The Museum of the Senses: Experiencing Art and Collections 9781474252430, 9781474253796, 9781474252454, 9781474252447

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The Museum of the Senses

SENSORY STUDIES SERIES Series Editor: David Howes ISSN: 2052–3092 As the leading publisher of scholarship on the culture of the senses, we are delighted to present this series of cutting-edge case studies, syntheses and translations in the emergent field of sensory studies. Building on the success of the Sensory Formations series, this new venture provides an invaluable resource for those involved in researching and teaching courses on the senses as subjects of study and means of inquiry. Embracing the insights of a wide array of humanities and social science disciplines, the field of sensory studies has emerged as the most comprehensive and dynamic framework yet for making sense of human experience. The series offers something for every disciplinary taste and sensory inclination. Published Titles: François Laplantine, The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology Michael Bull and John P. Mitchell (eds.), Ritual, Performance and the Senses Luca Vercelloni, The Invention of Taste: A Cultural Account of Desire, Delight and Disgust in Fashion, Food and Art Ian Heywood (ed.), Sensory Arts and Design Alex Rhys-Taylor, Food and Multiculture: A Sensory Ethnography of East London David Le Breton, Sensing the World Forthcoming Titles: Rupert Cox, The Sound of the Sky Being Torn: A Political Ecology of Military Aircraft Noise

The Museum of the Senses Experiencing Art and Collections Constance Classen

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Constance Classen, 2017 Constance Classen has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:          HB: 978-1-4742-5243-0            PB: 978-1-4742-5379-6          ePDF: 978-1-4742-5244-7 eBook: 978-1-4742-5246-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Classen, Constance, 1957- author. Title: The museum of the senses : experiencing art and collections / Constance Classen. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Series: Sensory studies series | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2017007906 (print) | LCCN 2017013328 (ebook) | ISBN 9781474252461 (ePub) | ISBN 9781474252447 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781474253796 (paperback) | ISBN 9781474252430 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Art museums–Social aspects. | Material culture–Social aspects. | Art appreciation–History. | Sensory evaluation. | BISAC: ART / Museum Studies. | HISTORY / Social History. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General. Classification: LCC N410 (ebook) | LCC N410 .C59 2017 (print) | DDC 708–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007906 Series: Sensory Studies, ISSN: 2052–3092 Cover design: Adriana Brioso Cover image © Frederic Cirou/Getty Images Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

For George

CONTENTS

List of Figures  ix Acknowledgements 

xi

Introduction  1 1 A Taste of Heaven: Relics and Rarities 

9

2 The Feel of a Rembrandt: Paintings and Sculptures  3 The Lure of the Unseen: Egyptian Mummies 

47

4 Conversation Pieces: The Arundel Collection 

71

5 A Trail of Scent: The Afterlife of Collections 

93

6 The Museum Retouched: From Empire of Sight to Sensory Playground  115 References  Index  163

143

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure I.1

The British Museum 2

Figure I.2

Arm of a statue of Amenhotep III 3

Figure 1.1

Painted medieval reliquary 10

Figure 1.2

Kissing the Crown of Thorns in Paris 11

Figure 1.3 The Coronation Chair with the Stone of Scone under the seat 15 Figure 2.1

The Jewish Bride, Rembrandt van Rijn 26

Figure 2.2  Trompe-l’oeil Letter Rack, Samuel van Hoogstraten 29 Figure 2.3 Shrinking from the Medici Venus: ‘The Model British Matron’, Linley Sambourne 34 Figure 2.4

The Magic Lantern, Paul Sandby 44

Figure 3.1 The Egyptian galleries at the British Museum newly illuminated with electric light 48 Figure 3.2 Dr. Granville’s Egyptian mummy, Henry Perry 61 Figure 4.1  Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel, Daniel Mytens 74 Figure 4.2  Aletheia Talbot, Countess of Arundel, Daniel Mytens 75 Figure 4.3

The Felix gem 80

Figure 4.4  The Continence of Scipio, Anthony van Dyck 81

x

List of Figures

Figure 5.1 The ‘Kidnapping’ of Holbein’s Christina of Denmark, Bernard Partridge 98 Figure 5.2

The Laughing Boy, Bernardino Luini 99

Figure 5.3

Fonthill Abbey, John Rutter 100

Figure 5.4 The Statue Gallery, Ashmolean Museum (1814), William Westall, after Charles George Lewis 106 Figure 6.1  Harmonic Motion (2013), Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam and Charles MacAdam 116 Figure 6.2

The Royal Armoury, London 121

Figure 6.3

Claude Monet with a visitor in his garden 134

Figure 6.4 Experiencing The Fear of Smell – The Smell of Fear, Sissel Tolaas 135

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have spent many years researching and writing this book, and along the way I have received invaluable support from numerous individuals and institutions. My family has been tremendously encouraging and helpful, as always. Special thanks are due to my daughter, who provided very competent editorial assistance. David Howes served as the guardian angel of the book from start to finish. I am also grateful to colleagues in the fields of history, art history and museum studies who have been strong supporters of my project. Fellow ‘historians of the senses’ Richard Newhauser, Herman Roodenberg and Mark M. Smith have been generous with their encouragement. Caro Verbeek provided intriguing scent experiences and information on olfactory art history. Fiona Candlin, an indefatigable researcher into the social and sensory life of museums and objects, has been an important source of advice on things museological. I have been fortunate to participate as a researcher on several of Chris Salter’s innovative new media art projects. Rebecca McGinnis of the Metropolitan Museum of Art raised my awareness about nonvisual modes of art interpretation. Martina Bagnoli, director of the Galleria Estense in Modena, has done a marvellous job of showing how the sensorial histories in which I and others have been engaged need not remain a matter of words only, but can help shape the ways in which historical artworks and artefacts are exhibited. I appreciate the invitation from the Tinguely Museum in Basel to participate in their lecture series on the senses in art, along with the work done by Lisa Ahlers of the museum in preparing my paper for publication in the resulting anthology, Prière de toucher. The Touch of Art: Interdisciplinary Symposium (Verlag Bibliothek der Provinz, 2017). This paper, entitled ‘Sacred Art and the Pilgrim’s Touch’, forms part of Chapter 2 of the current book. Another publication of mine, ‘Touching the Deep Past’ (The Senses & Society [2014] 9, 3), was incorporated into Chapter 3. At Bloomsbury, I greatly benefitted from the aid and support of Jennifer Schmidt and Clara Herberg. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded my investigations into the sensory history of the museum with several major research grants. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of the Fonds de recherche du Québec. The Canadian Centre for Architecture, under the directorship of Mirko Zardini, supported my work on William Beckford and Fonthill Abbey. Marcelo Wanderley and CIRMMT at McGill University provided me with a stimulating environment for exploring the historical roots of multimedia art. The Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) was a generous

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Acknowledgements

supporter of my research on the senses in the museum. At the TMA, the director, Brian Kennedy; associate director, Adam Levine; and director of education and engagement, Michael Deetsch provided important insights into the inner workings of a multifaceted institution, and also demonstrated a hearty enthusiasm for expanding the sensory offerings of museums. Halona Norton-Westbrook, associate curator of contemporary art, offered a knowledgeable commentary on the exhibits, and other members of the museum personnel likewise shared their time and expertise with me. Finally, the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University provided muchappreciated aid in covering the costs of permissions for the illustrations which appear here, while Ornella Hemmingway proved a capable research assistant on the subject of the senses in contemporary museums.

Introduction On a sunny afternoon in the British Museum, a woman pats the knee of a statue. A few steps away, a man runs his hand over a row of hieroglyphs. In another part of the gallery, a boy reaches out a finger to test the sharpness of a stone owl’s beak. This scenario seems unreal because we know that touch is forbidden in museums: visitors are supposed to pass through galleries like disembodied spirits. The cartoonist Henry Bateman once satirically depicted a boy being sentenced to life in prison for merely breathing on one of the glass cases in the British Museum. In the templelike atmosphere of the museum, even the slightest touch seems an act of sacrilege. Certainly, much is done to ensure sensory restraint in museums. When exhibits are not protected within cases, lines and ropes warn people to keep their distance, and signs enjoin them not to touch. Guards stand by, ready to step in when visitors step over the line. The whole ‘high-culture’ ambiance of the museum, with its august architecture and pristine spaces, proclaims that this is not a place in which to indulge one’s ‘lower’ senses (Figure I.1). There are cafés and gift shops for moments of corporeality, but within the galleries visitors are supposed to cut themselves off from their bodies below their eyes and become all detached contemplation. Yet visitors persist in treating the museum as a site for sensory exploration. This became obvious to me when I emulated Jane Austen, who preferred observing museum visitors to looking at exhibits, and toured galleries with an eye on the public. Sitting watchfully in the British Museum – perhaps the most iconic of collection sites – I saw all the transgressive actions described above and more. Despite having presumably been schooled not to touch in museums and despite the deterrence presented by guards, many visitors continue to respond to the material world of the museum in a full-bodied way. In fact, I observed such a diverse range of interactions with museum objects that I began to classify them. There was the inquisitive touch of visitors who trace out hieroglyphs and feel the hidden sides of sculptures. There was the playful touch prompted by an outburst of frivolity or an attempt to subvert the solemnity of the museum. There was the reverent touch, extended to objects with religious associations. There was the caressing touch given to marble animals and other enticing sculptures,

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Figure I.1  The British Museum (from Claude de la Roche Francis. London: Historic and Social. Philadelphia, PA: John C. Winston, 1901). and the defiant touch manifested by visitors who apparently wanted to show that they were not subject to petty museum rules. Moreover, many times touch was used instrumentally in order to assist another sense. For instance, visitors rested their elbows on the edge of a sarcophagus in order to peer inside or, in the case of one elderly man I observed, rapped on the sarcophagus to assess its tone. One could include here the increasingly common practice of touching a museum object for photographic purposes. This is the form of touch which the actor Elizabeth Hurley recently used when she posed for a friend’s camera sitting on an historic bed in the Victoria & Albert Museum (Buchanan 2015). She was thrown out of the museum, but she promptly posted the photograph on the internet, thereby, one imagines, fulfilling the underlying visual purpose of the illicit touching. Ironically, photographic touch is perhaps the most potentially damaging of all the common ways in which museum visitors interact with artefacts, as the closer the encounter with a museum piece the more eye-catching the resulting image. It was the desire to snap a striking self-portrait that led a twenty-first-century tourist to climb onto the knee of a statue in Milan and inadvertently break off its leg (Miller 2014). Photography is evidently not the immaterial medium that it seems. Besides all these forms of tactility, a slew of incidental touches takes place in the museum, such as leaning on a convenient architectural fragment, crouching behind cases to play hide-and-seek or rubbing against

Introduction

3

exhibits in the crush to see some star attraction. Such actions make it clear that visitors cannot be counted on to pass intangibly through the museum. They also make it clear that galleries are not just sites for visual display, they are also – like it or not – material environments presenting a host of possibilities for physical interactions. What do people like to touch best? In my experience, few objects elicit more touches than sculpted or carved hands. These almost appear to be asking to be touched, especially when they are held out. In the Louvre, visitors like to press their palms against the upheld palms of a set of ancient stone monkeys. A particular favourite in the British Museum is a colossal granite arm with its hand clenched, once part of a statue of Amenhotep III (Figure I.2). The hand is actually holding something, perhaps a papyrus roll, but most visitors can’t resist seeing it as a fist about to deal a knock-out punch. Museum-goers delight in pretending to be punched by this granite hand; they place a fist against or beside it, and they caress its stony curled fingers. Thus the arm of a statue which once guarded the entrance of an ancient Egyptian temple has taken on an entirely new material and social life in the museum – one hardly envisioned by the curators. I knew from my historical research that such responses to museum pieces (minus the photographic touch) are nothing new. People have been touching artworks and artefacts in public museums since they first opened in the seventeenth century. In fact, many visitors seemed to find touching artefacts essential to their comprehension. The poet Horace Smith expressed this

Figure I.2  Arm of a statue of Amenhotep III (courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum).

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sentiment in his ‘Address to the Alabaster Sarcophagus, Lately Deposited in the British Museum’: Thou alabaster relic! while I hold My hand upon the sculptured margin thrown, Let me recall the scenes thou couldst unfold… Here, where I hold my hand, ‘t is strange to think What other hands, perchance, preceded mine; Others have also stood beside thy brink, And vainly conned the moralizing line! King, sages, chiefs, that touched this stone, like me, Where are ye now? Where all must shortly be. (1857: 551–2). One feels that simply gazing at the sarcophagus would not have had the same impact on Smith. Given this history of visitor engagement in the museum, I speculated that Amenhotep III’s granite arm had probably been eliciting inquisitive and playful responses since it was brought to the British Museum in 1823. Consequently, I was not surprised to discover the following exchange in a late-nineteenth-century spoof of sightseers in the museum: FIRST SIGHTSEER. There’s an arm for yer! SECOND S. (a humourist). Yes; ow would yer like to have that come a punching your ‘ed? (Anstey 1892: 53) Some nineteenth-century visitors might even have associated this piece and other oversized statuary in the museum with the popular belief – supported by Bible stories – in the existence of giants. Indeed, a further comment on the colossal arm in the spoof quoted above is: ‘How it makes one realize that there were giants in those days!’ (Anstey 1892: 53). Museums themselves once contributed to such fancies by claiming to include giants’ bones among their exhibits. We hear of this in the following account of the eighteenth-century Ashmolean Museum in Oxford: One of the curiosities shewn, which was especially attractive to the more ignorant of the visitors, was the Leg-bone of an Elephant, which was exhibited and labelled as the Thigh-bone of a Giant. (Parker 1870: 31) Whether associated with legends of giants or not, the granite arm of Amenhotep III is apparently one of the more popular pieces in the British Museum. However, one would never gather this from the scant official information available. The British Museum website only states that the arm is made of red granite, notes that it originally belonged to a statue of

Introduction

5

Amenhotep III found outside a temple in Karnak (the head is also in the museum) and provides its measurements and acquisition date of 1823. So it generally is with museum pieces. We receive their histories with the fingerprints wiped off. In recent years a few intrepid authors have begun to pry open the metaphorical glass case which encloses the subject of collection experience and delve inside. Among these, Fiona Candlin has investigated touch (or its absence) in art and the museum: Modern art history has generally relegated touch to a pre-modern era, linking it to non-rational social structures and a lack of perceptual sophistication, as have academics in museum studies and more worryingly, some organizers of museum access projects. (2010: 4; see also Pye 2007; Chatterjee 2008; and others cited by Howes [2014] in his review of the field) In her book Museum Bodies, Helen Rees Leahy has examined how visitors move through museums: ‘Famously Hegel observed that a museum visitor no longer kneels in front of a Madonna, but when and how did they learn not to?’ (2012: 4). Sandra Dudley and the contributors to her anthologies have explored the materiality of museum pieces (2010, 2012). David Morgan, for example, notes that: Rather than understanding objects as projectiles bearing the intentions of their makers, it is more productive to study the response to objects as they are displayed, exchanged, destroyed and circulated in order to determine what they mean to people. (2012: 101–2) The Museum of the Senses contributes to this countertrend in museum and material culture studies by providing an alternative history of art and artefacts with the smudgy but telling fingerprints left on. The findings presented here are based on historical research, site visits, and discussions with museum visitors, scholars, curators and educators. As regards these last two groups, I was fortunate to be offered an inside look at new initiatives of visitor engagement and education at the Toledo Museum of Art, where much thought is being given to the multisensory dimensions of the museum experience. Within a broader context, this book falls within the field of the history of the senses, which seeks to understand the corporeal experiences and practices of past eras within the social and material contexts of the time (i.e. Smith 2004, 2007; Classen 1993, 2014). The focus of the chapters that follow is on multisensory experiences of Western art and collections in various historical contexts. Much has been written about how non-Western artefacts – and by extension, societies – are reduced from their dynamic, full-bodied, cultural life to static ‘pictures’ in the ethnographic museum (i.e. Lamp 2004; Edwards, Gosden and Phillips 2006). The ways in which classic Western museum pieces may have been similarly ‘flattened’ has received much less attention. These are more likely

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to be presumed to be appropriately positioned as static visual works, as they themselves have been central to the development of Western visual culture and museology. The first chapter of The Museum of the Senses, ‘A Taste of Heaven’, destroys this illusion by exploring the rich hands-on history of relics and rarities. Why did people feel the need to touch – and, at times, taste – these objects? Answering this question opens up the history of sensory engagement and longing which underlies many of the artefacts on display in museums. If relics are the most evidently touch-oriented museum pieces, the most seemingly visually oriented are conventional artworks. After all, what can one do with a painting but look at it? What did Leonardo da Vinci mean then, when he talked about the ‘touch appeal’ of paintings? Was it simply a metaphor? And what did early modern artists, such as Rembrandt, think could be gained by painting directly with their fingers? The second chapter, ‘The Feel of a Rembrandt’, reveals the range of motives behind the largely forgotten aesthetics of intimacy which once helped shape both the creation and the experience of art. In the following chapter, ‘The Lure of the Unseen’, we enter into another room, as it were, of the ‘museum of the senses’. This room houses one of the most popular museum exhibits: the Egyptian mummy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mummies were gawked at, sniffed, petted and probed. The desire to comprehend the mummy was augmented by its layers of bandages, which rendered the body within tantalizingly invisible, and prompted voyeuristic public mummy unwrappings. Given that mummies were often considered to be emblematic of the ‘mysterious’ Orient, the chapter suggests that the Western obsession with exposing and exploiting the materiality of the mummy evidenced a parallel interest in exploring and colonizing Eastern lands and peoples. Chapters 4 and 5 of The Museum of the Senses offer a sensory and social history of the influential art collection assembled by Thomas and Alethea Howard, Earl and Countess of Arundel, in the seventeenth century. Chapter 4 looks at how the items in this collection were brought together and how they served as conversation pieces for connoisseurs and collectors. Chapter 5 traces the ‘afterlife’ of the Arundel collection from the seventeenth century to the present day, as the pieces were dispersed and given new meanings, and indeed uses, over time. The theme of scent is employed here as a means of exploring how early modern collections were interwoven with more intangible expressions of connoisseurship and cultural life. While the book focusses on historical experiences of collection pieces, a number of contemporary display strategies are considered in the last chapter, ‘The Museum Retouched’. This chapter describes the nineteenth-century rise of the museum as an ‘empire of sight’ (Stewart 1999: 28), and its contemporary reinvention as a place for multisensory exploration. As forward-thinking museums seek to accommodate the desire of museumgoers to be more than passive spectators, new initiatives are appearing in galleries: tactile exhibits for the visually impaired and the sighted, the

Introduction

7

relaxation of rules forbidding running or shouting, artworks that can be climbed or smelled, electronic touch screens and interactive audio guides, museum tours for babies… Are these just sensational ploys to capture the attention of a jaded public? Or are they forays into the creation of a whole new gallery experience? Can the goal of conserving heritage objects be reconciled with that of making exhibits engaging and accessible to multiple senses and publics? Art critic Julian Spalding takes a conventional stand in declaring that the task of the museum is ‘to heighten visual awareness’ by promoting object viewing (cited by Warwicker 2014). However, in an age of superabundant visuality, the museum stands out, not as an empire of sight, but as a repository of primal cultural matter – an extraordinary and sensuous landscape of things.

