whose ideal of classical beauty and its primacy in aesthetics and art history overshadowed the entire century to come. Stille Anmut, edle Größe (‘Silent grace, noble greatness’) were his aesthetic watchwords and he regarded the overstuffed baroque interiors of many collections with nothing but scorn:
The paintings on ceilings and above doors are usually there only to fill space and to cover areas which cannot be filled up with gilt ornaments … Fear of emptiness fills the walls and paintings, empty of thought, are there to replace emptiness.13
True beauty, Winckelmann argued, was noble and pure, and the rooms in which works of art were displayed had to reflect not the amount of gilt putti their owner could afford but the intention to serve this ideal above all others. For objects from classical antiquity this approach worked well: many of them, especially marbles, were almost impossible to date. Denon, though, did not follow the German master blindly. Other sections of the museum, especially paintings, were arranged in a rational spirit akin to the work of Linnaeus and Buffon – genera, species, subspecies – as far as this seemed possible.
Denon’s dream, and Napoleon’s, was not to last. The great museum that had been designed for eternity was dispersed again after the Battle of Waterloo, when representatives of various countries discreetly placed requests for the restitution of their property (though the Tuscan delegates did not trouble themselves with early Renaissance panels in the Louvre and went to retrieve their fine furniture instead). The Director General of Museums, however, was confident that he had justified Napoleon’s confidence in him by having been able to use and display with great sensitivity and intelligence the greatest art collection there ever was.
In 1815 Denon thought that it was time for him to retire. His personal collection was waiting for him, after all, in his house on the Quai Voltaire. He had assembled a fine collection of vases and also of paintings, all of which he had bought legitimately – testament to the character of a man in an incomparable position to avail himself of whatever he chose.
Over the course of his collecting career Denon had found several works by old masters such as Ruïsdael and Parmigianino, and had stored in his cupboards thousands of etchings, medals, bronzes, exotic curiosities and works of art. The centrepiece and heart of his collection, however, was a medieval reliquary made of gilt copper and containing an unexpected range of relics, which he itemized meticulously himself:
Splinters of the bones of the Cid and his wife Jimena, found in their grave in Burgos; splinters of the bones of Heloise and Abaelard from their graves in the monastery of Paraclet; hair from Agnès Sorel, who is buried in a hole, and from Ines de Castro from Alcaboça; a part of the moustache of the French King Henri IV found whole during the exhumation of the king’s corpse in Saint-Denis in 1793; a part of the shroud of Turennes; splinters of the bones of Molière and La Fontaine; hair from General Desaix. Two other drawers in the side walls contain a signature from Napoleon’s own hand, a bloodied part of the shirt worn at the moment of his death, a lock of his hair and a leaf of the willow tree under which he is resting on the island of St Helena.14
Dominique Vivant Denon died in 1825, aged seventy-eight, of a cold he had contracted while leaving an auction.
During the nineteenth century, burgeoning museums were thrown into a series of curiously ill-matched marriages: young states wanted long ancestries and tried to invent them spiritually if they could not establish them practically. At the same time the finest achievements of the arts had to be displayed as scientifically as possible; the all-dominating spirit of rationalism, commerce and inquiry was attempting to establish its own mythology.
Many museums throughout Europe set out to achieve what the great Vienna museums were to proclaim in their very architecture: completeness and universality. Rooms filled with plaster casts at the Victoria & Albert Museum still remind visitors that what was not actually there could be recreated in order to show the public all that was great in art, but during the nineteenth century the British Museum, too, filled the gaps in its ranks of Greek and Roman sculpture with plaster casts of great masterworks.
In their new public function, museums assumed the roles of public educator and arbiter of taste and knowledge with the whole-hearted ferocity of a Victorian missionary bringing to childlike natives the gospel and the rules of cricket. As empires expanded into increasingly remote parts of the globe it was felt necessary to display the spoils of this new-found power at home, arranged in a Darwinian, or even Hegelian, progression of civilizations and human types from the primitives who had been found in a pitiful state and blessed with the gift of Christian progress to the very pinnacles of this culture, which happened to coincide (depending on the museum’s location) with the life and horizons of the British ruling class, of German Protestantism, of the newly restored French monarchy, or of the liberty of the Americans.
