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Casts and cast-offs: the origins of the Museum of Classical Archaeology*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

Mary Beard
Mary Beard
Affiliation:
Newnham College, Cambridge
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Extract

‘It's my PARTY…;’

The Cambridge Museum of Classical and General Archaeology opened on 6 May 1884 with – what else? – a PARTY. Distinguished guests turned out, the University meeting the Aristocracy, Arts and Politics: H.R.H. Prince Albert Victor of Wales (the Queen's son, then an undergraduate), Sir Frederick Leighton (President of the Royal Academy), the painters Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Poynter, the American Ambassador, Sir Frederick Burton (Director of the National Gallery), George Scharf (Director of the National Portrait Gallery), and other assorted dignitaries rubbing shoulders and sharing the fun with Richard Jebb (Regius Professor of Greek), E. B. (Primitive Culture) Tylor, S. H. Butcher (of Butcher and Lang's Odyssey), as well as (in the usual formula) ‘the Heads of Colleges, Doctors and Professors, the officers of the University’ … and their ‘ladies’. ‘Luncheon’ was taken in the hall of Gonville and Caius College at one o'clock. A great feast, no doubt, but a bit of a sprint. By two o'clock the assembled company had already finished the pudding and was proceeding to the lecture room of the new museum in Little St Mary's Lane.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 39 , 1994 , pp. 1 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

NOTES

1. ‘… and I'll cry if I want to, cry if I want to, cry if I want to. / You would cry too, if it happened to you. / Nobody knows where my Johnny has gone, but Judy left the same time. / Why was he holding her hand, when he's supposed to be mine?’ Gore, Lesley, It's my party (Chappell Music, 1963)Google Scholar. The reasons for the tears at this party will become clear in what follows.

2. An ‘Account of the Proceedings at the Opening of the Museum of Archaeology’ (including a verbatim record of the speeches given) was published in the Cambridge University Reporter, 25 June 1884, 964–79. All quotations in my discussion of the occasion are taken from this report.

3. The Fitzwilliam Museum had been established under the terms of the will of the 7th Viscount Fitzwilliam in 1816; it was opened to the public in 1848. For the earliest collection of casts in the Fitzwilliam, see below 7–8.

4. The British collection was in the charge of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, and had been ‘a wandering institution’ (Reporter, 25 June 1884, 975Google ScholarPubMed) ever since the foundation of that Society in 1839.

5. The words of the American Ambassador, Reporter, 25 June 1884., 969Google ScholarPubMed.

6. Colvin, Sidney, Reporter, 25 June 1884, 964Google Scholar.

7. He then went on to evoke the Nike of Samothrace, whose cast he had admired in the museum earlier that morning. Although he alludes in passing to ‘the original … which stands at the head of the great staircase in the Louvre’, his discussion almost entirely conflates original and replica: ‘There is life in her very raiment. I always receive this sensation of life from the Greeks …’

8. Freeman, E. A. (of Freeman's History of Sicily), Reporter, 25 June 1884, 977Google ScholarPubMed.

9. Freeman, E. A., Reporter, 25 June 1884, 976Google ScholarPubMed.

10. Clark, J. W. (President of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society), Reporter, 25 June 1884, 975–6Google ScholarPubMed.

11. Tylor himself may have been blind to the contradiction between this eulogy of von Hügel and what had been already said. Or he may have intended his words as a joke – on von Hügel, or on the false consciousness of the audience who imagined that the casts could indeed represent innocent contact with the past. See further, Beard, M. and Henderson, J., ‘Please don't touch the ceiling: museums and the culture of appropriation’, New Research in Museum Studies 4 (1993, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

12. The words of a friend, who was unimpressed by the parochialism of the first version of this paper. I have written this second version with S. J. in mind – hoping to convince him that it is more significant than he thought.

13. I intend to look at the more recent history of the cast collection (including the debates surrounding its move to a new building in 1982) in a later article.