1 A Taste of Heaven: Relics and Rarities In 2011, the British Museum held a dazzling exhibition of medieval reliquaries – elaborate containers for holding the bodily remains of saints. The exhibition was called ‘Treasures of Heaven’, a title which tantalizingly suggested that Heaven itself had graciously loaned some of its prized pieces to the museum, and that people interested in catching a glimpse of this otherworldly realm could do so during visiting hours (see Bagnoli 2011). This proclaimed opportunity to perceive Heaven here and now through one’s senses attracted large numbers of visitors. For some, however, a mere glimpse – or even a prolonged contemplation – of the divine was not enough: they wanted direct physical contact with holiness. In consequence, the staff at the British Museum were kept busy wiping kiss marks off the glass cases in which the reliquaries were displayed. The director of the museum, Neil MacGregor, called this tactile devotion ‘a new form of audience participation’ (cited in Kennedy 2011). Responding to the onslaught of kisses, art critic Jonathan Jones exclaimed in a provocative article: What Treasures of Heaven does is to lead us into a medieval world where people did kiss relics. If some people still enact those rituals, that is magical. Go for it. (Jones 2011, see further Berns 2012; Clifton 2015) However, touching museum pieces – even just their display cases – violates museum policy, which views handling as destructive. It also contravenes modern aesthetic values, which hold that art objects should be appreciated through sight alone. When a sacred object enters a museum, it leaves behind its former multisensory life and supposedly becomes a purely visual, desacralized work. However, as the sensuous response to the ‘Treasures of Heaven’ exhibition clearly demonstrates, the distinction between museum object and religious relic is not always obvious. The same holds true for a range of classic museum pieces which were traditionally regarded as objects of wonder and power. This chapter delves into the social and sensory history of such objects, and examines the transformations that occurred when they came to be displayed – or suppressed – within the glass cases of the modern museum.

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Sealed with a Kiss The cult of saintly relics reached its fullest expression in the Middle Ages when churches competed over the importance of their collections and pilgrims made long, hard journeys to visit sacred shrines. The most popular relics, durable and pulsating with holy vitality, were the bones of saints. These were often enclosed in splendid reliquaries (Bagnoli 2011; Figure 1.1). Another popular kind of relic, known as a second-class relic, was an object that had reputedly come into close contact with a saint. In the case of St. Francis of Assisi, for example, sandals and fragments of tunics belonging to the saint served as relics. The most valued of such relics were treasures indeed, both in a spiritual and monetary sense. When, in the thirteenth century, the Emperor of Constantinople received a substantial loan of gold from Venice, he provided as security nothing more than a thorny wreath – but that wreath was the crown said to have been worn by Jesus when he was crucified (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.1  Painted medieval reliquary (courtesy of The Walters Art Museum).

A Taste of Heaven

11

Figure 1.2  Kissing the Crown of Thorns in Paris (Credit: P. Deliss, via Getty Images).

The crown was then acquired by Louis IX of France who built a magnificent chapel to house it: Sainte Chapelle. The faith placed in the supernatural power of such objects can hardly be overestimated. A major relic was believed to bring good fortune to the whole city, or even country, which possessed it. The loss of such a relic, conversely, signalled a disastrous loss of divine favour. The same King Louis fell into a panic when he learned that another important relic, one of the nails used in the crucifixion, had fallen out of its reliquary while being kissed by pilgrims: ‘He began to scream aloud that he would have rather had the best city of his kingdom ruined and destroyed’ (Le Goff 2009: 80–1). Relics could also empower individuals. Emperor Constantine had ‘holy nails’ from the crucifixion placed in his helmet to protect him from the blows of enemies. William the Conqueror wore a necklace of saintly bones at the Battle of Hastings to ensure his victory. Ordinary folk hoped that relics would similarly provide divine aid, transforming illness into health and misfortunes into blessings. The best way of accessing the supernatural power of a relic was believed to be through touch, and, particularly, through a kiss (see Classen 2012: 35–45, 50–1). A sixteenth-century account of a visit to the shrine of Thomas Becket describes a whole series of devotional kisses being performed by pilgrims. The sword that was said to have killed the saint, and therefore been sanctified by his blood, was offered up for kissing. The reliquary containing part of the saint’s skull had an opening to allow for direct tactile

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access. ‘Touch windows’ were also made in the shrine containing the saint’s body so that pilgrims could place their heads inside and kiss the tomb. In one case an overly enthusiastic pilgrim managed to crawl into Becket’s shrine through such an opening and lie down inside (Webb 2000: 83; TattonBrown 2002: 94). The sacrality of kissing in such contexts was due in part to the traditional association between the breath and the spirit; an association seen in the Latin word for breath – spiritus. In church, a ‘kiss of peace’ was customarily exchanged by members of a congregation to reinforce their spiritual bond. It could also be used to effect a reconciliation between antagonists. A dramatic illustration of the social importance of such a ‘kiss of peace’ comes from the life of Thomas Becket. Having angered Henry II by his insistence on upholding the rights of the Church against those of the Crown, Becket fled into exile in 1164. After a series of negotiations, the king agreed to accept Becket back in his ‘love and grace’ but refused to seal the reconciliation with a kiss. Trying to wiggle his way out of this corporeal and spiritual commitment, Henry argued that he had sworn never to kiss Becket again in a fit of anger. Pope Alexander III absolved Henry from his vow but still the king demurred, proposing that his son, the young Henry, kiss Becket instead. Becket, however, insisted that only a kiss from Henry II himself would do. In the end, the future saint returned to England without the guarantee of a kiss and was killed by the king’s knights shortly thereafter (Petkov 2003: 63–5). The sequel to this story of a kiss unbestowed took place several years later, after another series of negotiations between the king and the Church. Henry II walked barefoot in sackcloth and ashes to Canterbury Cathedral, where Thomas Becket’s remains were already drawing eager pilgrims. After being ritually flogged by the gathered monks, the king inserted his head into one of the ‘touch windows’ in Becket’s shrine, and finally offered up a kiss to his former enemy. Adding to the appeal and power of many relics were the ornate reliquaries in which they were contained (Bagnoli 2010). Fashioned of silver and gold and adorned with gems, these reliquaries made splendidly visible the invisible power of the otherwise rather plain bits of bone, cloth and wood that usually served as relics. At least occasionally, however, the visual effect of reliquaries was so stunning that the more essential tactile aspect was overlooked. In 1538, a fine French lady who visited Becket’s shrine seemed more impressed by the costly decor than by the actual relics, and remained ‘overlooking and viewing, more than an hour’. (Well might she stare, if contemporary accounts of the shrine having jewels as big as goose eggs are true.) The prior, who wanted to get down to business, gave her a cushion on which to kneel, and exposed a portion of St. Thomas’s skull in its reliquary for her to kiss, ‘but she neither kneeled nor would kiss it, but was still viewing the riches thereof: so she departed, and went to her lodging for dinner’ (cited in Stanley 1855: 200). This French visitor may not have been the most responsive pilgrim, but she was one of the last, as shortly after her visit the power-hungry Henry VIII had the relics destroyed and their precious ornaments sent to the Royal Mint.

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The pilgrimage practice of kissing relics was a sign of devotion, but it also served as a means for acquiring some of the wonder-working power attributed to these capsules of holiness. In fact, not satisfied with an ephemeral touch, pilgrims would often place clothes on relics in order to soak up some of their miraculous vitality. The sixth-century bishop Gregory of Tours claimed that these supernatural emissions actually had physical weight. He observed that when a cloth was held against the tomb of St. Peter, it became ‘so soaked with divine power that it [would] weigh much more than it weighed previously’ (cited by Eastman 2011: 7). Medieval pilgrims not only touched and kissed holy objects, they also frequently licked them. Such kissing and licking would have involved the senses of taste and smell, as well as that of touch, making relic devotion a truly multisensory act. Given that the bodies of saints were reputed to emit a sweet odour of sanctity, the experience of intimate contact with a relic would sometimes have been highly scented (Classen 1998: ch. 2). This total sensory engagement with relics was in keeping with the rich religious and social life of the senses at the time (see Newhauser 2015). The practice of licking relics had a counterpart in the visionary kissing and sucking of Christ’s wounds described by medieval mystics (see Bynum 1987: 144–5; Olson 2015). Such acts had roots in the early Church when the wounds of martyred Christians might be licked by disciples eager for a taste of holiness. Thus, as St. Vincent of Saragossa lay dying after being tortured, his followers crowded around his ravaged body: One ranges with kisses over [his wounds], another rejoices to lick the red blood from his body. Many dip linen garments in the drops of blood so as to preserve in their homes a sacred source of protection for their descendants. (cited by Roberts 1993: 14) One hopes St. Vincent was, at this point, beyond minding such intrusive attentions. Stories were recounted by the faithful of miraculous cures that occurred after an ill person had devoutly licked or sucked a relic, and thereby ingested its holy effluvia. One of these told of a priest who sought aid for his ailments from a stone supposedly sprinkled with the blood of St. Winifred: He took it and kissed it with great reverence. Then going apart he fell on his knees and began to lick the stone, praying inwardly as he held part of it in his mouth. In half an hour all pain was gone, and the disease was cured. (Morris 1881: 122) Licking a relic, and related acts – such as drinking wine in which a relic had been dipped, or swallowing water mixed with the scrapings of a shrine – could, in fact, be considered sound medical practice in an age when medicine and religion often overlapped. The Protestant Reformation attacked the practice of touching and kissing relics as a form of idolatry. In England, injunctions prohibited the ‘offering

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of money, candles or tapers to images or relics, or kissing or licking the same’ (cited by Duffy 2005: 407). Parodies ridiculing the practice appeared, such as the following lines from a sixteenth-century play by John Heywood: And another holy relic here may ye see: The great toe of the Holy Trinity; And whosoever once doth it in his mouth take; He shall never be diseased with the toothache. (cited by Classen 2012: 151) The new religiosity decreed that accessing the divine through touch and taste was to be replaced by gaining spiritual enlightenment through reading and hearing the Word of God. Progressive Catholics often agreed. The sixteenthcentury priest and humanist Erasmus stated bluntly: ‘Should anyone produce a tunic worn by Christ, we would hurry to the ends of the earth to kiss it. But you might assemble his entire wardrobe, and it would contain nothing that Christ did not express more explicitly and truly in the evangelic books’ (Classen 2012: 152).

Royal Relics, Charms and Wonders The rejection of ‘tactile religion’ by the religious reformers could not do away with the popular belief that touch could act as a conduit for mysterious and transformative forces. Even in Protestant England, belief in the healing touch of the monarch lasted for centuries (see Thomas 2005). The practice was dropped during the period of the Protectorate (when it was humorously suggested that the credulous might touch the Great Seal of England instead), but returned in full force with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The new king, Charles II, ritually touched thousands of people a year. During royal touching ceremonies in England, special medallions – called touch pieces – were handed out to participants by the monarch. Some of these touch pieces graphically portrayed the notion of touch as a medium for supernatural healing by depicting on one side a hand descending from Heaven with the biblical phrase ‘He touched them’, and continuing on the reverse with – ‘And they were healed’. The essayist Samuel Johnson received a touch piece from Queen Anne in 1712 which he afterwards wore around his neck, in keeping with the belief that the touch pieces themselves possessed curative power so long as they remained in contact with the body. (Johnson’s touch piece is now in the British Museum.) Just as objects which had come into contact with saintly bodies might be attributed special powers, so might objects which had been touched by a monarch. Such beliefs would have motivated much of the eager public handling of royal artefacts held in collections in early modernity. One such collection was located in Westminster Abbey in London. This, for example, was where the Coronation Chair was displayed when not in use (Figure 1.3).

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Figure 1.3  The Coronation Chair with the Stone of Scone under the seat (from Claude de la Roche Francis. London: Historic and Social. Philadelphia, PA: John C. Winston, 1901).

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An  eighteenth-century visitor to the abbey noted that ‘There is seldom anyone, who now sees it, who has not the curiosity to sit down’ (cited by Rodwell 2013: 223). And it was indeed sat on by visitors for centuries until barriers were erected in the later 1800s. In 1584, for example, Lupold von Wedel wrote that during his visit to the abbey ‘a chair was shown to us, in which all the English kings are crowned, and in which I also sat down’ (cited by Rodwell 2013: 223). That brief ‘I also sat down’, suggests how a visitor could imaginatively and temporarily take on the mantle of kingship by sitting where monarchs sat when they were crowned. In 1832, an intrepid visitor ate his supper while seated in the Coronation Chair and then, his head full of fantastic imaginings, had a nap (Rodwell 2013: 226). As the chair was reputedly quite uncomfortable and rather plain, the attraction of this exploit must have lain in the identification with royalty it provided. Another royal artefact kept in the collection of Westminster Abbey and subject to much handling was the Stone of Scone (Figure 1.3). Legend claimed that this was the stone that the biblical Jacob had used as a pillow when he had a vision of Heaven. This stone was said to have been brought to Ireland and from thence to Scotland where it was used in coronation ceremonies. In the thirteenth century, the Stone of Scone was captured by Edward I, taken to England, and placed under the seat of the Coronation Chair. With its dual religious and royal associations, the Stone proved irresistibly appealing to visitors to the abbey. In fact, many of the early visitors not only touched the Stone but also scraped off particles as a keepsake, creating hollows in the Stone that are visible today (Rodwell 2013: 230). Some visitors may well have consumed the powder they collected in order to fully incorporate the Stone’s presumed mystical powers. Visitors to another important London landmark and collection site, the Tower, had the opportunity to finger the crown jewels. In this case, the precious nature of the jewels added to the allure of these royal regalia. In the seventeenth century, a custodian customarily showed the jewels to visitors. However, this custodian was attacked one day and the crown, sceptre and orb were stolen. When the jewels were recovered, they were more securely placed behind bars. Even then, however, handling continued. A German tourist Zacharias von Uffenbach remarked in 1710 that it was still possible ‘to get one’s hand through [the bars] and pick up the articles’ (1934: 40). The fact that this handling of the jewels was permitted despite the risk of damage and theft indicates both the extent of the demand for tactile access and the perceived need to accommodate this demand in a hands-on culture. A striking instance of popular belief in the magical vitality of at least certain royal relics can be found in connection with another artefact on display at the Tower of London: a codpiece belonging to Henry VIII. Women wishing to conceive would traditionally stick a pin in the velvet lining of the codpiece in the hope that it would serve as a fertility charm (Uffenbach 1934: 41).

