With the success of the British Museum, the museum had arrived, and the material remains of Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome were secure in their place as museum objects. What museums would do with these remains over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries depended very much on a discourse surrounding art, taste, and the antique. Enlightenment engagement with Kant’s elucidation of the ‘‘sublime’’ - an instinctive appreciation of overwhelming and innate beauty - coincided with the rise of antiquarianism as a learned and upper class pursuit, in an elite educational system based on Greek and Latin. Noblemen like Sir William Hamilton helped set the vogue for collecting Greek and Roman art, and well-to-do young men on the Grand Tour visited Italy in the footsteps of Goethe. Egypt, a risky sea journey from Europe, and popularly described as ‘‘bandit-ridden,’’ was a fringe concern reserved for hardier travelers and missionaries.
Working in the collection of Cardinal Albani at Rome, the German scholar Johann Winckelmann prepared his History of Ancient Art, published in 1764. Winckelmann placed Egypt at the start of a narrative of development that culminated in the sublime accomplishments of Greek art, a scheme informed by Hegel’s interpretation of Egyptian art as an incomplete expression of human potential (Harten 1995). The influence of Winckelmann’s work bolstered Hegel’s ideas about Egypt, rather than those of the philosopher von Herder, who countered that Egyptian art should be understood on its own merits, as an expression of Egyptian religion and culture (Norton 1991). By the early nineteenth century, Egyptian objects were thus being redefined in the public perception as antiquities, rather than mere curiosities, and conceived in relation to the remains of ancient Greece and Rome.
This was the intellectual backdrop to the events of the Napoleonic Wars, in which Egyptian objects functioned as trophies of war and badges of national status. Rivalry between European powers - Britain and France in particular, but Russia, Scandinavia, Austria, and German and Italian principalities as well - played itself out in Egypt, through concerted collecting activities on the part of countries’ consular officials, and at home, where the ‘‘cabinets of curiosities’’ of old became grand collections open to, and sometimes owned by, the public, like the British Museum. In Bavaria, a seventeenth-century collection, bolstered by the efforts of Ludwig I, formed the basis for a display of Egyptian art at the Glyptothek, a neo-Classical building opened in 1830; the collection was installed in chronological sequence (Potts 1980). In Turin, the royal house of Piedmont acquired the impressive collection the French consul Bernardino Drovetti had amassed in Egypt, installing it in a seventeenth-century palazzo in 1824. Florence created an Egyptianizing set of rooms for the display of its Egyptian collection, also opened in 1824 (Vassilika 2006), and the Vatican likewise set the Museo Gregoriano Egiziano in an opulent Egyptian-inspired space, opened in 1839 (Grenier 1993).
Following the British defeat of Napoleon’s forces in Egypt, Egyptian antiquities seized from the French reached London in 1802 (Moser 2006: 65-73). The monu-mentality of these objects - which included colossal statue fragments, two massive stone sarcophagi, two obelisk fragments, and the Rosetta Stone - changed the small-scale character of the Museum’s Egyptian collection and brought it considerable public attention. Initially the British Museum housed its new Egyptian objects in makeshift huts in the courtyard of Montagu House, while putting in motion plans for a purpose-built extension. Opened in 1808, the new extension, known as the Townley Gallery, housed the Egyptian stone pieces as well as the Townley collection of Greek and Roman sculpture and, upstairs, displays of coins, medals, and prints. On the ground floor, which supported the weight of the sculptures, Classical antiquities occupied the sequence of rooms that visitors would encounter between the entrance and the stairway to the upper level. Two rooms (out of ten) held the Egyptian objects, with a further room beyond devoted to the highlights of the Classical collection. Egyptian pieces were arranged symmetrically around the walls of the gallery, giving a clear sightline through a Doric-columned entrance that framed the Townley copy of Myron’s Discobolus (plate 34). The walls of the Egyptian gallery were a stony grey, and the only light came from side windows, rather than the toplighting used for Greek and Roman marbles. The display thus created an Ancient Egypt that was shadowy, angular, and at odds with the Classical art and neo-Classical architecture surrounding it (Moser 2006: 73-84). This was an Egypt of arrested ‘‘spirit,’’ as befitted the Enlightenment narrative of Greek artistic beauty.
The public impact of the Townley Gallery was instant and enormous. For the first time, people who visited the Museum, or read accounts of it in the popular press, could see Egypt as a civilization that made impressive stone statues and architecture as well as shabti figures, beads, and mummies. As Moser emphasizes (2006: 86), the political significance of the objects seized from the French was also integral to their appeal. The aesthetic of the objects themselves, however, was a source of condemnation: the press described Egyptian figures as ‘‘uncouth,’’ ‘‘monstrous,’’ and lacking in movement or expression, which was meant as a pejorative (Moser 2006: 87-9). Their size and durable materials inspired awe, but not their artistic form.