14. See, for example, Jenkins, I., ‘Acquisition and supply of the casts of the Parthenon sculptures by the British Museum, 1835–1939’, ABSA 85 (1990) 89–114Google Scholar; Archaeologists and aesthetes (1992) 214Google Scholar; Penny, N., ‘Chantrey, Westmacott and casts after the Antique’, Journal of the History of Collections 3 (1991) 255–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar (on the largely post-antique Chantrey collection in Oxford); articles by Smailes, Helen, Davies, Glenys, de Grummond, Nancy T., Vaughan, Gerard, Howard, Seymour on the Albacini collection in Edinburgh, in Journal of the History of Collections 3 (1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Haskell, F. and Penny, N., Taste and the antique (1981) esp. 79–91 and 117–24Google Scholar; Connor, P., ‘Castcollecting in the nineteenth century: scholarship, aesthetics, connoisseurship’, in Clarke, G. W. (ed.), Rediscovering Hellenism (Cambridge 1989) 187–235Google Scholar.

16. There is no need to explain how and why practice might not quite equal theory here. Nevertheless, this principle of open, published debate has long been a central defence of the democratic government of the University of Cambridge; the dullness of the University Reporter has a paradoxically radical role to play. Let's hope it stays that way.

17. It is only in the case of the Boston collection of casts that the published documentation rivals the richness of the Cambridge material' see Whitehill, W. M., Museum of Fine Arts Boston (2 vols., 1970)Google Scholar.

18. For the difficult history of the building works, see Willis, R. and Clark, J. W., The architectural history of the University of Cambridge III (1886) 198–224Google Scholar; Jaffé, M., in Treasures from the Fitzwilliam (Exhibition Catalogue, 1989) xi–xiiiGoogle Scholar.

19. The front hall was not completed until March 1875; see the ‘Annual Report of the Fitzwilliam Museum Syndicate to the Senate’ (henceforth ‘Annual Report’) May 1875 (= Reporter, 1 June 1875, 431–2Google ScholarPubMed).

20. ‘Annual Report’, 20 May 1850.

21. The papers of the Fitzwilliam Museum Syndicate for 1850 include copies of some of the letters exchanged in the negotiations that preceded this donation. On 25 May 1850 Edmund Oldfield of the British Museum (who acted as intermediary in the donation) wrote to W. C. Mathison, a Fellow of Trinity, in the following terms: ‘A few days since I was informed by Lord Colborne, that a friend of his, the Dowager Lady Wombwell, had a collection of Casts from the Antique, which from a change of residence, she was no longer able to accommodate with house-room … Lord Colborne thought of offering them to some of our great provincial towns, for their Athenaeums or Institutes. I was however at once struck with the importance of securing them, if possible, for an institution, both of higher interest to me, and of greater influence on public education and taste than any at Liverpool or Manchester.’ On Lady Wombwell's behalf, he asked for £100 for the whole collection. Following the Vice-Chancellor's refusal to buy, Oldfield wrote again on June 15 1850 to inform Mathison that Kirkpatrick had agreed to pay for the collection, provided that the University met the costs of transport. This was readily agreed by the Fitzwilliam Museum Syndicate.

I have been so far unable to discover how Wombwell acquired his collection. He is described in Boase, F., Modern English biography III (1901)Google Scholar, as “well known in the fashionable world and on the turf”.

22. See the published notice by the Vice-Chancellor, 9 May 1853, recording the donation by Lord Stratford de Redclife of ‘a set of Casts from the Halicarnassus Marbles in the British Museum’; ‘Annual Report“, 27 October 1856, recording the donation of 15 casts (including two heads from the Parthenon, the ‘Spinario’) by Scharff, G.; ‘Annual Report’, 2 May 1874 ( = Reporter, 5 May 1874, 370Google Scholar), recording the donation of the cast of a relief sculpture of a Greek trireme by P. Colquhoun.

23. The papers of the Fitzwilliam Museum Syndicate include a copy of a letter (19 April 1853), from the Provost of King's – showing that he was acting as intermediary for Lord Stratford in his donation. In the case of Colquhoun's gift, a copy of a letter from the donor himself (31 December 1873) gives the following details: ‘I have the honour to forward for the acceptance of the University a Cast of the midship section of a Greek trireme made under my supervision on the Acropolis of Athens in November of this year to be placed where the University Authorities may deem most fitting.’