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As occurred with religious relics, the mania for royal relics of all sorts was occasionally made the subject of humour. Of King Henry’s codpiece it was said that The people in the Tower stick forty in an hour Upon an old Pincushing there for Pence a piece the Rabble-Rout May stick them in and take them out. (Pepys Collection 3.178) Of Hans Sloane, whose collection would form the basis of the British Museum, the poet Edward Young wrote: He shows, on holidays, a sacred pin, That touch’d the ruff that touch’d Queen Bess’s chin. (cited by De Beer 1953). These satirical lines ridicule the ‘sacrality’ people might assign to an object with even a tenuous connection to a royal body. The previous verse detailing how visitors paid a pence each to stick a pin in Henry VIII’s codpiece suggests that pecuniary interests might have contributed to the propagation of some of such ‘magical’ practices. Even those who assigned no wonder-working powers to royal relics might still be swayed by their aura of pomp and power. For example, Samuel Pepys, though no relic worshipper, kissed the remains of Queen Katherine kept on display at Westminster Abbey: ‘[I] had the upper part of her body in my hands. And I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen and that this was my birthday’ (1669: 23 February). While Pepys might not have expected any transformative effects to follow from this act, it was obviously still a special moment for him. The relics of monarchs had a particular claim to the possession of supernatural traits due to the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which linked the power to rule to divine authority. However, the belongings of any sufficiently exalted person might be taken as relics to be cherished and as charms to be touched. This occurred with Shakespeare’s possessions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the playwright’s fame skyrocketed. Shakespeare’s birthplace of Stratford was scoured for any remaining personal possessions, while wood from a mulberry tree he had supposedly planted was made into a variety of knick knacks to satisfy a relic-craving public. A cup carved of this wood inspired the following verse by the famed eighteenth-century actor and Shakespeare promoter, David Garrick:

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Behold this fair goblet, ‘Twas carved from the tree, Which, O my sweet Shakespear, was planted by thee; As a relic I kiss it, and bow at the shrine; What comes from thy hand must be ever divine. (cited in Davidhazi 2001: 49) Such practices might seem to border on idolatry, but the desire for an encounter with greatness evidently could not be satisfied by words alone, even when the words were written by Shakespeare. Beyond such ‘celebrity’ relics, a wide range of notable or exotic objects were attributed numinous powers. These included such curiosities as supposed unicorn horns, magical stones, and, as shall be discussed in a later chapter, Egyptian mummies. As with saintly relics, these ‘objects of power’ were often imagined to heal by touch or by ingestion. Unicorn horns, for example, were believed to have purifying powers and hence to counteract diseases and poisons. Water in which a unicorn horn (actually a narwhal tusk) had been dipped was considered an efficacious treatment for leprosy and related diseases. The wealthy – for unicorn horns were very costly – might ingest horn powder directly as a curative. In its role as a poison detector, a unicorn horn would be passed over food or clothing. If poison were present the horn was said to tremble or change colour. The list of supposedly magical stones, in turn, included the Stone of Scone discussed above, the Lee Penny, and the Blarney Stone (all three of which still exist today). The Lee Penny, brought to Scotland from Islamic Spain by a fourteenth-century crusader, Sir Simon Lockhart (and still owned by the Lockhart clan), is a gleaming red gem set in a coin. For centuries this amulet was regularly dipped in water to provide a healing cordial. After the Reformation the practice was linked with witchcraft, but allowed to continue on the interesting grounds that no words – or incantations – were involved in its use. In Ireland, the famed Blarney Stone unusually did not heal, but instead conferred powers of eloquence on those who kissed it. Not everyone was convinced of the powers of these vaunted charms. The renowned sixteenth-century physician Ambrose Paré, for example, doubted the medical value of unicorns’ horns (Paré 1649: 534). (Interestingly, one of the reasons for his scepticism was that such horns had no particular taste or smell, an argument that points to the importance of scent as a sign of healing virtue in premodern medicine.) For many, however, the imaginative and tactile appeal of such celebrated objects was too great to resist.

Sensuous Science With the advance of science, the talismanic touching – or tasting – of legendary objects was countered by a classificatory interest in using one’s senses to determine the physical nature of the world (Arnold 2006: 56, ch. 7; see also Roberts 2005). If licking saintly relics previously seemed to offer

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believers a ‘taste of Heaven’, the new ‘natural philosophers’ were just as likely to be after a taste of earth. Take, for example, the following eighteenthcentury geological description of a type of Silesian earth: This is fine pure earth of a pearly white colour, very heavy, compact and pure, somewhat unctuous or very smooth to the touch, it colours the fingers a little, is easily friable into a soft powder, adheres firmly to the tongue, melts readily in the mouth, and is very pure, fatty, somewhat harshly astringent to the taste, and leaves some small grittiness between the teeth. (Mendes da Costa 1757: 7) The sensory detail of such scientific analyses rivals the sensuous raptures of medieval mysticism and can scarcely be exceeded by the rapturous food descriptions of the modern gourmet. One Victorian scientist who was well-known for his sensorial methods was the geologist William Buckland. A twentieth-century poem, referring to Buckland’s reputed gustatory acuity, aptly presents the geologist as saying: I have always found a quick Flick of the tongue enables me to test The surfaces of substances – often a lick Confirms what I had only guessed. Believe me – I would be ashamed to boast – Blindfold I’d name, by taste alone, The colours of marbles, and tell most Varieties of semi-precious stone. (Plomer 1973: 164–5) Buckland even claimed he could tell the age of a skull by its taste (Huxley 2011: 122). Once the geologist went so far as to consume a royal relic before the startled eyes of its owner. The story is related by the master anecdotalist Augustus Hare: Talk of strange relics led to the mention of the heart of a French king, preserved at Nuneham in a silver casket. Dr. Buckland, whilst looking at it, exclaimed, ‘I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before’, and before anyone could hinder him, he had gobbled it up, and the precious relic was lost forever. (1995: 358) This peculiar act seems reminiscent of medieval practices of relic appropriation, such as the time Hugh of Lincoln devoutly bit an arm bone said to belong to Mary Magdalene ‘first with his incisors and finally with his molars’ (Crook 2011: 2). While it indicates a similar desire to possess the marvellous, however, Buckland’s act was also motivated by the geologist’s belief that to eat is to dominate: ‘The great of the earth eat the less great’

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(Gordon 1894: 31). In this regard, consuming a king must have added considerably to the geologist’s self-esteem. Buckland’s personal eccentricities, nonetheless, were informed by the scientific notion of the time that one’s senses provided the best tools for analysing and classifying the material world, even such parts of the world as might be considered the stuff of museums and shrines.

Cabinets of Curiosities In early modernity, the site par excellence to encounter objects of wonder was in the cabinet of curiosities, a proto-museum of rare artefacts and natural specimens. This new setting, however, did not signal an end to the full-bodied appreciation of such objects. In fact, we find a variety of motives continuing to bring people into close contact with the rarities housed in such cabinets, and in the public museums which succeeded them. Among these was the scientific interest in sensory classification described above. Robert Hooke, an early curator of the Royal Society’s museum, or ‘repository’, was not unusual in including taste and smell among the sensory qualities of objects which should receive attention. The physician and botanist Nehemiah Grew, in fact, tasted a number of the items he catalogued for the Society’s museum. Concerning the Society’s records of its investigations, Ken Arnold notes in Cabinets for the Curious: ‘entry after entry records specimens being picked up, measured, tasted, burnt, magnetised and electrified, bent and hammered’ and otherwise examined (2006: 144). The items subjected to these last treatments were usually regarded as expendable, but any object might be put through a range of sensory tests. Private collectors made multisensory examinations of collection pieces as well. ‘I have seen an antiquary lick an old coin, among other trials, to distinguish the age of it by its taste’, wrote Joseph Addison in the seventeenth century. Addison added that there was apparently ‘as much difference between the relish of ancient and modern brass, as between an apple and a turnip’ (1811: 437–8). Collectibles with sacred associations, in turn, continued to attract devotional touches. This was the case with the relic known as the Nanteos Cup, said to be made of wood from Christ’s cross and kept for centuries in a private Welsh collection. (It is now displayed at the National Library of Wales.) Liquids drunk from the Nanteos Cup were said to have healing virtues, but certain devotees went a step further and nibbled on the cup itself; thus ‘its present unshapely condition’ (‘Cistercian Abbey’ 1889: 263). Due to its possession of many objects deemed to be curative, the early museum sometimes doubled as an apothecary’s. This occurred with the Dresden Museum, which allowed scrapings to be taken from its unicorn horn for medicinal use. Indeed, so many prized collectibles were accorded healing powers that early museums were at some risk of being eaten up by collectors and visitors in quest of health benefits.

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Another factor contributing to the edibility of the early museum was that a number of rarities on display were exotic food stuffs, such as cocoa and coffee beans, and even the nests from which bird’s nest soup was made in Asia. These last were savoured by Uffenbach when touring Hans Sloane’s Museum in London: Among other things he pointed out to us the nests that are eaten as a delicacy … judging from its taste, appearance and feeling, I took it for a gum or resin. (1934: 187) Even if museum pieces were not themselves consumed, combining a collection visit with a meal was a popular practice (and would eventually lead to the establishment of restaurants in museums). Hans Sloane, for example, liked to conclude his guided tour of his collection with coffee in the library. (When the composer George Frederic Handel visited Sloane in 1740, he irked his host by carelessly placing his buttered muffin on a precious manuscript [Classen 2007: 904–5].) Those who wished for more coffee and less collection could visit Don Saltero’s Coffee House in London, run by a former servant of Hans Sloane and embellished with a range of curiosities, many of them cast-offs from Sloane’s museum. If tasting was not unknown, handling was commonplace in cabinets of curiosities and early museums. Indeed, Robert Hooke held that ‘a collection is not for divertissement and wonder, and gazing … like pictures for children to admire and be pleased with’, but rather a resource for scholarly inquiry which necessitated ‘manual handling … of the very things themselves’ (De Beer 1953: 109–10; Hooke 1971: 335). One feels that, though approaching the subject from a scientific rather than a religious perspective, Hooke had something in common with the prior at Becket’s shrine who was frustrated by his French visitor’s preference for superficial gawking over meaningful touching. Undoubtedly, the hands-on investigations of many early museum-goers were more a tactile form of gawking than they were techniques of scientific or aesthetic inquiry or gestures of devotion (Uffenbach 1928: 31). However, we can also find examples of object handling that evidence a yearning for a connection with storied objects and peoples. This occurred when Sophie von La Roche visited the British Museum in 1786 and imagined herself immersed in past worlds as she picked up one antiquity after another – even what she supposed to be a handful of ashes from a funerary urn: ‘I felt it gently, with great feeling… I pressed the grain of dust between my fingers tenderly’ (La Roche 1933: 107–8). Such tactile communing with the past would be discouraged in the nineteenth century, but it nonetheless retained its supporters. An Englishman writing in The Spectator in the late 1800s argued that touching historical relics provided an essential tangible link with the past: ‘In our day one of the chief feelings connected with the relics of the great dead, is the hunger for a sense of reality in connection with the men of the past, which can only be

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satisfied by some material link’. Thus, ‘to actually touch the glove or the helmet which Cromwell wore gives us a sense of security in his existence which can hardly be obtained in any other way’. Though divested of their sacred significance, bodily relics might similarly serve as material evidence of past eras: ‘How much more should we feel this security were we to touch [Cromwell’s] hand itself?’ (‘Relic-keeping’ 1887: 1308–9). The claim could further be made that, though not believed to be pulsating with sacred power, historical relics offered a kind of cultural vitality: ‘all Germany feels the stronger and fuller of continuous life because the Emperor addresses his Parliament from the throne pressed by the feet of Charlemagne’ (‘Relic-keeping’ 1887). (The author would have been pleased to know that, not only Charlemagne’s throne, but his very bones, were available to be touched in the nineteenth century [i.e. Bray 1841: 150].) It seems that, just as a church well stocked with saintly relics was once considered to exert a beneficial influence over the surrounding region, so, in modernity, a collection well stocked with cultural and historical relics might be thought to radiate power and prestige over its environs.

Relics and Rarities Today The most valuable relics and rarities have a long history of not only being handled but also stolen. Saintly remains were not infrequently appropriated, often with the purpose of endowing another locality with their beneficent aura and prestige. For example, when the rising city of Venice wanted a suitably important patron saint in the early Middle Ages, it snatched the body of St. Mark from its shrine in Alexandria. (There was little fear that St. Mark would punish Venice for this abduction, for it was generally believed that saints who did not wish their remains to be moved would use supernatural means to prevent it.) Indeed, so prized were saintly bodies, that in at least one instance, impetuous peasants attempted to kill a renowned holy man in order to secure his remains for their region (Classen 2012: 36). Reputed unicorn horns, also highly coveted items, were similarly targeted by thieves. One such horn belonging to Edward I of England was discovered missing and recovered from under the bed of the keeper of the palace gate, who had probably hoped to sell it and make his fortune (Kunz 1916: 295; Shephard 1930: 114). Such practices have their contemporary counterparts. Narwhal tusks – the unicorn horns of past centuries – continue to be subject to theft and smuggling. However, they are now exceeded in value by rhinoceros’ horns, considered a sovereign remedy in many Asian cultures and regularly stolen from museums, as well as brutally taken from the hunted animals themselves. Relics have also continued to be subject to theft. The Stone of Scone was stolen from Westminster Abbey in 1950 by Scottish nationalists who saw it as an icon of Scottish independence. (It was later returned to the abbey, where it remained until it was officially handed over to Scotland in 1996.) More recently, in 2011, a Greek Orthodox monk was caught at an airport

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transporting a skeleton in his suitcase, the remains of a saintly nun removed from a cemetery in Athens (‘Monk Arrested’ 2011). In 2014, the Nanteos Cup was stolen while – in a very medieval fashion – it was on loan to a sick woman desiring its healing influence (Lusher 2014). These examples bring us back to the topic with which this chapter began: the lure of sacred relics. A number of reliquaries which survived the religious and political upheavals of modernity ended up in public museums, sharing space with ancient urns and dinosaur bones. For example, while the Crown of Thorns acquired by Louis IX is still housed in a church (Notre-Dame-deParis), the Holy Thorn Reliquary, which contains one of the Crown’s thorns, now resides in the British Museum. The Crown of Thorns in Paris is still an object of veneration (see Figure 1.2). The Holy Thorn Reliquary, bustling with sacred imagery and brandishing a lone menacing thorn, has been transformed into an historical artefact and art object. Though now cut off from the touch of the faithful, museum reliquaries sometimes give indications of the sensory lives they led before they entered the visual realm of the museum. This is the case with the reliquary in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) which was created to house one of St. Catherine’s bones. Inscribed on the reliquary is the promise that those who kiss it will be granted an indulgence which will expedite their entry to Heaven. Many reliquaries in museums no longer contain the relics they were originally made to house. Occasionally, however, relics are found hidden within a reliquary long thought to be empty. When staff at the British Museum were carrying out a routine cleaning of a portable altar in 2009, they were startled to discover several dozen bundles of cloth inside containing saintly bones (Kennedy 2009). Such a discovery dramatically reminds us of the sacred and corporeal dimensions of museum reliquaries. However, even an empty reliquary might be considered to be full of holiness due to its original contact with a sacred object, and therefore a worthy subject of a devout kiss. Nonetheless, such tactile encounters are strictly taboo in the modern museum. If, inspired by the promise of an indulgence offered by the reliquary of St. Catherine in the V&A, visitors tried to kiss it today, they might attain an accelerated entry to Heaven but they would also gain a speedy exit from the museum. Curiously, a myth exists in contemporary secular culture that no ‘modern’ person would dream of kissing a reliquary. ‘That was an enchanted way of seeing – and touching, and kissing’, sighs Jonathan Jones, relegating the practice to a distant, wonder-working past. ‘We no longer imagine [relics] to have actual magical power’, declares another writer on the subject (Butterfield 2011). But, for millions of believers around the world, saintly relics continue to have transformative powers which can be accessed through touch. For such persons the untouchability of museum relics might well appear, if understandable, alienating. One contemporary Christian author described seeing a museum worker in Russia kissing the glass case holding an icon of the Trinity, then feeling frustrated by his own inability to do the same with a reliquary of St. Thomas Becket in the British Museum.

