The British Museum 250 Years [antikvár]

Preface London 1753. The most populous city in Europe. The richest city in Europe. The greatest financial centre in the world. A cosmopohtan place, where Voltaire had discovered the true meaning of political and intellectual freedom, where Handel had discovered himself as the master of the oratorio, and where Canaletto painted the Thames and made it as seductively glamorous as the Grand Canal. The London of Garrick and Reynolds, Hogarth and Doctor Johnson. The London in which the first national museum in the world was founded. This book, written by the scholar-historian Maqorie Caygill, tells the story of an extraordinary experiment in public education. The Europe of 1753 was rich in collections of paintings and antiquities, books and natural curiosities. But they were overwhelmingly collections belonging to princes, prelates or noblemen, graciously opened to the public. The British Museum on the other hand was a startlingly new idea: a collection bought by Parliament that was to belong not to the king, nor to the state, but to every person in the land. It was to be not so much a public museum as a private museum of every citizen, a key instrument in achieving the Enlightenment dream of an informed and educated political community. The idea that this collection should belong to everybody was given legal form by borrowing a structure from English family law, the trust. The point of a trust is to ensure that property is managed not just for the benefit of this generation, but is preserved also for the enjoyment of generations not yet born. This was always a venture aimed at posterity. And to show that the beneficiaries of this particular trust were the entire nation, three principal trustees were appointed -the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor and the Speaker of the House of Commons, the leaders ofthe three component elements of Parhament. There had never been anything like it before, but the Trustee Museum, on the hnes of the British Museum, was in succeeding generations to become the model for the whole English-speaking world. The collection bought by Parliament in 1753, although then one of the most important anywhere in Europe, has been completely dwarfed by the acquisitions of the following 2S0 years. Maqorie Caygill traces the history of that expansion, the fi-uit of scholarship and wealth, of political power allied to connoisseurship and systematic collecting. The result is a collection unique in the world, where the cultures of all humanity from the earliest times to the present day can be studied under one roof And this is still, as it was in the beginning, fi-ee to anybody who wants to enter it - truly a museum of the world, for the world. It was one of the great dreams of the eighteenth century to gather objects from all corners of the globe and then to organise them in systematic categories, so that points of similarity and difference would emerge and the great scheme of the natural law would become clear. It was an ambition which in France took the pubhshed form of the Encyclopédie. In London, it was built as the British Museum. That eighteenth-century ideal is now visited by 4.5 million people from all over the world eveiy year. And it is an ideal which is surely more important now than it ever has been. As the world becomes more interdependent and more tightly linked, it is more and more essential to have a place where the interlocking stories of humanity can be seen and explored. Neil MacGregor Director The British Museum Old and new. Head ofthe Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III (1390-1352 BC), and the steeland glass roof of the Queen EliiabethllCreatCourt.