24. These were on the lower floor, known as ‘The Left-Hand Room’ and ‘The Right-Hand Room”. See Handbook to the marbles, casts and antiquities in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (1855) (henceforth ‘Handbook 1855’) 35–51Google Scholar; The visitor's guide to the Fitzwilliam Museum (1868) (henceforth ‘Guide 1868’) 74–9Google Scholar.

25. See, for example, Guide 1868, 57–8Google ScholarPubMed; above the principal doors leading to the galleries of paintings were casts of Castor and Pollux, the Antinous Braschi, an Athena – as well as the Fitzwilliam coat of arms.

26. According to the Guide 1868, the main basement gallery of the Museum contained (among many other objects): the Diana of Versailles and the other casts presented by Duncan; an idol from the sacred grove near Ava, Burmese empire; a quorn or Roman hand-mill found in Coveney Fen; a Japanese umbrella; the lid of a twelfth-century sarcophagus found in digging foundations for the Cambridge County Courts (positioned directly behind the Townley Venus); a tile from the Alhambra, a palace of the Moorish kings at Granada; casts in plaster from arabesque work at the Alhambra; an Egyptian tombstone; a marble with an inscription in Armenian; two plaster casts of marble medallions by Thorwaldsen; etc., etc.

27. Reporter, 20 May 1873, 51Google ScholarPubMed.

28. Fitzwilliam Museum Syndicate Minutes (henceforth ‘Syndicate Minutes’), 5 June 1875.

29. In Michaelmas Term, 1876, the salaries of the Museum staff ranged from £110 per annum for the ‘Principal Attendant’ to £52 per annum for the ‘General Servant’; Reporter, 14 November 1876, 88–9Google ScholarPubMed.

30. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 4 December 1875; ‘Annual Report’, 20 May 1876 (= Reporter, 23 May 1876, 508Google ScholarPubMed); for the Slade lectures, Reporter, 19 October 1875, 39Google ScholarPubMed; 2 November 1875, 67.

31. For the donations of Colvin and Sidgwick, see ‘Annual Report’, 29 May 1880 (= Reporter, 1 June 1880, 593Google ScholarPubMed); for Sidgwick's gift as cash, rather than casts, see Waldstein, C., Catalogue of casts in the Museum of Classical Archaeology (1889) ivGoogle Scholar.

32. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 24 November 1877.

33. ‘Annual Report’, 4 June 1879 (= Reporter, 10 June 1879, 709Google ScholarPubMed); the acquisition is dated to 23 March 1879.

34. ‘Annual Report’, 7 June 1877 (= Reporter, June 5 1877, 499Google ScholarPubMed); the acquisition is dated to 10 March 1877.

35. Reporter, 26 March 1878 395Google ScholarPubMed.

36. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 27 November 1880 record two casts of Amazons being transported to London to illustrate Colvin's lecture at the Royal Institution.

37. See, for example, Reporter, 11 March 1879, 435–40Google ScholarPubMed; 1 April 1879, 493–9; for a clear account, Winstanley, D. A., Later Victorian Cambridge (1947) 209–23Google Scholar. Extraordinarily, Brooke, C. N. L., A history of the University of Cambridge IV: 1870–1990 (1993)Google Scholar is not much help with this – or any other of the topics covered in this article; in fact the Museum of Classical Archaeology does not rate even a single entry in the index.

38. Reporter, 8 June 1880, 615–6Google ScholarPubMed.

39. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 6 March 1880.

40. Waldstein (later ‘Walston’) was Reader in Classical Archaeology from 1883 to 1907; and Director of the Fitzwilliam from 1883 to 1889.

41. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 8 June 1878.

42. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 26 October 1879.

43. See Watkin, D. J., The triumph of the classical: Cambridge architecture 1804–1834 (1977) 59, no. 82Google Scholar.

44. Reporter, 30 May 1882, 627Google ScholarPubMed.

45. The papers of the Syndics include a letter from the Master of Peterhouse, dated 11 March 1880, reported to the Syndics a month later (“Syndicate Minutes”, 17 April 1880).