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Kissing an icon is an established custom in the Russian Orthodox Church, whereas there is nothing remotely similar governing the behavior of American tourists approaching medieval objects in the museums of London. (Taliaferro 2006: 18) Yet, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, sacred artefacts can still elicit corporeal responses, even in the anti-tactile space of the ‘museums of London’. Uncovering the history of relic interaction allows such gestures to be understood not simply as breaches of museum etiquette or as odd anachronisms or even as ‘a new form of audience participation’ (in the words of the former director of the British Museum) but as meaningful acts of sensory communion with deep cultural roots. Juxtaposing the tactility of past eras with the growing visualism of his own time, the nineteenth-century author of the article in The Spectator cited above asked an interesting question: ‘Why is [touching physical relics] stupider than the preservation of a photograph of the dead?’ (‘Relic-keeping’ 1887: 1309). A hunger, in some cases literal, still exists for objects of wonder and power in the modern world. In fact, if permitted, how many people today might touch museum reliquaries, with at least a faint desire for a supernatural effect? How many people continue to kiss the Blarney Stone, though they have to hang upside down to reach it, set as it is in the wall of a castle tower? An object need not even be credited with magical powers to be seen as radiating a palpable vitality. When the Hilton of Cadboll Stone, a slab inscribed with Pictish symbols, was removed from the Scottish village where it was found and put on display in Edinburgh, many villagers felt as though they had lost a ‘living’ part of their community. ‘When it’s in the Edinburgh museum it’s just a dead headstone’, lamented one resident. Another expressed the desire to ‘just touch it’ (cited in Paine 2013: 47). Even scientists, though now assessing artefacts through microscopes rather than through touch and taste, are not immune to the tactile lure of the numinous. A geologist at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, which possesses a microscope slide of a fragment of the Blarney Stone, recently stated that, although kissing the slide might not work as well to bestow eloquence as kissing the original stone, ‘I have tried it’ (McDonald 2014). Should accommodation be made for those for whom certain museum pieces continue to pulsate with a vitality accessible to a reverent touch? What kinds of compromises might be reached? Could allowances be made at the British Museum for visitors who wish to touch reliquaries – for example, by mounting a ‘touching board’ connected by wire to a reliquary? Even if this could be accomplished with minimal risk to artefacts, one suspects that the idea would not be palatable to the guardians of high culture. Though it may be designed to look like a temple, and though it may lure visitors with promises of heavenly treasures, the modern museum is very much a secular institution. While it provides a feast for the eyes, it is not yet prepared to offer a taste, or touch, of Heaven.

2 The Feel of a Rembrandt: Paintings and Sculptures In 2014, I was invited to give a lecture on tactile art at a conference at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In keeping with the sensory theme of the occasion, participants were invited to touch one of the best-known paintings in the Rijksmuseum: The Jewish Bride by Rembrandt (Figure 2.1). The painting stood majestically on an easel at the front of the conference room awaiting our attention. There was a catch, not surprisingly. The painting was not the original, but an authentic-looking and feeling 3D copy. It could therefore be handled freely without any concerns over damaging a fragile masterpiece. The selection of a work by Rembrandt for multisensorial appreciation was apt, for the Dutch artist possessed a deep interest in tactile experience. His paintings depict a wide range of tactile acts, from the violent – Jacob wrestling with a very tangible angel, Judith beheading Holofernes – to the tender – Jacob blessing the sons of Joseph, and the gentle embrace of the couple in The Jewish Bride. Indeed, the first painting known to be by Rembrandt is a picture representing the sense of touch, part of a series of works on the senses. This depicts an old man grimacing as he undergoes a painful operation. The most poignant of Rembrandt’s touch-centred paintings is one in which touch is forbidden: the Noli me tangere of 1638 which depicts the risen Christ shrinking from Mary Magdalene’s longing hands. Rembrandt’s interest in touch is further evidenced by his striking preoccupation with blindness. He represented blind biblical and historical personages in numerous works, along with blind persons from his own time. In view of this fascination with the loss of vision, it’s not surprising that the painting representing ‘sight’ in Rembrandt’s series on the senses shows two dim-sighted men crowding around a vendor of eyeglasses. The painting evokes a world in which faulty sight was common, and therefore a discerning touch all the more important. Even artists might suffer from poor sight. Michelangelo, for example, increasingly relied on touch for his appreciation of sculpture as his vision deteriorated with age. His late drawings seem to show some of this emphasis on tactility, displaying, as one critic put it, ‘the marks of a hand in search of form, a process of groping, caressing, of coaxing form from out of the depths of the paper’ (cited in Sohm 2007: 77).

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Figure 2.1  The Jewish Bride, Rembrandt van Rijn (The Rijksmuseum). One of Rembrandt’s most famous works shows Aristotle touching a bust of the blind Homer (Aristotle with a Bust of Homer). The portrayal of touch here suggests a sensory and imaginative communion between the two ancient thinkers. As Aristotle’s other hand is fingering a gold chain given to him by Alexander the Great, we can also see the picture as depicting an opposition of social values through a contrast of tactile sensations: the exaltation of artistic creation, represented by Homer’s bust, and the glory – but also bondage – of worldly success, signified by the weighty chain. Aside from these considerations of interpretation, it is clear that there is no inkling in the representation of Aristotle’s touch being considered an inappropriate way to approach a work of art. The nineteenth-century art critic Bernard Berenson argued that the first business of an artist was ‘to rouse the tactile sense’ by creating ‘the illusion of being able to touch a figure’ (1967: 40). Rembrandt achieves this both through his nuanced use of shading and through his intricate textures and corpulent renditions of flesh. The artist not only suggested tactility by what he showed the viewer, however, but also by what he obscured. The large swathes of darkness in many of Rembrandt’s works remind us of a time when light was often meagre and the world explored by the hands, rather than the eyes. In Rembrandt’s day, a ‘rough’, patchy style of painting was much admired. This was thought to add an extra dimension of tangibility and demonstrate the apparently free and natural manner of the painter. The rough style also

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produced a stimulating contrast between the blur of colours experienced when a painting was seen close up and the composed picture it resolved into at a distance. The influential seventeenth-century artist Cornelis Ketel was such an enthusiast for rough painting that he sometimes eschewed using a paintbrush all together and instead painted portraits with his fingers. Then, stimulated to greater feats by the results (and perhaps obligated by progressive arthritis), he moved on to using his toes. Ketel’s portraits thereby became contact images, direct imprints of the painter’s vital energies on the canvas. Although Rembrandt sometimes painted with his fingers as well, his own rough style was mostly the product of broad brushwork, which his pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten praised for its ability to ‘suggest a lot of roundness’ (cited by Weststeijn 2008: 237). Yet, despite all these appeals to touch, Rembrandt’s paintings are still pictures, accessible to us through the sense of sight. What point could there be in touching one, as participants at the Amsterdam conference were invited to do with The Jewish Bride? For many of those participants there was evidently not much point. Rather than lining up eagerly to take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to feel a Rembrandt, they swept by the painting on their way to lunch, or else gave it only a few hurried strokes. Given my interest in the senses in art, I took my time exploring the surface of the painting. Rembrandt is said to have advised viewers to stand back from his paintings to avoid being repelled by their oily fumes (Alpers 1990: 17), but here smell was no problem. I was struck by the picture’s tactile variations, from the scratchy folds of the painted cloth to the bumpy painted pearls. Seeing and touching the painting was a very different experience from simply looking at the image as a flat picture. Rembrandt, in fact, was known for laying on paint an inch thick and for painting jewellery that could almost be picked off the canvas. Of one portrait it was said that it ‘could be lifted by the sitter’s painted nose’ (1990: 15). Such techniques earned him a reputation as a sculptor of paint. Even though his canvasses today have been somewhat flattened by conservation treatments, I could appreciate this characteristic lumpiness when feeling the 3D copy of The Jewish Bride. If the opportunity to touch art does not excite much interest today, the same cannot be said of previous eras. In a world where visual representations were far fewer than today, pictures had a quality of enchantment that seemed to call out for a wondering touch. This was especially the case with religious paintings. A poetical friend of Rembrandt remarked admiringly of his Noli me tangere that there ‘dead paint comes to life’ (Baker 1993: 84). This miraculous vivification mirrors that of the risen Christ depicted in the painting. Who can doubt that some of the painting’s owners (including the Empress Josephine) touched the luminous Christ figure, imaginatively granting themselves the experience denied to Mary Magdalene? The sense of tangibility produced by painterly techniques created a further inducement to experience a picture by hand, as well as by eye. Regarding the thick layering of paint for which Rembrandt was renowned,

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the sixteenth-century painter and art historian Karel van Mander declared that ‘paintings with a pronounced impasto invite the viewer to touch them’ (Scholten 1998: 39). The aim of this chapter is not to present an argument for letting our fingers, as well as our eyes, roam over artworks, but rather to investigate the tactile appeal exerted by such works. Once practices of tactile interaction with art are unearthed from the mounds of art history, the question then arises of the social factors which supported such sensory practices and the processes by which multisensory works were ‘refined’ into visual art.

Art as Sensory Surprise The story is told that Rembrandt, who was known for his frugality, once stooped to pick up coins that had been painted on the floor by his students. Such trompe l’oeil paintings frequently led viewers to touch what turned out, to their chagrin or delight, to be flat painted surfaces. We hear of them already in antiquity, when it was said in praise of the Greek painter Zeuxis that his scenes were so realistic that birds came and pecked at his painted grapes. However, he himself was fooled, the story goes, by his rival, Parrhasius, who painted a picture of a curtain that Zeuxis tried to sweep aside in order to see the ‘real’ painting underneath. In the Middle Ages, Giotto famously tricked his teacher into trying to brush a painted fly off a canvas. In the seventeenth century, Samuel Pepys wrote of a floral painting by Simon Verelst, that the drops of dew looked so real that, ‘I was forced again and again to put my finger to it to feel whether my eyes were deceived or no’. Pepys declared the painted bouquet ‘the finest thing I saw in my life’ and said that it was ‘worth going miles to see’ (cited by Latham 1983: 12– 13). Rembrandt himself is said to have once placed a trompe l’oeil painting of his maid in the window to fool passersby (Wetering 2015: 589). Immersed as we are in photographic realism today, such painterly effects might not seem so compelling, but we should not underestimate the enthusiasm they aroused in centuries past. The seventeenth-century art historian Franciscus Junius wrote of the ‘astonishment’ and ‘unspeakable admiration’ viewers felt when facing a naturalistic painting and believing that in its lifelike images ‘they doe see living and breathing bodies’ (cited by Weststeijn 2008: 157–8). Hoogstraten described the reaction to such artistic virtuosity as one of overwhelming physical and emotional sensations: ‘The viewer perspires profusely, and finds himself embroiled in a “terrifyingly confused inner struggle” which is imbued with a “vivid sense of inexpressible joy”’ (2008: 156). For many, the mark of a true artist was being able to paint a picture so lifelike that viewers could not resist touching it. The trompe l’oeil effect was extended to large-scale paintings of passages and staircases which invited viewers to enter them. The sixteenth-century painters Hans Vredeman de Vries and his son Paul created a number of these ‘threshold’ illusions for Rudolf II, ‘including one which feigned a passageway so perfectly that the

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emperor repeatedly attempted to walk into it, renewing his pleasure with each deception’ (Brusatti 1005: 11). The repeated efforts of the emperor to reconcile visual appearance with tactile experience, as in the case of Pepys with the painted dewdrop, point to the fact that one touch was often not enough – or perhaps ever enough – to vanquish the power of such illusions. A painting was taken to be truly convincing if it could fool even the keen senses of animals. The ancient tale of birds pecking at painted grapes was the first in a series of accounts over the centuries of animals being tricked by lifelike paintings. Albrecht Dürer’s dog, for example, was said to have licked the artist’s self-portrait, mistaking it for Dürer himself. ‘One can still see the marks of this, as I can prove myself’, declared a friend (Koerner 1996: 163). Such animal touches made for memorable anecdotes, as well as constituting tributes to a painter’s outstanding capacity for verisimilitude. Trompe l’oeil paintings enjoyed particular favour in the seventeenth century. Whereas previously their ‘deceit’ had sometimes been viewed as immoral, it appeared pleasurably stimulating in a new age marked by curiosity and exploration. Such paintings were most effective at eliciting a tactile response when they portrayed objects within hand’s reach. Hoogstraten, for example, depicted what would become a familiar trompe l’oeil motif, a letter rack holding variously textured and hand-sized items, such as a crumpled piece of paper, a book, a chain, a cameo, a comb, scissors, ribbons and a feather quill (Figure 2.2). Each one of these items is

Figure 2.2  Trompe-l’oeil Letter Rack, Samuel van Hoogstraten (Credit: Heritage Images/Contributor).

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associated with a different tactile sensation, ensuring that viewers would touch and touch again. As such deceptions worked best when encountered in naturalistic surroundings, Hoogstraten strewed his house with these testimonies to his artistic prowess. Wherever one looked one saw: Here an apple, pear or a lemon in a dish rack, there a slipper or shoes painted on a cut-out panel and placed in the corner of the room or under the chair. There were also dried, salted fish on a nail behind a door, and these were so deceptively painted that one could easily mistake them for actual dried plaice. (cited by Brusatti 1995: 152) One can imagine the artist’s satisfaction as visitors tried to touch or pick up these seemingly unassuming objects. Such painted mimics were not just seen as amusing tricks, however, for they garnered high praise; in Hoogstraten’s case, winning him a gold medal from Emperor Ferdinand III. Trompe l’oeil paintings sometimes had as their subject matter the physical properties of paintings themselves. Rembrandt, for example, created a trompe l’oeil frame and drawn-back curtains for a painting of the Holy Family. (Paintings were often covered with curtains when not being viewed, which helped preserve their power to astonish.) Cornelis Gysbrecht, another master of the genre, depicted the reverse side of a framed painting, tempting viewers to turn it over to see the ‘real’ picture supposedly on the other side. Such works drew attention to the ways in which paintings are not only objects for the eye, but things to be manipulated in various ways. Sculpture, as a three-dimensional art form accessible to both sight and touch, could lay claim to a greater verisimilitude than painting. The fact that sculpture could be appreciated by two senses was taken by some to mark the superiority of this art form over painting (Johnson 2002). However, it also diminished the element of sensory surprise, for sculpture both looked and felt three-dimensional. Yet sculpture still offered certain tantalizing illusions: visual impressions of soft warm flesh or delicate folds of cloth were discovered by touch to actually be hard, cold stone. When viewing a scene of a sea battle carved in marble, Pepys particularly admired the way in which the sculptor had been able to portray evanescent smoke (Latham 1983: 12). Except in the case of religious images, sculptures were usually left unpainted and so the illusion of life remained incomplete. This was partly due to the fact that the materials of sculpture, such as marble or bronze, were often valued in themselves, and partly due to an admiration of ancient sculpture, which was then believed to have been unpainted. There were also concerns over idolatry – a statue that was too lifelike might inspire too powerful a response. Artists would certainly have known that their works would be touched, and might well have tried to enhance their attractions by creating pieces with ‘touch appeal’; depicting soft fabrics, enticing flesh and costly jewels. They might nonetheless be ambivalent about their works being handled, given the risk of damage. Bernini, for example, complained about his

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sculptures being ‘pawed’ by the masses (Chantelou 1985: 23, 150). However, there was a monetary incentive for creating art that people could scarcely resist touching, for inducing to touch was an important step towards convincing to buy. The element of sensory surprise which appealed in trompe l’oeil painting can be found in other cross-sensory spectacles (Newhauser 2014: 19). Food and art, notably, have historically had more in common than people might imagine. Eggs were used to make egg tempera paint, ‘beer could be used in gilding, flour and water were boiled together to make glue, and the soft, moist, inside parts of bread were used to erase or clean a drawing’ (Smith 2004: 113). Not only were food items employed in art production, they could themselves be transformed into works of art. When Leonardo complained as a young man of his patrons that they ‘gobble up all the sculptures I give them, right to the last morsel’, he was talking about marzipan sculptures (cited by Snodgrass 2004: 147). (He determined to henceforth specialize in works ‘that do not taste as good’ [2004].) Sugar sculptures, which could take a thousand fantastical forms, from castles to rustic scenes to sacred tableaux, were particularly popular as table decorations at Renaissance and early modern banquets. The Venetians were highly skilled in this art and when Henry III of France was being fêted in Venice in 1574 he was delightfully surprised to discover that the very plates, cutlery and napkins were of sugar. Such pleasing counterfeits indicated that the arts and the senses could be crossed in many different ways (Belozerskaya 2005: 246). Indeed, though trompe l’oeil paintings are customarily analysed in terms of their visual effects, they often aimed to arouse gustatory and olfactory, as well as tactile, sensations in viewers. Hazlitt called this sensory interplay ‘gusto’, in reference to the vivid pleasure it excited. As a stimulant of ‘gusto’, food paintings were particularly effective, suggesting that they may sometimes have served as ‘appetite facilitators’ (Bendiner 2004: 46). This certainly seems to have been the case in antiquity, going by a Greek food painting described by the ancient philosopher Philostratus: Purple figs dripping with juice are heaped on vine leaves and they are depicted with breaks in the skin, some just cracking open to disgorge their honey. … See too, the pears on pears, apples on apples … all fragrant and golden … even the grapes in the painting are good to eat and full of winey juice. (cited by Kisler 2014: 13) Scenes of luscious, ready-to-eat foods were very popular in early modernity, and continued to attract admiration in the eighteenth century. Denis Diderot remarked of the gustatory appeal of the food still lifes of Chardin: ‘You take the bottles by the neck if you’re thirsty; the peaches and grapes excite your appetite and you want to grab them’ (cited by Bendiner 2004: 46). In a hungry world, such food still lifes not only tempted viewers with their trompe l’oeil delicacies, but also presented paradisiacal images of

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permanent plenty, and perhaps even served as charms for warding off the ever-present spectres of poverty and starvation. Moreover, one sees a tendency over the centuries to bring the unnaturally unisensorial character of pictures into line with the multisensoriality of life. Philostratus was quick to smell aromas and hear sounds – from fragrant fruit to singing women to whinnying horses – in the paintings he viewed. Descriptions of paintings, and sculptures, in early modernity are similarly rife with imagined sensations: viewers smell the lily in a painted Angel Gabriel’s hand, feel the wind ‘blowing’ from a seascape and hear statues groan and murmur (see Land 1994). The painter and historian Giorgio Vasari famously claimed that the pulse in the throat of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa throbbed with life (Jacobs 2005: ch. 4). Sometimes such comments would have been conventional hyperbole which described ideal, rather than actual, responses to powerful pictures. However, there is no denying that vivid sensory associations often did occur when viewing art, in a way that might surprise us today. The medieval Byzantine writer Manuel Philes, for example, commended a painter for leaving ‘noisy’ birds such as swallows out of a pastoral fresco so as not to disturb the occupants of the room (Littlewood 1997: 34). How many people today would feel their peace was disturbed by a painting of swallows? How many would even know what the calls of swallows sound like? Or, for that matter, what scent to associate with the lily in a painted Gabriel’s hand?