Collections had changed from being instruments of exploration to instruments of conservation, exploratory only in so far as they contained the specimens by which plants or animals, artistic styles or types of minerals were defined. From occupying a place in the intellectual vanguard, questioning the limits and the very quality of human knowledge, the great collections of natural history and of the history of art that had evolved out of the old cabinets became, tendentially at least, profoundly conservative; institutions devoted to classification and representation, and to the prevention of decay and corruption, both material and moral.
The process leading to the opening of the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna illustrates this process. When the naturalia contained in the former Habsburg cabinets of rarities were amalgamated with the collection of the Florentine scientist Johann V. Baillou, which had been purchased by the Habsburg emperor in 1748, Baillou was made Director of the Imperial and Royal Collections. True to the spirit of the Enlightenment it was no longer thought appropriate to have a large, general collection for the amusement of the nobility alone: the new, scientific displays were intended for instruction and were to be installed in the palace, even if this good intention was not put into practice until some fifty years later. By then the collections of dead specimens were partly supplemented by the menagerie and botanical gardens in Schönbrunn.
After the rule of the fanciful Abbé Eberle and his more sober successor Schreiber, the museum continued to grow apace, boosted by gifts, bulk purchases and the results of several expeditions to South America and other continents. It was a better, more genuinely general, collection now, but it had quickly outgrown its quarters at the Josephsplatz. The entire city was bursting at the seams, and accommodation inside the medieval city walls had become almost unbearably cramped. Vienna was due for a dramatic reinvention.
On 20 December 1857, Emperor Francis Joseph finally decreed the demolition of the old city wall and the building in its stead of a grand boulevard around the old centre of his capital. Among the buildings to be erected in this symbolic location would be two museums, which would be built by Gottfried Semper and Karl von Hasenauer. The two large museums between the famous stables built by the Baroque genius Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach and the imperial palace itself would form an imperial forum of knowledge, culture and history.15 Now the collections (which had been separated into zoology, botany and mineralogy in keeping with the scientific thinking of the day) could be once more reunited under one roof and would have space enough to grow and flourish. The new building was administered no longer by the imperial court but by an independent authority, the ministry of education.
Here, finally, everything could be displayed with sufficient space, labelling and explanation, ordered accordingly, catalogued and kept safely behind glass; while in the offices, workshops and laboratories curators and scientists could prepare and restore specimens, determine and classify new additions, and press on with the advance of science. This was to be a home worthy of the greatness of the Habsburg Empire.
The spirit of collecting had come a long way from the cabinets of curiosities of 200 years earlier, which had sought to extend the boundaries, to find and document what was rare and monstrous. Now was the day of the ordinary, not of what was outside human understanding, but what had already been subjected by it. The system was all-important, the objects themselves mere illustrations of the supremacy of the rational mind. When Sir William Henry Flower, Curator of Zoology at the British Museum, described the planning of a new museum in 1898 the priorities are already set:
First you must have your curator. He must carefully consider the object of the museum, the class and capacities of the persons for whose instruction it is founded, and the space available to carry out this object. He will then divide the subject to be illustrated into groups, and consider their relative proportions, according to which he will plan out the space. Large labels will next be prepared for the principal headings, as the chapters of a book, and smaller ones for the various subdivisions. Certain propositions to be illustrated, either in the structure, classification, geographical distribution, geological position, habits, or evolution of the subjects dealt with, will be laid down and reduced to definite and concise language. Lastly will come the illustrative specimens, each of which as procured and prepared will fall into its appropriate place.16
This ethos of objectivity, which transformed great collections effectively into catechisms of scientific and imperial greatness, to pillars of empire, was not confined to museums owned by the state. General Pitt Rivers, then still Colonel Lane Fox, the founder of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum of ethnography and natural history, had a similarly detached view of his own anthropological objects and their significance:
The collection does not contain any considerable number of unique specimens, and has been collected during upwards of twenty years, not for the purpose of surprising any one, either by the beauty or value of the objects exhibited, but solely with a view to instruction. For this purpose ordinary and typical specimens, rather than rare objects, have been selected and arranged in sequence, so as to trace, as far as practicable, the succession of ideas by which the minds of men in a primitive condition of culture have progressed from the simple to the complex, and from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.17
The journey from one aristocratic owner into professional administration and finally state ownership (the Habsburg collections were nationalized in 1919), mirrors a process that took place all over Europe. Museums were national business, and had to play a role in the formation and perfection of the nation. It had, in the delicious definition of the curator G. Brown Goode’s, reached the stage of being ‘a collection of instructive labels illustrated by well-selected specimens’.
