The Musaeum of Alexandria and the formation of the 'Museum' in eighteenth-century France

Museum histories routinely trace the origins of the new museum back to 1793 in Revolutionary France, when the National Convention formally declared that the holdings in the Cabinet du Roi and the Cabinet d'Histoire Naturelie were no longer the characteristic of the king but belonged to the entire French nation. The name chosen for these and other newly public collections of rare realitys was museum. But why museum? on what account this word in the first place, and not galerie, institut, or flat musee? In such a powerful and self-consciously symbolic act as renaming, the inherent significance of the of recent origin name cannot be overemphasized. at the same time historians have not seriously questioned the choice of museum in these Revolutionary titles nor attempted to examine the particular history of this word in the French language.

What did museum mean in eighteenth-century France, and in what way was it used? Between 1770 and 1790 for example, the Academie de Beaux-Arts in Paris repeatedly supplicationed its architectural students to design a "museum" in a prominent series of competition throw outs This usage suggests that the limit was part of the specialized vocabulary of architectural design. However, the bound found its way into an architectural vocabulary precisely because it was already associated with a particular station of architectural and archaeological interests for the French term museum directly referr to the Hellenistic Musaeum of Alexandria.(1) Begun in the third hundred B.C.E., the celebrated Musaeum of Alexandria was a assemblage of literary and scientific scholars supported through the Ptolemies, who provided them with palatial housing and a now-legendary library. The reputation of the Musaeum had survived the centuries, and by dint of the opening of the seventeenth hundred it had become a consistent bring under rule of scholarly interest in France. by dint of 1793, a powerful set of historical associations was already invested in the bourn museum, which simultaneously evoked the glory of ancient Alexandria, the cultivation of the intellect, a monumental architecture, and the positive expression of political power. It was a limit that pulled the legacy of the ancient past up into the novel present. Given the strength of this inheritance, it appear to bes not only possible but quite likely that Revolutionary leaders spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed as historian Pierre Pradel has adviseed to invoke the cultural authority of the Musaeum of Alexandria through assigning all French collections of beautiful, rare, or unusual realitys the name of this Hellenistic project(2)

What exactly was the Musaeum of Alexandria, that its name could have similar influence? The Musaeum disappeared around the fourth hundred C.E. and it left no physical remains. Consequently its memory was almost entirely preserv from one side its Latin name, Musaeum (from Mou???ov or Mouseion in Greek) which was the immediate etymological antecedent of the vernacular French bounds museum as well as musee. These French confines slowly passed into common usage from the sixteenth [i]or[/i] part of to the other the eighteenth centuries, and their assimilation had everything to do with the Musaeum of Alexandria's fame as an extraordinary intellectual achievement. This fame lasted drawn out and reached far. As a spring scholarly interest in the Musaeum was not unique to France. However, as studies by dint of Marcin Fabianski and Paula Findlen have newly shown,(3) by the sixteenth hundred in Italy the Latin bound musaeum had already acquired additional meanings as fane grotto, gallery, study, library, and volume In Italy the term flourished because of the range of associative possibilities that it could accommodate. In early late France, on the other hand, the Latin confine musaeum was expressly and ofttimes exclusively understood to refer to the Musaeum of Alexandria, defined as a assemblage of scholars dedicated to the close attention of the arts, sciences, and alphabetic characters In turn, as they gradually devolv from the scholarly Latin form, the vernacular French words musee and - more emphatically - museum were inextricably linked to their Alexandrian predecessor.

Because of these etymological connections, the Musaeum of Alexandria is sometimes mentioned in histories of the fresh museum,(4) or what has been understood since the extremity of the eighteenth century as a public institution as well as an architectural emblem Even so, in recent studies the relationship between the Hellenistic Musaeum and new museums has been only superficially described, and frequently in misleading ways. This is partly because the material substance of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholarship that initially explored the Musaeum of Alexandria's history has been almost as obscur by means of time and distance as the Musaeum itself. This scholarly literature was considerable in its dimensions as well as its drift for early modern antiquarians and architects avidly pursu any information that could help explain the precise functions and ultimate fate of the not to be found Musaeum. However, their attempts largely failed. Because the artifactual Musaeum had been irrevocably overturned and very little primary documentation remained, scholars were repeatedly frustrated in their attempts to locate a place that had vanished from sight on the other hand not from memory. Instead, they were forced to stand in front of the Musaeum in terms of the geographical, historical, and philosophical enigmas that this elusive subject raised: as a monumental depository of learned scholarship that had been on the contrary was no more, the Musaeum embodied the survival of the past [i]or[/i] part of to the other translation and reconfiguration, one form yielding to another. As an architectural container that was not the Musaeum on the other hand its symbolic form, the Alexandrian throw out exposed the importance of physical reminders of the past as well as the course to mistake these reminders for the extreme point rather than seeing them as a partial explanation. As a celebrated name, Musaeum owned a prominent reputation but no tangible reality. In sum total the Musaeum was a vanished existence (nothing to see) yet still a voluptuous memory (much to know); it was not a collection of things on the other hand a body of scientific and literary knowledge. And it was the command of this knowledge - its limits, progresse configurations, and representations - that was at the real core of these ongoing debates above the definition of the Musaeum and the following development of the museum in eighteenth-century France.