Living Statues In the eighteenth century, an enthusiastic Englishman named Henry Quin visited the Uffizi gallery in Florence daily. While there, he would place a chair next to the ancient statue known as the Medici Venus, climb up and kiss the sculpted goddess. ‘At first I kissed it as one would any piece of marble, but … at last I began to conceive it was real flesh and blood’ (cited by Rau 2002: 83). Over a century earlier, Galileo had asked with reference to the role of touch in art: ‘Who would believe that a man, when touching a statue, would think that it is a living human being?’ (cited by Gastel 2012: 40). With his scientific mentality, Galileo thought that touch, by revealing hardness instead of softness, inanimacy instead of movement, would immediately break the spell of a statue’s vivacity. However, in the case of Quin we see the reverse of the trompe l’oeil effect: instead of revealing the deceptive nature of what appears real, touch gives reality to an illusion. Fantasies of a statue that comes to life with a touch date back to antiquity (Hersey 2009). In the myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor falls in love with a statue of a woman he has created and, thanks to the intervention of Aphrodite, is able to kiss her into life. Later, the story of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ told a similar tale of a woman who, resembling a statue in her unending sleep, is awakened by a kiss. In Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, Leontes

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wishes to kiss what he believes to be a statue of his dead wife, only to discover that she is in fact alive. The theme remained popular throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a striking Victorian example occurring in George MacDonald’s account of the ‘Marble Lady’ in his ‘faerie romance’, Phantastes (1858). Returning to actual statues, the Medici Venus no doubt received many fervent touches when it was first created and, in contrast to its later unadorned state, boasted dazzling golden hair, ruby red lips, and earrings. Among the first news we have of the statue, however, is of its being exiled from Rome to Florence by a seventeenth-century pope who found its attractions too sensuous. As an iconic and seductive portrayal of feminine loveliness, and as the supposed ‘perfection of sculptural art’ (Coltman 2009: 88), the Medici Venus continued attracting caresses in its new home. Physician Lucas Pepys wrote to his brother of the Medici Venus and like statues in 1767: ‘I assure you I have had as much pleasure in passing my hand over [them], as I had in seeing them’ (cited by Findlen 2012). Another visitor wrote that, after rushing in when the gallery opened, ‘in three steps I had the very Venus de Medicis in my arms … why would she not answer the kisses I could not help printing all over her delicate form?’ (cited by Coltman 2009: 179–80). In his poem ‘Childe Harold’, Byron defied the cold, hard reality of the statue with images of its warm ‘melting kisses’ (1854: 195). According to Rodin (who well knew the physical labour involved in sculpting stone), the statue appeared to have been ‘moulded by kisses and caresses’ (cited by Mitchell 2004: 225). For others, the Medici Venus and similar works represented a tactile temptation to be resisted by the highminded. Thus the journal Punch lampooned John Calcott Horsley, who campaigned against the use of nude female models in art schools, as a ‘matron’ recoiling in horror from the Medici Venus (Figure 2.3). Although offering a far thinner tactile experience than sculptures, paintings also lured viewers to touch the bodies they portrayed. Leonardo wrote of the sensuous appeal of one particular painted figure: ‘I made a picture representing a holy subject, which was bought by someone who loved it… [The buyer] wished to remove the attributes of its divinity in order that he might kiss it without guilt’ (1989: 26). The artist also told the story of a king who preferred holding a portrait of his beloved to hearing her described in a poem, because the painting was something he could ‘see and touch, and not only hear’ (cited by Cranston 2003: 226). That additional sensory dimension apparently made all the difference. Portraits, however, might be touched in punitive, as well as passionate, ways. The iconoclast movement in the sixteenth century destroyed thousands of what were considered to be idolatrous images. Alongside such mass destruction of art, portraits were sometimes employed for judicial punishments from the Middle Ages into the nineteenth century. This occurred when the persons convicted were absent or deceased. These ritual assaults on images shamed the offenders, served as a public condemnation of crime and emphasized that the law cannot be cheated of its prey

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Figure 2.3  Shrinking from the Medici Venus: ‘The Model British Matron’, Linley Sambourne (from Punch, 24 October 1885).

(Freedberg 1989: 246–63). In 1673, for example, a life-size painting of a condemned but absent French general was hung on a gallows and stoned. In 1706 in Caen, a portrait of a woman convicted in absentia of murder was taken from her house and ‘burned alive’. In 1781, portraits of three escaped thieves were whipped in Geneva (where punishments of images were frequent and must have provided an important source of income for artists). At times whole groups of absent criminals were punished at the same time by means of their portraits, creating a spectacle that mingled mass execution

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with art exhibition: ‘It was quite a sight to see so many paintings on display at the place of executions, and in each one of them an executioner cutting off a head’ (Friedland 2012: 105–10). (Including the executioner in the painting was a business-like variation of the practice of punishment by portrait.) Such ritual punishments constituted another form of interacting with portraits as though they were alive, and one that must have encouraged spectators to think of images as more than simply unfeeling representations. Putting to one side iconoclasm and the punitive use of art, we see that accounts of tactile interaction with statues and portraits often featured male spectators and female representations. The pervasiveness of this typology means that female touches have largely been erased from art history (see Pollock 2013; Parker 2010; Classen 2005). While Ovid’s account of Pygmalion and his statue-wife has been widely disseminated through the centuries, not so many know that in another tale Ovid related the myth of Laodamia, who conversed with a statue of her absent husband: While you bear arms as a soldier in a different part of the world I have a wax statue to remind me of your appearance. To it I speak endearments and words owed to you, and it accepts my embraces. (cited by Fulkerson 2005: 115) In fact, there can be no doubt that women have touched, and been imaginatively touched by, lifelike images throughout history (i.e. Perry 2015; Hickson 2012: 53, 55), despite the monopolizing myth of the male touch bringing artworks to life.

Tableaux Vivants The traditional association of art objects with women was sometimes reversed, resulting in women being seen as objets d’art (see Nead 2002). A notable instance of this occurred in the case of Emma Hart, who married the eighteenth-century collector and diplomat Sir William Hamilton. Hamilton spoke of his wife-to-be as though she were a new acquisition for his collection: ‘The prospect of possessing so delightful an object under my roof soon certainly causes in me some pleasant sensations’ (cited by Fraser 1986: 77). Horace Walpole remarked after the wedding that the noted collector had ‘actually married his Gallery of Statues’ (cited by Fothergill 1969: 251). When Hamilton was later forced by financial constraints to place his collection, including portraits of his wife, up for auction, it almost seemed as though he were disposing of his living collectible as well. Emma Hamilton’s famous lover, Admiral Nelson, bitterly declared to her: ‘I see clearly, my dearest friend, you are on SALE’ (cited by Fothergill 1969: 401). Nor was Nelson’s comment as far-fetched as might seem, for portraits of women were known to be used as lures to encourage male clients to acquire the ‘originals’.

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Most notably, Hamilton encouraged his wife to actually pose as a work of art. Making skilful use of drapery, Lady Hamilton learned how to imitate the attitudes of ancient statuary. Goethe, who was present at one of these exhibitions, responded enthusiastically: ‘Here one sees in perfection, in ravishing variety, in movement, all that the greatest artists have loved to express…’ (cited by Fothergill 1969: 288). The German writer went on to note of the collector that: ‘Not content merely with seeing the beautiful creature he possessed as a moving statue, this connoisseur of art and women wished also to have the pleasure of seeing her as a brilliant, inimitable picture’ (1969: 233). To this end, Sir William constructed a black box surrounded by a gold frame in which his wife could pose as a painting. These ruses permitted Hamilton to live out Pygmalion’s dream of touching what seemed to be a lifeless representation and finding it to be soft, warm flesh. However, Emma Hamilton should not just be seen as the passive subject of her husband’s manipulations, for she exercised considerable flair in staging her poses (as did, no doubt, many unrecognized artists’ models). The Hamiltons were not unique in their methods for bringing art to life. Tableaux vivants, or living paintings, as they were called, enjoyed considerable popularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such tableaux might be performed privately, as occurred with the Hamiltons, or publicly for theatre audiences. It was customary to choose famous works of art, either paintings or classical statuary, as the subject matter. Those works which portrayed nudes – such as the Medici Venus – made especially popular theatrical turns, with their artistic credentials helping to ward off charges of indecency. Tableaux vivants allowed spectators to view art as living, tangible scenes, and performers to embody the figures portrayed in a work. It also provided a dramatic, full-bodied introduction to art for many theatre-goers unfamiliar with the iconic works being depicted. The practice of staging tableaux vivants went back a long way. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, these scenes were presented during pageants and processions to add to the drama and distinction of the occasion. In 1458, for instance, the Adoration of the Lamb by the Van Ecyks was enacted to mark the entry of Philip the Good (a patron of the artists) in Ghent. Occasionally painters were employed to design new pictures to be staged. Claes Moyaert, a distinguished artist and disciple of Rembrandt, designed two allegorical tableaux vivants for the procession celebrating the arrival of Maria de Medici in Amsterdam in 1638. Tableaux vivants might also be employed in theatre productions to show a particular scene from a play between acts. One seventeenth-century illustration of such a frozen theatrical scene depicts it as though it were a real painting, placing it inside a frame complete with hooks for hanging on the wall. This indicates the extent to which these staged tableaux were identified with pictures (Winkel 2006: 230). Painting influenced theatre in other ways as well. Playwrights often found inspiration in the same dramatic historical and mythological subject matter represented in paintings. When the seventeenth-century Dutch playwright Joost van den Vondel wrote a play about the biblical Joseph, he took as his

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guide paintings on the subject, such as Jacob Shows Joseph’s Blood-Stained Coat by Jan Pynas (Winkel 2006: 230). Incidents of this modelling of theatrical scenes on pictorial works continued to occur in subsequent centuries. To give a literary example, in Anna Karenina Tolstoy describes the Swedish soprano Christina Nilsson employing poses derived from pictures by Wilhelm von Kaulbach (Tolstoy 1999: 130). Painters, in turn, might be influenced by plays, making use of their portrayals, costumes and set designs for their own creations (and, at times, contributing to set designs as well). For example, painterly depictions of Heaven arguably evolved over the centuries alongside the theatrical spectacles of Heaven enabled by the increasingly sophisticated machinery used to elevate artificial clouds and angel actors above the heads of audiences. Art historians have even posited a connection between the celestial rays painted by Raphael (who also worked as a stage designer) and the bars from which actors impersonating saints and angels were suspended during heavenly stage scenes at the time (Buccheri 2014: 58). From a broad perspective, therefore, the vitality of art depended not only on the virtuosity of the artist and the imagination of the spectator, but on its participation in a total multisensory dynamic comprised of plays and performances, meals and music, and many other elements. While paintings and sculptures of earlier eras can still be seen in museums today, the more ephemeral displays which accompanied them are more or less out of sight and out of mind – encountered ‘only as pale ghosts that dwell in occasional texts’ (Belozerskaya 2005: 44).

Wonder-Working Images In the ancient world, statues of deities were believed to manifest very unstatue-like phenomena. As one nineteenth-century author put it: The Athenian statues all sweated before the battle of Chaeronea, so did the Roman statues during Tully’s consulship… Juno’s statue at Veii assented with a nod to go to Rome, Anthony’s statue on Mount Alban bled from every vein in its marble before the fight of Actium…. (Reade 1893: 914) In turn, statues might be ritually touched, bathed, clothed, fed and perfumed by their devotees (Perry 2015). Such sensuous ‘idolatry’ was condemned by the Church Fathers, but nonetheless found a counterpart in Christian devotional practices directed at representations of saints. (For the sensory life of icons in Byzantium, see Pentcheva 2010.) Throughout history, in fact, the paintings and sculptures which have most often been credited with vital powers and which people have most wanted to touch, have undoubtedly been sacred images. Considering that sacred images played a dominant role in the field of art for many centuries, this tactile approach to aesthetic

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representation inevitably influenced both the production and the experience of art in the West. Sacred paintings and statues gave a physical presence to significant persons and events in Christian history. They were object lessons for the masses, providing visual and material confirmation of the stories heard in church (Palazzo 2014; Quiviger 2014). They also, similar to relics, served as tangible focal points of religiosity. Compared to relics, religious images had the disadvantage of never having been in physical contact with the saints they depicted. This meant that sacred power was not inherently present in their material substance. This disadvantage might be overcome in two ways. One was when a particular image was deemed to have been touched by a saint and to have acquired sacred power through this means. For example, the statue of Our Lady of the Pillar in Spain is said to have been personally presented to St. James by the Virgin Mary, making it a tactile relic, as well as a religious image. Other examples include images of Christ and the Virgin Mary said to have been painted by St. Luke and therefore endowed with a saintly touch. The shrines of such image relics sometimes rival the shrines of saints as sites of pilgrimage. The other, more usual, way to ‘empower’ an image was to couple it with a saintly relic. A graphic illustration of such coupling comes from a Renaissance account of a sick man who gazed at a picture of St. Philip Neri while consuming a physical relic of the saint. On finding himself healed, ‘the poor man … went and took down the picture, and kissed it over and over again, shedding an abundance of tears, and he likewise made all who were in his house kiss it…’ (Bacci 1847: 224–5). Here picture and relic worked together, with the first serving to receive devotion and tribute, and the second to perform the desired medicinal effect. In order to create a more permanent fusion of relic and image, relics might be placed in the back or frame of a painting, or inside a statue or crucifix. This worked to the advantage of both image and relic: the image gained tactile efficacy while the relic acquired a compelling visual accompaniment (see Figure 1.1). Carvings of the crucified Christ, for example, sometimes contained supposed pieces of the True Cross. When worshippers kissed such a relic-endowed carving they could therefore follow a chain of tactile links back to the actual body of Christ. Though some might hold that ‘painted saints are nothing’ (Kamen 1993: 139), saintly representations were sometimes thought to work wonders even without accompanying relics. Such images, furthermore, had the desirable quality of being endlessly reproducible. Referring to St. Christopher’s reputed ability to calm storms, a sixteenth-century Spanish author noted that, ‘Being unable to have his body everywhere, or a relic of his, [people] place his image, to go there at times of tornadoes and storms, to be freed of them by the saint’s intercession’ (cited by Carlos Varona 2010: 111). When a relic was not available, it seems that a picture might do almost as well. As relic-like objects, the most effective and appropriate way to interact with sacred images was through the sense of touch. The Church promoted

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such devotional touching by granting indulgences to believers who kissed saintly images. The bright colours of paintings also incited viewers to touch and kiss. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote: Some beautiful picture of a saint is exhibited – and the brighter the colours the greater the holiness attributed to it; men run, eager to kiss [it], then they are invited to give [a donation]…. (cited by Morison 1884: 131) The tactile attractions of paint pigments were enhanced by the healing powers colours reputedly possessed; significantly,‘color makers, apothecaries, and frequently physicians all belonged to the same guild of St. Luke, and all often produced and sold both medicaments and paints’ (Smith 2004: 113; see also Classen 2012: 128–9). Many of the sacred images of the Middle Ages were not hung on walls but located in illuminated manuscripts. In fact, ‘more compositions were planned and executed by illuminators than by any other class of medieval painter’ (Thompson 1956: 24). In the case of an illuminated gospel or service book, the power of the saintly images complemented the sacrality of the text to create a potent whole. It might not even be thought necessary to look at the pictures or words in the book to benefit from their power, merely touching or holding the closed book was enough (Kingsley 2014). With the new emphasis on artistic realism in the late Middle Ages and after, tactually enticing trompe l’oeil effects were increasingly employed in sacred art. The dramatic use of light and shadow during the Baroque period added a further illusion of tangibility by making the saintly figures depicted seemingly pop out of the dark at the viewer. For example, Francisco Zurbarán’s sharply defined painting of Christ on the cross, highlighted against a dark background, was often mistaken for a three-dimensional carving (Bray et al. 2009: 197). In the shadowy light of a church such effects would have been particularly striking. As Bernard of Clairvaux indicated in the quote cited above, it was financially rewarding for churches and monasteries to own pictures with touch appeal, as they might thereby receive increased donations from impressed pilgrims. As methods of technical reproduction improved, it became possible for ordinary people to possess their own holy pictures. The unlimited amount of contact made possible by the personal ownership of such a picture could be intoxicating. Margaret Ebner wrote: I possessed a little book in which there was a picture of the Lord on the cross. I shoved it secretly against my bosom, open to that place, and wherever I went I pressed it to my heart with great joy and measureless grace. When I wanted to sleep, I took the picture of the Crucified Lord in the little book and laid it under my face. (cited in Classen 2012: 180) Interactions with religious images were not necessarily one-sided. As occurred with the statues of deities in the ancient world, Christian images

