On holiday with Leonardo

Nicholas Penny

• The New Museology edited by Peter Vergo
  Reaktion, 230 pp, £23.00, September 1989, ISBN 0 948462 04 3
• The Romantic Interior: The British Collector at Home 1750-1850 by Clive Wainwright
  Yale, 314 pp, £35.00, November 1989, ISBN 0 300 04225 6
• Journal of the History of Collections, No 1 edited by Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor
  Oxford, 230 pp, £23.00, June 1989, ISBN 0 00 954665 0

To attract support today, a great museum, whether of art, archaeology, ethnography or natural history, would be ill advised to draw attention to its extensive collection of specimens, even if it can reasonably be claimed that these specimens enable the visitor to confirm, extend and perhaps challenge the work of a Winckelmann, a Darwin or a Burckhardt. There would be little point in defending them as places where the rare or obscure can be rediscovered in private and where anyone, however poor, can speculate and meditate in peace. They have to present themselves as exciting places to shop, with didactic but fun videos, and glamorous displays of popular masterpieces (preferably on temporary loan). They are being forced to regard themselves as a part of the entertainment industry. The institution most conspicuously under pressure is the Victoria and Albert Museum, about which I have already written in this paper. One of the greatest collections and educational resources in Europe, it has been damaged by the expulsion, on government advice, of some of its most eminent curators, and by the appointment, in irregular circumstances, of a new level of management bent on replacing the ideal of public service by slick public relations and marketing. A seat on the museum’s Board of Trustees was vacated long ago by the resignation of Martin Kemp. No art historian of equivalent seniority can, it seems, be persuaded to fill it. A collection of essays entitled The New Museology suggests where suitable candidates may be found. Paul Greenhalgh is one. He cheerfully announces that ‘in these times of desperate financial pressure’ – can he be referring to Mrs Thatcher’s ‘economic renaissance’? – museums ‘cannot exist simply as a receptacle guarding our heritage, or as a haven for scholars’. As if they ever ‘simply’ did anything of the sort. He denigrates the high-minded aims of Victorian museums and commends the international exhibitions around the turn of the century which were ‘loud, aggressive and tempestuous’ thanks to their provision of popular diversions.