46. The Syndics approached Peterhouse in October 1880 (‘Syndicate Minutes’, 23 October 1880) – receiving a reply from the Master on 1 November 1880 (‘Syndicate Minutes’, 27 November 1880); in October 1881 they decided to make a formal approach to Professor Humphrey, the tenant of Grove Lodge (‘Syndicate Minutes’, 22 October 1881), which was turned down.

47. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 17 November 1881: they agreed unanimously that it was ‘desirable to purchase for the purposes of an Archaeological Museum … Messrs Fosters interest in the lease of the Malting abutting upon Peterhouse and Little St Mary's Lane’.

48. Reporter, 30 May 1882, 628Google ScholarPubMed.

49. Reporter, 30 May 1882, 629Google ScholarPubMed.

50. Broad approval for the proposals was given by the University in March 1882 (Reporter, 14 March 1882, 380–1Google ScholarPubMed); the Master of Peterhouse reported the college's final terms for the leasehold in April 1882 (‘Syndicate Minutes’, 29 April 1882). Further discussion (see no. 48 and 49) followed, before the purchase of the lease.

51. Reporter, 12 December 1882, 237Google ScholarPubMed.

52. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 9 December 1882.

53. Reporter, 6 March 1883, 448–52Google ScholarPubMed.

54. For Colvin's request for leave, see ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 24 February 1883; the leave was confirmed some weeks later (‘Syndicate Minutes’, 3 March 1883, noted in the Reporter, 6 March 1883, 450Google ScholarPubMed).

55. Reporter, 11 November 1884, 151–5Google ScholarPubMed.

56. Waldstein, , Catalogue of casts (above, n. 31) 1Google Scholar.

57. For the ‘taste’ represented here, see Haskell, and Penny, , Taste and the antique (above, n. 15) esp. 148–51Google Scholar; 196–8; 202–5; 229–32; 243–7.

58. For major transitions in the character of museum display, see Bann, S., ‘Poetics of the museum’, in The clothing of Clio (1984) 77–92Google Scholar and ‘Views of the past’, in Fyfe, G. and Law, J. (eds.), Picturing power (1988) 39–64Google Scholar; Pearce, S., Museums, objects and collections (1992) 192–209Google Scholar' Hooper-Greenhill, E., Museums and the shaping of knowledge (1992)Google Scholar.

59. Note some of the varied descriptions of the Wombwell/Kirkpatrick casts in the guide 1868: (‘Left-Hand Room’ 74–6): ‘3. Venus dei Medici. Remarkably fine … 6. Torso of Venus, otherwise called the Richmond Venus, The original belonged to the Duke of Richmond, but is now in the British Museum … 11. The Sleeping Faun, commonly called the Barberini Faun. This is considered very fine.’ A particularly striking instance of the ‘confusion’ of cast and prototype is this description (Handbook 1855, 44Google ScholarPubMed) of the cast of the Capitoline Antinous: ‘All below the left knee is modern; the left foot and the left forearm have been restored.’

60. Report published 16 June 1851.

61. In the letter to Mathison of 25 May 1859 (above, n. 21), Edmund Oldfield wrote: ‘All these casts are what are technically termed “original”, that is, taken, either immediately, or by repetition, from moulds made upon the statues themselves.’

62. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 10 February 1877; 21 April 1877.

63. Reporter, 25 June 1884, 965Google ScholarPubMed.

64. So, for example, the speech of the American Ambassador, above p. 000.

65. Is a repainted cast (like the Peplos kore now in the Museum of Classical Archaeology) more or less ‘authentic’, more or less ‘original’ than the battered white lump of marble on which it is based? Is a well preserved cast of a piece of the Parthenon frieze, taken before the worst effects of erosion, more or less ‘original’ than the effaced prototype seen on the monument today?