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might be said to speak, move, sweat and bleed. In the twelfth century, the Benedictine monk Rupert of Deutz recorded his vision of the vivification of a carved Christ on a crucifix. When I looked [at the crucifix] more closely, I recognized that it was the Lord Jesus himself who was there, crucified and alive, with his eyes open and directed at me… [I] held him, embraced him, and kissed him for a long time. (cited by Viladesau 2006: 77) Such accounts provide a potent sacred counterpart to the ancient myth of Pygmalion. However, while in the story of Pygmalion the beauty and lifelike qualities of the artwork itself are central, in the case of miraculous images, even ‘poor’ art could make for a transcendent experience. The aesthetic quality of a sacred image was subordinate to its supernatural associations, and its presumed tactile power ultimately took precedence over its visual attractions. This is evidenced by the fact that copies of sacred images would often be touched to the original in order to participate in their power, whereas no one thought of doing this with copies of famous secular statues or paintings. This is not to say that aesthetic values were not appreciated in sacred images. If this were the case, there would have been no reason for artists to put much effort into their religious works. Yet many of the acknowledged masterpieces of Western art were created for devotional use and were admired for their artistic virtuosity, as well as touched and kissed as sacred icons. Often the two values merged. When a pair of Renaissance artists restored the Ghent altarpiece by the Van Eyck brothers, they were reportedly moved ‘with such love that they kissed that skilful work of art in many places’ (cited by Nash 2008: 67). A seventeenth-century admirer of Bernini’s bust of Pope Urban VIII praised it in a madrigal: It is alive, alive, Bernini, Urban’s sacred head, work by your hand… I would kiss his foot, if only you would sculpt it. (cited by Gastel 2012: 97) Were these admirers reverencing the consummate artistry of magnificent works or the saintly figures they portrayed? Likely both at once.

Making Art Visual With the Reformation the role of images in religion came under attack – both verbally and actually. The English Puritan William Dowsing, nicknamed ‘Smasher’, left a record of his icon-breaking activities. One entry reads: ‘We

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brake down 1000 Pictures superstitious; I brake down 200; 3 of God the Father, and 3 of Christ, and the Holy Lamb, and 3 of the Holy Ghost like a Dove with Wings’ (Dowsing 1885: 15). The shock experienced by worshippers, who would have touched, kissed and prayed before many of these images, would have been enormous. From the reformers’ point of view, traditional interactions with sacred images were coarsely sensuous and idolatrous. Philip of Marnix, a Belgian iconoclast, listed such interactions with disgust: They doe greatly esteeme and worship the images of our Lady and of other holy saints, and doe kisse and licke them & trim them up with goodly garments and jewelles … and cense them with sweete incense, and sing hymnes and other songs of praise devoutly before them and … carry them about upon their shoulders…. (Philip of Marnix 1636: 236) The fact that not a sense is left out of this litany of ‘idolatrous’ practices indicated the totality of such worshippers’ immersion in what the iconoclasts saw as an ‘animistic’ worldview (see Milner 2011). In England, Bishop Nicholas Shaxton declared that people required instruction in the proper use of sacred images, ‘that is to say, only to behold, or look upon them, as one looketh upon a book’ (cited in Aston 1988: 232). Images were now to be scanned and ‘read’, rather than touched and reverenced. If the new regime could strip religious art of its multisensoriality, what of secular art? When idolatry was not an issue, was appreciating an artwork through touch acceptable? The practice had many supporters, particularly as regards sculpture. One of these was the Renaissance art critic Lorenzo Ghiberti who wrote in reference to the tactile beauty of ancient sculpture: ‘there was the greatest refinement, which the eye would not have discovered, had not the hand sought it out’ (cited by Johnson 2002: 64). The eighteenthcentury art historian Johann Winckelmann similarly considered the subtleties of ancient sculpture to be at times ‘more apparent to touch than to sight’ (2006: 203). The philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder was another supporter of a tactile appreciation of sculpture (2002). Moreover, prior to the modern era no firm divide separated the fine arts from the decorative arts (Belozerskaya 2005: 229). Renowned sculptors also designed salt cellars and candlesticks. Eminent painters decorated furniture. The evident manual uses of such craft work seemed to naturally bring artistic productions within the realm of touch. However, in the view of the anti-touch brigade, touch was primitive and vulgar and therefore not an apt medium for experiencing the lofty values of art (Johnson 2011: 66). It was this view which came to dominate modern aesthetic theory (see Candlin 2010: 2). Influential philosophers such as Hegel and Kant agreed that art requires ‘pure’ visual contemplation. Touch, it was claimed, kept one tied to the base material world and thus could never experience beauty as a spiritual value. The ‘fondling of the voluptuous parts of marble statues of female goddesses has nothing to do with the contemplation

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of art’, Hegel quipped, dismissing with one jibe any possibility of touch having aesthetic value (1975a: 621). As a result of such attacks, both painting and sculpture were cut off from tactile experience. Only craftwork remained within the realm of touch, its manual characteristics seemingly preventing it from achieving the visionary qualities of ‘true’ art (Classen 2014). This exaltation of sight over touch was consonant with the rise in importance of visual media in an era of increased literacy and improved technologies of representation. Emphasizing the visual values of fine art also served to downgrade the aesthetic productions of women and nonWesterners, which tended to be characterized as tactile in nature: mere handiwork (see Classen 2005). Ultimately, ‘tactile’ art was said to be ‘primitive’ art. ‘As long as man is still a savage’, Schiller proclaimed in ‘On the Aesthetic Education of Man’, ‘he enjoys by means of [his] tactile senses alone’ (1982: 195). Conveniently then, given the social ideologies of the time, only (sighted) white males could truly be artists. From this perspective, any attempt to reintegrate touch into aesthetic experience could be understood as a dangerous ‘feminization’ or ‘primitivization’ of art. Not only aesthetic ideals, but also social hierarchies depended on keeping the visual arts visual. The visualist approach to art, with its rationalist, high culture associations, had strong support in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art criticism. It also dovetailed with the disappearance of many of the craft elements of painting (such as the preparation of paints), as they became relegated to technicians, and with the casting of the artist as a high-minded visionary who produced ‘masterpieces’, not decorative housewares. Among other things, these modern ideas led to tableaux vivants being disdained by aesthetic purists for their ‘crude’ materiality. Speaking of the practice of transforming paintings into ‘living pictures’, a nineteenth-century critic scathingly suggested that one might as well have one of Haydn’s symphonies ‘baked in a paté, so that it could be enjoyed with the tongue’ (Tantillo 2001: 17). Such crossing of the ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ senses was intolerable. As might be expected, trompe l’oeil works also lost favour. Whereas making a painting so lifelike that viewers were lured to touch it was once a sign of artistic virtuosity, now it was but skilful artifice, a gimmick, unworthy of the name of art. Hegel sneered: The grapes painted by Zeuxis have from antiquity onward been styled a triumph of art … because living doves are supposed to have pecked at them…. Instead of praising works of art because they have deceived even doves … we should just precisely censure those who think of exalting a work of art by predicating so miserable an effect as this as its highest and supreme quality. (1975b: 42–3) Thinking along the same lines, Schopenhauer called the Dutch still lifes of food which had been so popular a century earlier a ‘very low’ type of art: ‘By

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their deceptive appearance these necessarily excite the appetite, and this is just a stimulation of the will which puts an end to any aesthetic contemplation of the subject’ (cited by Korsmeyer 1999: 160). Art appreciation evidently had to be cleansed of material desires, and for this only a disinterested gaze would do. The result was a fracturing of the sensorium which mandated that even representations of such a multisensory subject as food have only eye appeal. The twentieth-century art historian Norman Bryson put it succinctly in a passage praising the austere still lifes of Juan Sánchez Cotán: ‘food enters the eye, but [does] not pass through touch or taste’ (see Korsmeyer 1999: 166). Bryson was even more enthusiastic about the optical effects supposedly achieved by Francisco Zurbarán: Zurbarán first creates a scene which greatly depends on ideas of touch and the memory of hands, and belongs to the visually lazy or sightless journeys of the body through its immediate envelope of space. Then he floods the stage with light, separates visual from tactile form, and offers the eye – alone – a spectacle so immaculately self-contained that the only appropriate response is to disown the tactile reflexes as crude and hamfisted. (1990: 76) The implication is that to excite tactile or gustatory interest is to wallow in the mindless domain of physical gratification. Conversely, the more an artwork sideswipes tactile interest by the imperiousness of its visual power, the greater its merits. Writing in the 1960s the eminent art critic Clement Greenberg emphasized the Modernist drive to place ‘an ever higher premium on sheer visibility and an ever lower one on the tactile and its associations’ (1961: 144). In light of this, the role of contemporary sculpture, according to Greenberg, was ‘to render substance entirely optical’, and that of art to free itself ‘from the interference of tactile sensations’ (1961: 144; Jones 2005: 421). The ‘glorious’ end result would be that ‘the human body is no longer postulated as the agent of space in either pictorial or sculptural art; now it is eyesight alone’ (cited by Jones 2005: 314). From this new perspective, Greenberg hoped that ‘a more enlightened connoisseurship’ might even be able to perceive a Rembrandt, with its ‘piles’ of ‘juicy paint’ as an ensemble of sheerly optical values (1961: 138, 143). This, of course, was the rarefied perspective of art theorists. Down on the ground, people kept on responding to art through a plurality of senses. After the eighteenth century, trompe l’oeil pictures lost favour with the academy but they continued to please the public. ‘Press reports … regularly claimed that [trompe l’oeil paintings] presented illusions so persuasive that viewers tried to grasp, touch, or enter them’ (Leja 2004: 125). In Catholic and Orthodox communities the touching and kissing of images persisted. The wooden statue and stone pillar of Our Lady of the Pillar in Spain continue to be venerated and caressed as they have been since the Middle Ages. Saintly portraits by Zurbarán continue to be touched by worshippers, who

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remain unaware that ‘the only appropriate response’ to the artist’s work is ‘to disown the tactile reflexes as crude and ham-fisted’. Though artworks in museums are hands-off, it is difficult to imagine many people who, in possession of a private sculpture gallery, would refrain from any form of tactile appreciation, no matter the dictates of aesthetic theory. This is not to say that no change has taken place in our ways of engaging with art. There is now much more concern over conservation – and a whole class of specialists to promote that concern. The notion that touch is dirty and damaging now colours our sensory responses to art. Moreover, in a world of boundless visual representations, works of art can hardly make the impression they made in days when images were rare. One would be hardpressed to find many museum visitors today manifesting the sensations of extreme wonder and emotional turmoil described by Hoogstraten and others as characteristic responses to great works of art. Technical factors, notably the greater visibility afforded by electric lighting, have furthermore reduced the need to supplement sight with touch. We see more, more often, and better than ever before, so why bother with clumsy manual exertions? In fact, much of our experience of the world now comes from its purely audio-visual representation on flat electronic screens. Already in the eighteenth century, people were experiencing the luminescent pleasures of ‘magic lantern’ projections. An illustration of the time, The Magic Lantern by Paul Sandby (Figure 2.4) tellingly shows paintings that have been draped with a sheet in order to provide a backdrop

Figure 2.4  The Magic Lantern, Paul Sandby (courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum).

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for a more compelling slideshow. This now seems like a portent of things to come, for the pictures we are most accustomed to in the twenty-first century are the descendants of such immaterial creations of light. Perhaps this is why the conference-goers at the Rijksmuseum seemed more at ease with images of paintings projected on a screen than with the three-dimensional reproduction of a Rembrandt that stood nearby on an easel, waiting to be touched. Nonetheless, however much galleries of light may beckon today, acquiring a feel for the art of the past requires delving into older ways of sensing the world.

3 The Lure of the Unseen: Egyptian Mummies My first encounter with a mummy exhibit was on a hot summer day in the British Museum when the mummy room was so packed that it was scarcely possible to breathe. I realized then, as I jostled my way through the overheated room to the more serene atmosphere of the Roman antiquities, the enormous draw of the mummy – an exhibit that I personally found unpleasantly macabre and morally questionable. The Egyptian mummy is definitely the star of the museum. Every early museum worth its name needed a mummy on exhibit. Even in the sixteenth century, we hear of the merchant John Sanderson visiting a mummy burial ground outside Cairo and taking away various ‘heads, hands, arms, and feet for a shewe’ (1931: 45). It was in the nineteenth century, however, that the mummy became spectacularly popular as a museum piece: ‘Ask a London boy what he saw in the Museum and he will instantly reply, “The Mummies!”’ (Stock 1884: 175). This fascination was fostered by the nineteenth-century obsession with death. It was a century in which not only mummified bodies but also morgue displays were public diversions. An administrator at the Parisian Morgue remarked that: ‘The Morgue is considered in Paris like a museum that is much more fascinating than even a wax museum because the people displayed are real flesh and blood.’ Conversely, a French cartoon of 1882 had a visitor exclaim, as he gawked at a wax figure laid out on a slab in the Musée Grévin, ‘This is almost as much fun as the real Morgue!’ (cited by Williams 1995: 93–4). While mummies may not have had the captivating immediacy of the bodies at the morgue, they did have the allure of wizened antiquity, and, in particular, of ancient Egypt. Interest in Egypt was at a fever pitch in the early nineteenth century. Colonial forays were made into the country: the French invaded in 1792 and shortly afterwards withdrew, the Ottoman Empire struggled to gain control, and in the late-nineteenth-century Egypt became a British protectorate. Archaeological expeditions sent tantalizing reports back to Europe of the discovery of royal tombs and ancient treasures. With the help of the Rosetta Stone and its trilingual text, long-forgotten hieroglyphs were decoded. Thrilled by such discoveries, Europe entered into a period of ‘Egyptomania’. ‘Everything must now be Egyptian’, declared

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Figure 3.1  The Egyptian galleries at the British Museum newly illuminated with electric light (London Daily News, 19 January 1890).

Robert Southey at the turn of the nineteenth century, ‘the ladies wear crocodile ornaments and you sit on a sphinx in a room hung round with mummies’ (1808: 275). It was at this time that the British Museum began to amass its truly monumental and enduringly popular collection of Egyptian artefacts (Figure 3.1). Even more than concealed tombs and cryptic hieroglyphs, the mummy fired the Western imagination. That the bodies of the actual inhabitants of ancient Egypt had survived to the present day to be gazed at by the curious seemed almost incredible. Here, however, lay a dilemma. Though the mummies could be taken out of their tombs and placed in the bright light of museums, they remained inscrutable inside their wrappings. Both the voyeur and the scientist demanded that the mummy be unwrapped for a more thorough viewing. The seventeenth-century Dutch physician Otto Heurnius, who displayed mummies in his anatomical museum, accommodated the desire to see the body beneath the bandages by including a mummy with ‘the face from the eyes to the chin and the big toe … uncovered’ (Schoneveld 1996: 11). Heurnius’s mummy was exposed just enough to satisfy curiosity and to prove that it was a true mummy, from head to toe, and no mere counterfeit (something museum-goers often suspect mummies of being even today [Day 2006: 137–8]).

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In the nineteenth century, the prominent Egyptologist Thomas Pettigrew staged mummy unwrappings which were attended by hundreds of paying spectators. A member of the audience on one of these occasions described how Pettigrew unrolled and cut through the layers of cloth in which a mummy from Thebes was swathed. ‘The greatest interest was evinced by the spectators to witness the process, and from time to time pieces of the bandages were handed to the ladies in the boxes.’ After about an hour’s work ‘the face was uncovered’ revealing hollow eyes and ‘a complacent smile’. When the unwrapping had come to an end ‘the mummy was raised on its feet, and presented to the company, and its erect appearance on the stage was received with enthusiastic applause’ (‘Unrolling a Mummy’ 1844: 217). It was a dramatic performance. No single unwrapping ever sufficed, however, because every mummy was distinct. Anything might emerge when the covers came off: a man, a woman, an animal – or perhaps, nothing at all, as some counterfeit mummies were all bandages. The story was told of a tourist who ‘hacked open’ a mummy he had bought in Alexandria and instead of a body found several European newspapers and a British Museum reading room ticket (‘Notes’ 1908: 4). This circular search, which started with a museum piece and ended in a museum library, symbolizes the difficulty of extracting any ‘truth’ from the mummy that is not grounded in the culture of one’s own time. In fact, as we survey the social life of the mummy in the nineteenth century, it becomes evident that to many this mysterious ‘parcel’ seemed to say – ‘make of me what you will’.