The Louvre Museum offers an informative contrast to the display and reception of Egyptian antiquities in Britain, and it epitomizes the nationalist endeavour at the heart of early museum expansion in Europe. Although it originated as a royal collection of paintings, the Louvre opened to the public in 1793, at the height of the French Revolution, and all citizens of the fledgling republic were welcome to visit its galleries (McClellan 1994; Gould 1965). Subsequent to the revolution, the Louvre’s fortunes were irrevocably tied to the legacy of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign: expedition member Vivant Denon was made Director-General in 1804 and supervised its re-opening as the Musee Napoleon in 1810. In the Rotunda of Mars, which served as a vestibule to the galleries, ceiling medallions commemorated Egypt, Greece, Italy, and France as the four primary schools of art (Duncan 1995, 1999).
Presented as equal nation-states and pinnacles of artistic accomplishment, these four schools were mapped through the physical layout of the museum, a conscientious arrangement in marked contrast to the British Museum’s more ambivalent division of Egyptian and Classical objects.
The Louvre had made up for its initial loss to the British, augmenting its Egyptian collection with some of Drovetti’s acquisitions, and by purchases of several other collections, including the second collection of the British Consul Henry Salt, which the British Museum had declined on grounds of expense. When the sumptuous, first-floor galleries of the Musee Charles X opened in 1827, the expanded Egyptian collection filled gilded bronze-and-glass display cases amid faux-marble walls, in a dazzling and visually stimulating array. Renowned artists painted the ceilings with Egyptian-inspired themes which referenced Biblical Egypt and the Greeks but in an aggrandizing way, such as Francois-Edouard Picot’s L’Etude et le genie des arts devoilant I’Egypte a la Grece. Staff had debated the merits of chronological and thematic display, installing the objects according to themes such as religion and history rather than aesthetic concerns (Moser 2006: 151). Champollion himself curated the displays and wrote the first catalogue; in the words of a 1990 collection guide, he ‘‘discovered’’ Egyptian art (Ziegler 1990: 5).
Museums like the British Museum and the Louvre made powerful claims on national identity (and state power) by collecting and displaying antiquities for public wonderment. Just as important as the antiquities - whose characteristics of age, scale, and distance made them suitable ‘‘objects’’ - were the members of the public, who could make themselves suitable ‘‘subjects’’ by visiting museums, behaving appropriately, and pursuing some educational end (Bennett 1985, 1988). Purpose-built galleries and permissible routes through the public spaces lent a ritualistic aspect to the museum visit, which chimed with the sense of awe that struck European viewers faced with large pieces of Egyptian sculpture, strange animal-headed statues, or the fabled Rosetta Stone. The new museums of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were not neutral spaces, though they pretended to be, and the impact of this hushed make-believe has only intensified over time:
[T]he museum environment itself is often ignored, as if its spaces were neutral or invisible. Most guidebooks sold in museums take this approach, representing the museum experience as almost solely a series of encounters with discrete art objects. (Duncan 1995: 1)
Moreover, in the British Museum and elsewhere, the most popular or intriguing Egyptian objects were of interest not for their inherent qualities alone, but for the stories of discovery, acquisition, and difficult transit that accompanied them - the first sign of another trait that continues to the present day. The ‘‘artefaction’’ of the colossal head of ‘‘Young Memnon’’ (Ramesses II) from his mortuary temple in Western Thebes is a case in point (Colla 2007: 24-66; Moser 2006: 95-6, 105-9, 114-15). Belzoni’s efforts to remove and transport the head for Salt were reported in the European press for months before the head arrived in England, and inspired Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias. By the time the bust was craned into place on a pedestal in the Townley Gallery, it was the most famous Egyptian sculpture in the world. Its acquisition had entailed multiple negotiations involving Salt and his agents, the British government, local, national, and regional officials in Egypt, and even the customs office in London, which did not charge import duty on the head because it was a gift for the British Museum. As with Elgin’s acquisition of the Parthenon marbles, financial concerns had greased the wheel in Ottoman Egypt but were no less a consideration on British soil. Treating the massive sculpture as property, documenting its every move, and transporting it from Luxor to London all contributed to its recognition as a museum object, an artefact. Other objects Salt and Belzoni had collected were intended for sale, but the Young Memnon was always intended for the museum, setting a precedent for collecting with intention and authority.
The acquisition of ‘‘Young Memnon’’ and its 1819 installation in the Townley Gallery inspired some positive appreciation of its beauty in terms previously reserved for Classical art (Moser 2006: 115), yet the response to Egyptian art on the whole remained derogatory and perceived its strange, stiff, or exotic qualities. Funerary remains and sculpture fragments also elaborated a view of Ancient Egypt that emphasized monumentality, ruination, and the passing of time, sometimes accompanied, as in Ozymandias, by the implication of moral, despotic corruption. This conception of Ancient Egypt would become even more important as the colonization of nineteenth-century Egypt proceeded rapidly, in pace with the Industrial Revolution. An object-oriented way of seeing Egypt through its past helped objectify Egypt in the present, with widespread repercussions.
World History
