Download or read book The British Museum written by James Hamilton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A concise history of one of the world's greatest and most comprehensive museum collections, from its founding in 1753. A product and symbol of the 18th-century Enlightenment, the British Museum is as iconic an expression of that cultural tendency as Johnson's Dictionary, the French Encyclopedie and Linnaean plant classification. Its collections embody the raw material of empiricism – the bringing together of things to enable the widest intellectual experiment to take place. James Hamilton explores the establishment of the Museum in the 1750s (from the bequest to the nation of the collections of Sir Hans Sloane); the chosen site of its location; the cultural context in which it came into being; the subsequent development, expansion and diversification of the Museum, both as a collection and as a building, from the early 19th to the 21st century; the controversy occasioned by some of its acquisitions; and the legacy and influence of the Museum nationally and globally.
Download or read book Scientific Instruments on Display written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2014-08-14 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During their active lives, scientific instruments generally inhabit the laboratory, observatory, classroom or the field. But instruments have also lived in a wider set of venues, as objects on display. As such, they acquire new levels of meaning; their cultural functions expand. This book offers selected studies of instruments on display in museums, national fairs, universal exhibitions, patent offices, book frontispieces, theatrical stages, movie sets, and on-line collections. The authors argue that these displays, as they have changed with time, reflect changing social attitudes towards the objects themselves and toward science and its heritage. By bringing display to the center of analysis, the collection offers a new and ambitious framework for the study of scientific instruments and the material culture of science. Contributors are: Amy Ackerberg-Hastings, Silke Ackermann, Marco Beretta, Laurence Bobis, Alison Boyle, Fausto Casi, Ileana Chinnici, Suzanne Débarbat, Richard Dunn, Inga Elmqvist-Söderlund, Ingrid Jendrzejewski, Peggy A. Kidwell, Richard Kremer, Mara Miniati, Richard A. Paselk, Donata Randazzo, Steven Turner.
Download or read book William Hunter and his Eighteenth Century Cultural Worlds written by Helen McCormack and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-12 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eminent physician and anatomist Dr William Hunter (1718-1783) made an important and significant contribution to the history of collecting and the promotion of the fine arts in Britain in the eighteenth century. Born at the family home in East Calderwood, he matriculated at the University of Glasgow in 1731 and was greatly influenced by some of the most important philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, including Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746). He quickly abandoned his studies in theology for Medicine and, in 1740, left Scotland for London where he steadily acquired a reputation as an energetic and astute practitioner; he combined his working life as an anatomist successfully with a wide range of interests in natural history, including mineralogy, conchology, botany and ornithology; and in antiquities, books, medals and artefacts; in the fine arts, he worked with artists and dealers and came to own a number of beautiful oil paintings and volumes of extremely fine prints. He built an impressive school of anatomy and a museum which housed these substantial and important collections. William Hunter’s life and work is the subject of this book, a cultural-anthropological account of his influence and legacy as an anatomist, physician, collector, teacher and demonstrator. Combining Hunter’s lectures to students of anatomy with his teaching at the St Martin’s Lane Academy, his patronage of artists, such as Robert Edge Pine, George Stubbs and Johan Zoffany, and his associations with artists at the Royal Academy of Arts, the book positions Hunter at the very centre of artistic, scientific and cultural life in London during the period, presenting a sustained and critical account of the relationship between anatomy and artists over the course of the long eighteenth century.
Download or read book Mummified written by Angela Stienne and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mummified explores the curious, unsettling and controversial cases of mummies held in French and British museums. From powdered mummies eaten as medicine to mummies unrolled in public, dissected for race studies and DNA-tested in modern laboratories, there is a lot more to these ancient remains than first meets the eye. This book takes you on a journey from Paris to London, Leicester and Manchester, from the apothecaries of the Middle Ages to the dissecting tables of the eighteenth century, and finally behind the screen of today’s computers, to revisit the stories of these bodies that have fascinated Europeans for so long. Mummified investigates matters of life and death, of collecting and viewing, and of interactions – sometimes violent and sometimes emotional – that question the essence of what makes us human.
Download or read book Useful Objects written by Reed Gochberg and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Useful Objects' examines the cultural history of nineteenth-century American museums through the eyes of writers, visitors, and collectors. Throughout this period, museums gradually transformed from encyclopedic cabinets to more specialized public institutions. These changes prompted wider debates about how museums determine what objects to select, preserve, and display-and who gets to decide. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials and accounts in fiction, guidebooks, and periodicals, this text shows how the challenges facing nineteenth-century museums continue to resonate in debates about their role in American culture today.
Download or read book The Museum of Babel written by Mark Thurner and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-12-06 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Museum of Babel: Meditations on the Metahistorical Turn in Museography is a thought‐provoking, transatlantic reading of contemporary exhibits of the museum’s own past. Museums everywhere now exhibit ‘evocations’ of their own pasts, often in the form of refashioned, ancestral cabinets of curiosities. Moving beyond discussions of ‘the return to curiosity,’ Thurner calls this retrospective trend the metahistorical turn in museography. Providing engaging and lively meditations on exhibits of the museal past in art, natural history, archaeology, and anthropology museums, including the Prado, the Royal Cabinet of Natural History, the Ashmolean, the British Museum, the Louvre, Coimbra’s Science Museum, Brazil’s scorched Museu Nacional, Mexico’s Museum of Anthropology, Argentina’s Museo de la Plata, and the Venice Art Biennale, Thurner argues that the ongoing metahistorical turn in museography is exposing the museum’s true vocation, which is to be a museum of itself, or metamuseum. In a word, The Museum of Babel is a provocative meditation on the museum’s true vocation. As such, it will be essential reading for museologists, curators, museum professionals, historians and philosophers of art and science, anthropologists, and students in an array of related fields, including museum studies, cultural studies, global studies, history, archaeology, anthropology, design, and art history.