The Most Interesting Object of All The Egyptomania of the early 1800s led the collector William Bullock to build a museum in Egyptian style to display his collection of artefacts. It was in this London museum that a novel exhibition of Egyptian antiquities was presented in the 1820s. The Egyptologist Giovanni Belzoni used the museum to re-create part of the tomb of Seti I, which he had discovered in 1817. Vibrant representations of Egyptian gods were painted on the walls, artefacts were illuminated by lamplight and the mummies themselves were laid out on a serpent-headed table (Mayes 2003: 261). Not all visitors were appreciative of this immersive display. The writer Marguerite Gardiner noted some of the comments she overheard during her visit to the exhibit: ‘After mounting a steep and dark stair-case, the first sentence we heard was uttered by a lady, who exclaimed, “O dear, how hot the Tomb is!” and another remarked, “That there was not light sufficient to see the gods.”’ Gardiner heard one ‘fat, red-faced’ woman exclaim that ‘looking at them there mummies … made her feel so queerish’, while another declared that she ‘hated everything Egyptian, ever since she had heard of the [biblical] plagues’. In the meantime, the fashionable crowd flirted and school boys amused themselves ‘by discovering likenesses to each other in the monstrous deities displayed on the wall’ (Gardiner 1822: 40–8).

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The exhibition was wildly popular. One visitor, Horace Smith, was inspired to write an ‘Address to the Mummy in Belzoni’s Exhibition’, which would be endlessly cited and reprinted: Since first thy form was in this box extended, We have, above-ground, seen some strange mutations;The Roman Empire has begun and ended; New worlds have risen, – we have lost old nations; And countless kings have into dust been humbled, While not a fragment of thy flesh has crumbled. (1825: 139) Reading such lines impressed museum-goers with a sense of wonder at the fact that the mummy at which they gazed had been a living body in an age so remote it seemed almost mythological. And thou hast walked about (how strange a story!) In Thebes’s streets three thousand years ago… (1825: 137) Mummies provided museum visitors with object lessons in ancient history, but even more importantly, according to numerous Victorian writers, they offered moral and religious lessons. In The Museum, a fictionalized account of a museum tour, two children are taken to see ‘the most interesting object of all’ – a mummy. The children in that pre-mass-media era are unable to identify the strange object before them. ‘Now do tell us what it is, Sir’, asks Edward. ‘It is a human being’, answers their guide impressively. Jane immediately shrinks back, crying out ‘Oh! is it a man – a dead man!’ Her father, however urges her to stay: ‘I heard you once say that you should like to see an Egyptian mummy, and now you have your wish’ (Tonna 1835: 121). The children are educated by their guide about practices of mummification but soon move on to deeper matters. Had the mummy a soul? Was it in Heaven? ‘We know that an immortal soul once dwelt in that body now before us’, the father pontificates, ‘but whether it is, at this day, with Christ in blessedness, or with the rebellious spirits … under chains and darkness … is not for us to decide’. One thing the mummy did seem to make clear to Christian viewers: it was the soul that required preservation from corruption and not the body. ‘O let us keep the soul embalmed and pure’ declaimed Horace Smith in his ‘Address to the Mummy’, ‘although corruption may our frame consume’ (1825: 139). ‘Beseech [God] to bestow on you grace to be his faithful servants’, the guide sternly lectures Edward and Jane in The Museum, ‘ere you become like this, a lump of senseless, helpless, immovable clay’ (Tonna 1835: 130). Improbable as it might seem, therefore, the mummy served as a stimulus for Christian piety. It was a potent memento mori, reminding all who saw it that life was short and death was long. Lady Meux, who had her own private Egyptian museum, used to pray every day by the side of a mummy

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in its case (Haggard 1926: 33). When a traveller visited Belzoni’s widow in 1844, she found her reading the Bible beside a mummy: The disconsolate [widow] was still in faded weeds, and intently occupied in reading from a very fine folio Bible. A large coffin, covered with hieroglyphics, stood open and upright before her – it contained the most perfect mummy perhaps in existence. (Morgan 1833: 697) An interesting pairing of antiquities occurs here in the juxtaposition of the ‘fine folio Bible’ and the ‘most perfect mummy’. (The writer also seems to pair the widow with the mummy.) A related Victorian response to mummies was to associate them with biblical events and personages. The fictional children in The Museum compare the mummy to Lot’s wife, who was turned into salt, as well as to the body of Jesus, which was treated with spices and wound with linen (Tonna 1835: 126, 128). Authors of nineteenth-century commentaries on museums often pointed out that ‘both Jacob and Joseph became Egyptian mummies’ when they died and were embalmed in Egypt (Long 1846: 99; Stock 1884: 175). It was suggested that the mummy might even be seen as the last word of Creation since the book of Genesis closes with ‘put in a coffin in Egypt’ (Stock 1884: 175). The mummy lent verisimilitude to the Bible – ‘even the lifeless and decaying remains of ancient Egypt are giving their evidence to the truth of the Book of books’ (‘Egypt’s Testimony’ 1871: 211) – and the Bible metaphorically brought those ‘decaying remains’ to life. The ‘most interesting object’ in the museum became even more interesting as a potential contemporary of Joseph, of Abraham, or even, as one perhaps less-thanreverent museum-goer observed, of Adam (Meriwether 1887: 67).

The Scariest Exhibit Mummies evoked a range of emotional responses in their Western viewers. Those who were saddened felt both the mummy’s vulnerability to illtreatment – in The Museum Edward is said to be half crying at the mummy’s piteous exposed condition – and the sharp contrast between the ‘poor, hard thing’ it now was and the living being it had once been (Wilson 1856: 155). As Horace Smith poignantly put it: A heart has throbbed beneath that leathern breast, And tears adown that dusty cheek have roll’d: – Have children climbed those knees, and kissed that face? What was thy name and station, age and race? (1825: 139). An additional note of pathos was sounded by the fact that the funerary customs which had preserved the body of the mummy had been performed

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in the hope of an afterlife among the Egyptian deities; a hope which, from the Christian point of view, was completely vain. Never would those poor souls, whose bodies continued on and on and on, dwell in the fertile realms of Osiris. Nor was it likely, many felt, that they would find a place in Heaven. ‘Poor Egyptian man!’ said Jane – ‘it makes me sad to look upon him, because I have not much hope that he belonged to Christ’ (Tonna 1835: 127). Not only were mummies godless in the eyes of many, they were also representatives of the empire that had enslaved the biblical people of God. European museum-goers, believing that they looked on the bodies of the very Pharaohs who had oppressed the ancient Israelites, saw cruelty and severity in their mummified features: We saw Pharaoh today. The very one that oppressed the Israelites. His body lies in the museum at Cairo. Visible are the very teeth that he gnashed against the Israelitish brick-makers, the sockets of the merciless eyes with which he looked upon the overburdened people of God. (Dewitt Talmage 1893: 46) While anger was sometimes directed at the mummies, however, more often, it was felt on their behalf. There was a widespread feeling that mummy displays violated the sanctity of the grave. ‘In gazing at the mummies exhibited in the [British] Museum … we almost feel that sacrilege has been committed, in tearing them from their quiet resting-places in the East, and placing them here as spectacles for the sight-seer’ (‘Egypt’ 1867: 36). There was also a feeling that it was an affront to the social order to make mummies – who had once moved in the highest echelons of Egyptian society – a spectacle for the vulgar masses. The author H. Rider Haggard denounced the exposure of royal mummies to ‘the gibes of tourists who find the awful majesty of their withered brows a matter of jests and smiles’ (cited by Luckhurst 2014: 190). A nineteenth-century commentator wrote of a mummy in the British Museum that ‘surely the old king would rather have been left in his pyramid than brought to this unroyal shelf, to share the distinction of being gazed at by the British public with the gorilla and the sun-fish’ (R.S.P. 1862: 235). All exhibits were equivalent in the museum – a marked counterpoint to the social hierarchy outside the museum. Then again, the ancient Egyptians themselves could be blamed for the sad lot of their remains, for it was they who had ‘presumptuously’ preserved their bodies instead of allowing them to decay and disappear (Gardiner 1822: 46). ‘Oh what a lesson to human pride, when the very means taken to keep that body from mixing with its kindred dust have only occasioned it to be brought here to be gazed and wondered at by the humblest who choose to appreciate it!’ (Tonna 1835: 122). If the Egyptians could have foreseen the consequences, it was said, would not they ‘have preferred the natural process of becoming quietly resolved into dust to occupying … even the … distinguished position of the best glass-case in a Royal Museum?’ (Romer 1846: 294). Of all the emotions aroused by the mummy, however, fear was the one which with it became most closely associated. Nonetheless, at the beginning

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of the nineteenth century, mummies do not seem to have been regarded as exceptionally scary. Among the fads promoted by Egyptomania, it is not mummies that Robert Southey thought would make children ‘afraid to go to bed’, but Egyptian drawings – ‘black, lean-armed long-nosed hieroglyphical men’ (1808: 275). It would take a combination of religion, science and fiction to turn the mummy into the scariest exhibit in the museum. ‘Tell me, Papa’, asks Jane, looking at the mummy in The Museum, ‘will that very same body which we now see, come to life again at the day of judgement?’ ‘It will be substantially the same, my dear.’ (Tonna 1835: 120–3) In an era when the last days seemed very real and near to many, the thought of mummies suddenly rising at the sound of a heavenly trumpet could be frightening. Christina Rosetti recalled an acquaintance who ‘shrank from entering the Mummy Room at the British Museum under a vivid realization of how the general resurrection might occur even as one stood among those solemn corpses turned into a sight for sightseers’ (1886: 157). While religion gave God the responsibility for reanimating the dead on the Day of Judgement, however, the nineteenth-century mind was inclined to think that science might do the trick at an earlier date. The revival of the dead by electricity (‘the spark of life’), for example, was a subject of intense scientific interest in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Novelists were quick to follow up on the imaginative possibilities of such reanimations. The most notable product of this fusion of science and fiction was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which told the story of a ‘monster’ created from an assemblage of body parts and vivified. This novel made a deep impression on a public already fascinated by the subject of death. After years of exploring Egyptian tombs, the last delirious words of Henry Salt, collector for the British Museum, were, ‘Oh Doctor, this is Frankenstein!’ (Manley and Rice 2001: 269). Although Shelley declared that her monster was more horrific than even ‘a mummy again endued with animation’, mummies were singled out by writers as prime subjects for a fictional resurrection. After all, did not the meticulous embalming of the mummy suggest that it had been preserved for a future revival? Contemporary scientific experimentation made it possible to imagine such a revival occurring at any moment. Early works making use of the theme of the reanimated mummy include the novel The Mummy by Jane Webb (1827), the play The Mummy by William Bayle Bernard (1833) and Poe’s ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ (1845). While the mummies portrayed in these stories were not particularly scary, the topic proved irresistibly creepy and, over time, the revivified mummy became a staple of horror literature. Hence mummies became frightening not only because they were dead, but because they were potentially alive. In recounting his experiences in Africa, David Livingstone remarked on

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how local children often fled from their first encounter with a white man ‘in an agony of terror, such as we might feel if we met a live Egyptian mummy at the door of the British Museum’. (1865: 181). By the time the famed explorer was writing in the 1860s, the imagined encounter with an ambulating mummy had become a standard by which to measure experiences of terror. Adding to the fear factor of the mummy was the shrouded mystery of its body. The mummy of nightmares was not the unwrapped, exposed mummy, but the bandaged, inscrutable, mummy. The bandages implied wounds and disfigurement, a body too horrific to be viewed. The blindfolded eyes and swaddled limbs of the mummy stimulated visions of horrible shuffling and groping movements which would prolong the agony of the mummy’s victim. The bandages furthermore made it difficult to tell if a mummy, lying so still in its case, was in fact dead, or simply biding its time. The work of Egyptologists increasingly made it clear that the mummy was the product of a culture steeped in powerful ritual traditions. Perhaps, then, the mummy had no need of Western science to spring into action. Perhaps the priestcraft of ancient Egypt had already endowed it with supernatural powers. Such ideas were fed by the nineteenth-century interest in spiritualism and resulted in psychics requesting to spend the night in the Egyptian galleries at the British Museum so that they could commune with the souls of the mummies housed there (Luckhurst 2014: 38). The mummy of the popular imagination was a vengeful creature who levelled curses at those who disturbed its peace. An inscription on an Egyptian sphinx in the British Museum (engraved perhaps by some ancient sceptic) declared that: ‘I touch without fear of harm’ (Long 1846: 218). The same could not be said with entire truth of museum-goers who came into contact with mummies. Many visitors, in fact, experienced a lurking fear that the mummy they touched might touch them back, even ‘come bounding … with blazing eyes and one stringy arm outthrown’, as Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in one of his mummy stories (2000: 270). Jane Webb’s The Mummy! detailed the horror of such a touch: Edric saw the Mummy stretch out its withered hand as though to seize him. He saw it rise gradually – he heard the dry, bony fingers rattle as it drew them forth – he felt its tremendous grip – human nature could bear no more. (1828: 220) Even a look from the painted face on a mummy coffin could terrify. Rider Haggard related how the painted coffin lid of one reputedly vengeful mummy came to the British Museum in 1889. A visitor showed up at the museum eager to donate the lid with its image of a woman’s face. After ensuring the immediate acceptance of the lid, the visitor is said to have declared: Thank God you have taken the damned thing! There is an evil spirit in it which appears in its eyes. It was brought home by a friend of mine who … lost all his money when a bank in China broke, and his daughter

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died. I took the board into my house. The eyes frightened my daughter into a sickness. I moved it to another room, and it threw down a china cabinet and smashed a lot of Sevres china in it. The cook saw it and fainted, and the other servants saw flashes of fire come away from the eyes, and ran away from the house. (cited by Luckhurst 2014: 35) ‘All this got into the papers’, Haggard noted, ‘and much nonsense besides’ (Luckhurst 2014). The fearsome reputation of that particular mummy accessory was made. Once on display in the British Museum, it reportedly caused a number of injuries and deaths, and would even be credited with the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, after a story circulated that it had been aboard the ship en route to the United States. With the public’s appetite for miscreant mummies whetted by such tales, the supernatural activities of mummies became a choice topic for writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle (1894) and Bram Stoker (2008 [1903]). The early twentieth-century archaeologist Margaret Murray always warned her students before taking them to see the mummy exhibit at the British Museum: ‘We are now going into the room where the so-called unlucky mummy is; if you believe in it you needn’t come, stay where you are’ (1963: 176). ‘Always there were a certain number of people who couldn’t face the thing’, Murray recalled. Perhaps that was because, as Murray notes, ‘it was even supposed to have killed people before they got out of the museum’ (1963). It must have been unnerving to think of ending a museum tour as dead as the artefacts one had just viewed.