66. Feelings of cultural superiority are quite out of place here. The Guide to the collection currently on sale (Museum of Classical Archaeology Cambridge, Guide to the cast gallery (1991) is inevitably inconsistent in its treatment of the ‘originality’ of the casts. Note, for example, the description of the Choiseul-Gouffier Apollo: ‘Imperial Roman copy of Greek bronze original. Date of original 470–450 BC’ –where the ‘original’ is not the marble prototype of the cast, but the lost bronze prototype of the marble.

67. For the exact terms of the bequest, see Willis, and Clark, , Architectural history III (above, n. 18) 198Google Scholar; Jaffé, , in Treasures (above, n. 18) ix–xiGoogle Scholar.

68. In 1885, a cast of the Esquiline Venus was purchased from Brucciani (a leading cast dealer) in London (‘Syndicate Minutes’, 9 May 1885; Reporter, 2 June 1886, 828Google ScholarPubMed)’ and Waldstein himself donated reduced copies of 16 slabs of the Parthenon frieze (‘Syndicate Minutes’, 2 May 1885; Reporter, 2 June 1886, 828Google ScholarPubMed – also detailing other purchases and gifts at the time).

69. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 11 October 1884.

70. Reporter, 13 May 1884, 694–5Google ScholarPubMed (‘Provisional Regulations for the Fitzwilliam Museum of Archaeology’).

71. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 6 February 1885.

72. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 2 May 1885.

73. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 7 March 1885.

74. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 9 May 1885.

75. Reporter, 11 November 1884, 154–5Google ScholarPubMed.

76. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 1 December 1908.

77. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 15 December 1903.

78. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 2 February 1909.

79. ‘Report of the Fitzwilliam Museum Syndicate on the relations between the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Museum of Classical Archaeology’, Reporter, 9 February 1909, 539–40Google ScholarPubMed.

80. Reporter, 2 March 1909, 626–8Google ScholarPubMed.

81. Published in the Reporter, 11 May 1909, 859–60Google ScholarPubMed.

82. Reporter, 11 May 1909, 853Google ScholarPubMed.

83. Reporter, 8 June 1909, 1057Google ScholarPubMed.

84. Reporter, 14 December 1909, 371–3Google ScholarPubMed.

85. Reporter, 8 February 1910, 612–14Google ScholarPubMed.

86. Reporter, 15 February 1910, 628–9Google ScholarPubMed.

87. Reporter, 1 March 1910, 691Google ScholarPubMed.

88. Reporter, 23 May 1911, 1050Google ScholarPubMed; 30 May 1911, 1094–5; copies of Waldstein's flysheets against the proposal, of various dates in 1910 and 1911, are preserved in the University Archives.

89. Note, for example, the words of the Fitzwilliam Museum Syndicate, Reporter, 9 February 1909, 540Google ScholarPubMed: ‘It is in fact the Laboratory of our rapidly increasing school of Archaeologists.’

90. Payment by undergraduates: Shipley, A. E., Reporter, 2 March 1909, 626Google Scholar; Wright, R. T., Reporter, 8 February 1910, 614Google ScholarPubMed. University contribution: Searle, W. G. and Grant, C. E., Reporter, 2 March 1909, 627Google Scholar.

91. Reporter, 26 May 1909, 976Google ScholarPubMed.

92. Reporter, 26 May 1909, 976Google Scholar.

93. Reporter, 21 November 1882, 176Google ScholarPubMed.

94. Reporter, 26 May 1909, 976–7Google ScholarPubMed.

95. Reporter, 8 February 1910, 612–14Google ScholarPubMed.

96. Reporter, 2 March 1909, 628Google ScholarPubMed.

97. Jenkins, , Archaeologists and Aesthetes (above, n. 14) 214Google Scholar.

98. Ibid., 225–30.

99. See Whitehill, Museum of Fine Arts Boston (above, n. 17).

100. Ibid., 202.

101. Archaeologists and Aesthetes (above, n. 14) 229.

102. DiMaggio, P., ‘Cultural entrepreneurship in nineteenth-century Boston, Parts I and II’, Media, Culture and Society 4 (1982) 33–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am grateful to Jeremy Tanner for this reference.

103. ‘Syndicate Minutes’, 21 October 1882.

104. Reporter, 8 February 1910, 615Google ScholarPubMed.