Download or read book Poetic Exhibitions written by Eric Gidal and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the process of tracing poetic and critical responses to the museum and its collections, Poem Exhibitions simultaneously demonstrates the impact of nationalist ideologies and scientific discourse on formal and thematic developments in Romantic poetry and aesthetics.".
Download or read book Women Patrons and Collectors written by Andrea M. Gáldy and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-10-18 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In looking at the history of collecting, one may be excused for regarding it as an activity in which, traditionally, women have shown little interest or in which they have not been involved. As the present volume shows, women—particularly aristocratic women—not only resisted this discrimination through the ages, but also built important collections and used them to their own advantage, in order to make statements about their lineage, power, cultural heritage or religious preferences. That is not to say that there was not an increasing number of middle-class women who became draughtswomen, painters and natural scientists and who found it equally beneficial for their chosen profession to collect. In every case, the female collector chose to collect and what to collect; she chose how and where to present the collection and she also decided when to dispose of objects, thereby occasionally taking on a curatorial role. Women have been seen as gatherers of furnishings, jewellery, dress and objects of domestic life. This third volume in the Collecting & Display series of conference proceedings challenges such perceptions through the detailed analysis of different types of collecting by women from the early modern period onwards; it thus seeks to give a voice to a group of important female collectors from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century whose importance for the history of collecting has not yet, or not sufficiently, been acknowledged.
Download or read book The First Modern Museums of Art written by Carole Paul and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2012-11-16 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the first modern, public museums of art—civic, state, or national—appeared throughout Europe, setting a standard for the nature of such institutions that has made its influence felt to the present day. Although the emergence of these museums was an international development, their shared history has not been systematically explored until now. Taking up that project, this volume includes chapters on fifteen of the earliest and still major examples, from the Capitoline Museum in Rome, opened in 1734, to the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, opened in 1836. These essays consider a number of issues, such as the nature, display, and growth of the museums’ collections and the role of the institutions in educating the public. The introductory chapters by art historian Carole Paul, the volume’s editor, lay out the relationship among the various museums and discuss their evolution from private noble and royal collections to public institutions. In concert, the accounts of the individual museums give a comprehensive overview, providing a basis for understanding how the collective emergence of public art museums is indicative of the cultural, social, and political shifts that mark the transformation from the early-modern to the modern world. The fourteen distinguished contributors to the book include Robert G. W. Anderson, former director of the British Museum in London; Paula Findlen, Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University; Thomas Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute; and Andrew McClellan, dean of academic affairs and professor of art history at Tufts University. Show more Show less
Download or read book A History of the British Museum Library 1753 1973 written by Philip Rowland Harris and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 952 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive history of a world-renowned repository of knowledge and scholarship, this volume deals primarily with the growth of the library's collections, their cataloguing, and the reading rooms in which they are housed. The appendices includes a list of some of the better known persons who have used the reading rooms. 100 illustrations.
Download or read book The British Museum written by Marjorie Caygill and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pictorial celebration of the 250th anniversary of the British Museum in 2003, charting the Museum's history decade by decade. From the start, it has been the Museum's aim to shed light on the histories of cultures by preserving, presenting, enhancing and researching the collections in its care.
Download or read book A Catalogue of English Books Printed Before 1801 Held by the University Library at G ttingen v 1 4 Books printed between 1701 and 1800 written by Bernhard Fabian and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Catalogue of English Books Printed Before 1801 Held by the University Library at G ttingen written by Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Emergence of the Modern Museum written by Jonah Siegel and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Emergence of the Modern Museum, a unique compendium of original sources, presents a detailed and dynamic account of the development of the museum and its practices in Britain during a crucial period of formation. From poignant recollections of visits to stately homes to charged debates about the acquisition of the Elgin Marbles or the establishment of an Indian Museum; from early catalogue entries describing the curiosities discovered by Captain Cook to later ones organizing human skulls according to Darwinian principles-this volume offers a representative sample of the diverse, contentious, and often moving ideas that have shaped the modern institution. With original selections, thematic organization, and insightful critical apparatus, this collection makes newly available a wide range of material, including proposals for reform laid out in parliamentary papers, essays by influential theorists and curators, and firsthand accounts of museum-going in the popular press.
Download or read book Enlightening the British written by Robert Geoffrey William Anderson and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of conference papers on the 'Enlightenment in Britain', this volume includes essays by leading scholars that throw new light on how the British Museum reacted to the great social, scientific and religious upheaval that characterised the Age of Englightenment.
Download or read book The Eighteenth Century written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Portrait Sculpture written by Aileen Dawson and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1756, the British Museum has acquired, by gift, bequest or purchase, some 90 works of portrait sculpture. Presented in a variety of media, most of the sitters are eminent statesmen, scholars and authors and many of the works are by sculptors of the first rank, yet the pieces have rarely been on public display and are correspondingly little known. The portraits have been closely studied and catalogued in this illustrated volume. For each piece, Aileen Dawson considers the gensis, material, place in the artist's oeuvre, and history in the museum.