The Mummy in the Flesh Despite the stories of curses, simply looking at mummies was not enough for those museum-goers who demanded a more intimate experience of these ‘statues of flesh’. Thus the writer Hezekiah Butterworth commented after a visit to the mummy exhibit in the Boston Museum: ‘We touched the head of one of these mummies … from a desire to realize the fact that we had touched the body of a man who lived three thousand years ago’ (Butterworth 1886: 162–3). The greatest opportunities for acquiring such tactile knowledge occurred not in museums, however, but in the mummies’ original burial sites in Egypt. There Europeans experienced the full materiality of mummies, with excitement, shock, disgust and even, eventually, nonchalance. Indeed, in parts of Egypt, notably Thebes, mummies were so plentiful, and so insistently offered up to tourists, that it was difficult to avoid coming into contact with them. One visitor to Thebes wrote that on approaching an underground burial chamber, ‘we were suddenly startled with the apparition of a troop of Arabs, men, women, and children, who issued out of it, and came running to us, each holding up an arm, leg, or skull of a mummy, which they were emulously screaming to us to buy of them’ (Morris 1843: 76). The very ground was said to be littered with mummy remains as the

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corpses were torn up in the quest for ornaments and saleable body parts. Many tourists were shocked by this experience. It was one thing to see a mummy tidily and (at least superficially) respectfully presented in a museum, and another to see it dragged out of its burial place and rifled, perhaps dismembered, by seekers of curios. The mummy, which seemed so powerful when enveloped in legends of curses, appeared abjectly powerless when broken to pieces and scattered over the sands. While many travellers condemned such ‘mummy abuse’, they usually ended up feeling overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of mummies on hand. Florence Nightingale, who visited Egypt in the mid-nineteenth century, reported burying the pieces of a mummy that had been pulled apart by her guides ‘decently out of sight’, yet moments later seeing another mummified body uncovered by the wind blowing over the sand (2003: 203). In fact, visitors to ancient burial grounds in Egypt often went from regarding mummies as human remains to be respected or curios to be treasured to considering them almost as commonplace as the shifting sand itself. This was particularly the case for those who entered subterranean mass graves and found themselves almost buried in mummies. Giovanni Belzoni offered an early description of the experience. After the exertion of entering into such a place… I sought a resting place, found one, and contrived to sit; but when my weight bore on the body of an Egyptian, it crushed like a band-box. I naturally had recourse to my hands to sustain my weight, but they found no better support; so that I sunk altogether among the broken mummies with a crash of bones, rags, and wooden cases, which raised such a dust as kept me motionless for a quarter of an hour, until it subsided. I could not remove from the place, however, without increasing it, and every step I took I crushed a mummy in some part or other. (1822: 243–5) Travellers likewise spoke of squeezing through narrow burial chambers, with their bodies unavoidably pressed up against the bodies of mummies. John Briggs reported that, after abruptly sliding into a burial chamber, I was instantly enveloped in a fine pulverised dust, through which I could but dimly see the guide holding out his hand to assist me to rise, which I instantly grasped, but, yah! it crumbled to powder – it was the extended arm of a mummy leaning up against the wall. (1859: 210) It was a far cry from merely patting a mummy on the head in a museum. Macabre embraces between humans and mummies found their way into fiction, as well as travellers’ tales. Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Ring of Thoth’, for example, ended with an Egyptian mummy and a dead museum attendant locked in an embrace at the Louvre. Such actual and literary embraces with mummies made one flesh, as it were, of the living and the dead. As the mummy often served as a tangible symbol of the mysterious East, these

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encounters also hinted at the possession of the Orient itself. On a smaller scale, embracing the quintessential museum object suggested a gathering of the whole museum, with its cultural power and material wealth, in one’s arms. The notion of being embraced by a mummy, in turn, carried the threat of being smothered by the museum. The mummy was, in a way, the museum made flesh, the dead ruler of a lifeless world. Touching mummies went hand in hand, as it were, with smelling them. While in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries mummies were often described as fragrant, the nineteenth-century experience of mummy burial sites emphasized stench. In 1834, James Augustus St. John described entering an ancient chamber of human and crocodile mummies in lurid, smelly detail: Everything…. [was] black as night, covered with soot, oily, slippery, and exhaling a stench unutterably disgusting… the passage grew low and narrow, so that it became necessary to creep forward on hands and knees.… This position I soon found extremely painful. The heat likewise appeared insufferable.… I felt the blood rush to my head, and experienced great sickness and faintness, accompanied by an extraordinary oppression of the lungs, greatly augmented by the odour of putrid corpses which issued from the extremities of the cave, and appeared to increase every moment. (Saint John 1834: 69) It was a blood-curdling, stomach-turning descent into hell, with malodour leading the way. It may be, as one visitor pointed out (Romer 1846: 292), that this stench was more the product of bat excrement than of mummies, however, most tourists made no such distinction. ‘I shall never forget the pungent odour which came forth to welcome us to the abode of Death’, exclaimed another traveller after entering a burial chamber: ‘We had got to some depth, with our pocket-handkerchiefs applied to our nasal organs, when the confined atmosphere, and the aforesaid essence of decayed mummies, became so very powerful, that not all the beckonings and gestures of our guides could induce us to go a step further’ (Steinmetz Kennard 1855: 116). In literary accounts the smell of the mummy wavered between the fragrance of spices and the stench of decay. This olfactory ambivalence signalled the mummy’s symbolism of both immortality and death. And, airy though it might be, mummy odour was described as virtually impossible to evade. ‘The Dream of Egypt was Eternity’, wrote Théophile Gautier, meditating on the aromas wafting from a mummy, ‘her odours have the solidity of granite, and endure as long’ (1890: 191). Bram Stoker agreed: You may put a mummy in a glass case and hermetically seal it so that no corroding air can get within, but all the same it will exhale its odour. One might think that four or five thousand years would exhaust the olfactory qualities of anything, but experience teaches us that these smells remain, and that their secrets are unknown to us. (2008: 36)

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The last question of the senses directed at the mummy was: How did it taste? The answer, apparently, was ‘somewhat acrid and bitterish’ (London Pharmacopeia 1747). Strange as it might seem, this gustatory experience was once not uncommon, for ‘mummy’ was prescribed by physicians as an excellent remedy for a variety of ailments from the Middle Ages into the nineteenth century. What had preserved one person’s body for so long could readily be imagined to help preserve another person’s body. Some lamented this trade in ancient remains: ‘Mummie is become Merchandise’, decried Thomas Browne in 1658, ‘and Pharoah is sold for Balsams’ (1852: 46). The renowned sixteenth-century physician Ambroise Paré commented that the ancient Egyptians could never have imagined ‘so horrid a wickednes’ as the eating of the bodies of their dead by future generations. As for the medicinal value of mummy, Paré wrote that the only results he had ever seen from its use were ‘vomiting and stink of the mouth’ (1649: 333). However, at a period when even ordinary corpses might be utilized for medicinal preparations, Paré’s arguments carried little weight. Indeed, the eventual decline of mummy medicine was perhaps not so much due to a loss of faith in its efficacy as to increasing suspicions that the mummy sold in pharmacies was counterfeit, rather than the genuine ancient Egyptian article (Cormack 1836: 149). Although most people were no longer eating mummies by the midnineteenth century, the prospect still intrigued. One way in which this was manifested was in frequent references to breathing in the dust of mummies. ‘The air is full of mummy-dust, which goes down your throat, do what you will’ was a comment often made by tourists at Egyptian burial sites (R.S.P. 1862: 236). In a passage that would be endlessly quoted for its frisson of cannibalism, Giovanni Belzoni wrote of his explorations in the mummy pits that ‘the dust … never failed to choke my throat and nose; and though, fortunately, I am destitute of the sense of smelling, I could taste that the mummies were rather unpleasant to swallow’. Preoccupation with the consumption of pulverized mummies extended to England. It was noted of a public mummy unwrapping in London that everyone present breathed in mummy dust. In one of his stories Charles Dickens mused that ‘Some of the component parts of the sharp-edged vapour that came flying up the Thames at London might be mummy dust, blown in from Egypt’ (1868: 264). Even the characteristic dustiness of the museum could be imagined to include particles of the mummies decaying within its halls. The notion of mummies being physically invasive – while we claim to possess them, they are, in fact, possessing us, even forcing themselves down our throats – was suggestive not only of the inescapability of death but also of the danger of being ‘overrun’, or ‘contaminated’, by colonial peoples. In an age of imperialism, the mummy dust, ‘blown in from Egypt’, hinted at the arrival of new peoples and new influences on Britain’s shores.

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A similar anxiety was expressed in Guy Boothby’s novel of 1899, Pharos the Egyptian, in which an Englishman is infected with a plague virus by an Egyptian mummy/magician who seeks revenge on the West for desecrating the ancient tombs of his homeland (1899). The museum mummy might be regarded as a trophy of imperialism; however, it had as its counterpart the spectre of the mummy as a threatening intruder. (This analogy only works up to a point, however, for not only Egyptian mummies had a history of being put on display, but also naturally mummified European bodies – such as the corpse of Queen Katherine, wife of Henry V, which was shown and handled for almost two centuries at Westminster Abbey.) Tasting mummy went beyond merely swallowing particles of mummy dust. With a mixture of disgust and gusto, travellers recorded seeing Egyptians burning mummies and coffins to cook their food. ‘Fancy one of these half-naked wretches stirring up the embers in his miserable oven with the shank of a Pharoah!’ (Romer 1846: 292, see also Phelps 1863: 178). Nor was it only the ‘wretched natives’ who made use of this form of fuel. In 1840, Sarah Rogers Haight cheerfully reported dining in an Egyptian tomb off food cooked over ‘charcoal from Cairo, and sundry portions of mummy from a neighbouring pit’ (1840: 134). The Egyptologist David Hogarth noted of food cooked over burning mummy coffins: ‘The dead wood… threw off an ancient and corpse-like smell, which left its faint savour on the toast which we scorched at the embers’ (1910: 157). Even goats’ milk was said to savour of mummy, as the goats ‘nibbled on the mummy wrappings’ (R.S.P. 1862). While accounts of the taste of mummy medicine customarily described it as unpleasant, in the nineteenth century people enjoyed savouring at least the idea of consuming mummies. A mid-nineteenth-century news item touted ‘mummy-steaks’ as a new gourmet food: ‘Mummy-steaks’, the last luxury introduced into London, are nothing more nor less than a regular beef-steak, cooked upon a fire made of Egyptian mummies. The mummies are broken up like hickory or maple wood, and the steak is laid upon the coals which proceed from their ignition… . A beef-steak is sure to gather an antiquated bituminous taste therefrom, which gourmands describe as especially delicious. (Church: 1853: 286) While in this account ‘mummy-steaks’ are only flavoured by mummy, in other (tongue-in-cheek) narratives they actually consist of mummy flesh: ‘When I was in Egypt with Sir Richard Bickerton … it was nothing uncommon to bring in a mummy and grill a steak or two – rather tough, but delicious’ (‘Drumstick Club’ 1837: 334). In a short period of time mummies had gone from being regarded as bitter medicine to being considered, at least facetiously, a tasty dish.

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An Anatomy of the Senses It was not on the dinner table, but on the anatomist’s table that mummies were most thoroughly broken down into their component colours, textures, odours and savours. As regards colour, the bodies of unwrapped mummies were generally described as black. A nineteenth-century account of the slow unveiling of a mummy at a public unwrapping reported that ‘at length the left foot was displayed to sight, and though black and shriveled, it excited much applause’ (cited by Daly 2000: 85). When Mary Shelley described her monster in Frankenstein as having the colour and texture of a mummy, therefore, the colour she imagined was likely black, rather than the now familiar green. As for the mummy texture Shelley had in mind for her monster, this was possibly leathery, but mummies, in fact, exhibited a wide range of tactile qualities. Some were soft and pliant and some were very brittle. Ernest Budge wrote of certain exemplars collected for the British Museum that they ‘crumbled in the hand even when touched with the utmost gentleness’ (2011). Others were very hard. This was the case with mummies which had been extensively treated with tarry bitumen as part of the embalming process and sometimes required sawing open at mummy unwrappings. One mummy found by Budge, that of the Lady Hentmehit, ‘was an oblong, black, shapeless mass, which was stuck to the bottom of the coffin, and to get it out it had to be broken in pieces’. One wonders why it was so necessary to remove Hentmehit’s body from the casket that was made for it. The end result, however, was that her ‘splendid coffin [without her “unsplendid” body] is in the British Museum’ (2011: 212). In the early nineteenth century, a French scientific commission produced a concise sensory classification of mummy types: Those filled with resinous matter are of an olive colour, the skin dry, flexible, and like a tanned skin, retracted and adherent to the bones… The belly and chest are filled with resins, partly soluble in spirit of wine. These substances have no particular odour by which they can be recognized; but, thrown upon hot coals, a thick smoke is produced, giving out a strong aromatic smell. These mummies are dry, light, and easily broken…. The mummies filled with bitumen are black, the skin hard and shining, and as if coloured with varnish…. These mummies are dry and heavy. They have no smell, and are difficult to … break. The report also catalogued the mummies prepared with natron, which have hard, elastic skin resembling parchment and little odour, those prepared with salt and ‘pissasphaltum’, which are ‘black, dry, heavy, and of a disagreeable odour’, and those simply salted: ‘dry, white, elastic, light’, and ‘yielding no odour’ (cited in Pettigrew 1834: 70-1). An extraordinarily well-preserved mummy was anatomized in 1825 by the physician Augustus Granville (Figure 3.2). After noting the sensory

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Figure 3.2  Dr. Granville’s Egyptian mummy, Henry Perry (from A. B. Granville. An Essay on Egyptian Mummies. London: W. Nicol, 1825).

characteristics of the body in the approved style, Granville carried out an experiment with the two detached ‘nates’, or buttocks: The one has been left in the state in which it was handed down to us by the Egyptian embalmers, dark, tanned, contracted and impregnated with the mummifying ingredients; the other, on the contrary, has been

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deprived, in toto, by my process of those ingredients … so as to appear like the same part in a recent subject, soft, elastic, of a yellowish white, with the cutaneous pores very distinct, and with its muscles, adipose substance and blood vessels perfectly striking. (1825: 40) Perfectly striking indeed, one would think, for the visitors invited to view this exhibit. In an earlier age sensory qualities such as colours and odours had often had a spiritual significance, bringing to mind notions of sanctity and sin (see Classen 1998: ch. 2). Times had changed, however, and Granville and his fellow scientists used their senses as tools for empirical analysis. Smell and taste, along with sight and touch, were enlisted to help identify and classify the materials under study. The sensory descriptors these early scientists used are sometimes obscure today – just what was the aroma of the ‘drug called wild incense from ant-hills’ that John Blumenbach associated with the mummies he examined in 1794? (127, 129). Yet an attempt at scientific accuracy was evidently the goal. There was, nonetheless, a quasi-magical, if not mystical, element to mummy dissections, for, even apart from hidden amulets, anatomists never knew what curious and even beautiful things they might find inside. The early nineteenth-century physician Richard Madden recorded that in the head of one mummy: ‘I found a quality of balsam … in colour and transparency it was not to be distinguished from pink topaz; it burned with a beautiful clear flame … and emitted a very fragrant odour, in which the smell of cinnamon predominated’. In the heart of another mummy Madden discovered a substance which ‘by the crackling noise it made on throwing it into the fire, and by the peculiarity of its taste’ he deemed to be pure nitre (1829: 88). The body of the mummy appeared to have been transformed by some ancient alchemy into a new creation which only the refined senses of the contemporary magician-scientist could decode.

What to Make of Mummies The modern answer to the question of what to do with a mummy is to make it into a museum exhibit. The classic premodern answer, as we have seen, was to make it into medicine. However, there were many other responses to this question, for just as mummies were layered in bandages, they were also layered in meanings and possibilities. As rare curios, Egyptian mummies were priceless relics, whose religious associations and physical longevity allied them with the incorruptible remains of saints. They were the possessions of kings, and perhaps once kings themselves (for in the Western imagination every mummy was royal). Museum curators might like to think of mummies as educational – the British Museum organized its mummy display in the nineteenth century to

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illustrate different types of mummification – however, the visiting public knew well that these enigmatic relics were objects of power. With such potent attributes, the mummy inevitably became a coveted collector’s item – and even a sign of a nascent consumer culture (Daly 2000: ch. 3). In James Smith’s humorous poem, ‘Country Commissions’, a traveller to London is asked to bring home, along with such bourgeois purchases as a stew pan and a chintz-covered chair, ‘a mummy dug up by Belzoni’ (1857: 247). As an entire mummy could be expensive and inconvenient to house, however, the majority of collectors contented themselves with owning a piece of a mummy. Théophile Gautier’s wellknown story, ‘The Mummy’s Foot’, deals with a curio of this kind (1890). In fact, the reason why European travellers to Egypt were approached by vendors carrying baskets of mummified hands and feet was because these were popular tourist items. Unwilling to buy their souvenirs from the mummy merchants, some tourists simply ‘picked their own’, breaking off a limb from an available mummy. The writer Gustave Flaubert acquired a pair of mummy feet in this way. Despite the ‘appalling stench’, travellers clambered down into burial chambers because ‘we must carry home a small bit of mummy’ (‘Tour of the Nile’ 1876: 152). When their initial enthusiasm had worn off, however, many mummy collectors found their keepsakes too macabre or unlucky or smelly to have around the house. These unwanted souvenirs often ended up being donated to museums by their ambivalent owners (Day 2006: 54). Backyard burial provided another common means of disposal, and many a garden in England and elsewhere became the final resting place of the discarded relics of ancient Egypt. Some tourists repented of their mummy purchases before even leaving Egypt. One early nineteenth-century traveller described his discomfort with an impulsively purchased mummy’s hand: I had no newspaper in which to wrap the mummy’s hand, and when I tried to put it in my pocket it clawed at the edge of the cloth and refused to go in.… There was nothing to do but to walk hand in hand with it until I could find a safe place to bury it. (Fuller 2008) The touch of life given to the mummy’s hand in this account suggests another reason why collectors might want to dispose of their mummy parts: the fear that the mummy might take an active role in its new home. If the allure of the mummy helped attract people to Egypt, it was in Egypt, as we have seen, that many Westerners learned to devalue the mummy. Not only did the vast quantities of mummies there make them appear commonplace, but the locals often seemed to regard them with a complete lack of wonder or reverence. The reported use of mummies as firewood was one evident sign of this. In fact, when entering a burial chamber, tourists might be taken aback to find the scene lit up by a fire composed of the former inhabitants of such chambers and their coffins (i.e. Eckley 1860: 118). There

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were many other examples of a casual attitude towards mummies. Isabella Romer saw two mummies being used as roof beams in an Egyptian hut (1846: 294). Gustave Flaubert had the bridle of his mount adjusted by his guide with a piece of bone from a mummy (1972: 58). Florence Nightingale observed her guides playfully taking apart a mummy’s skeleton and throwing the bones at each other (2003: 203). Tourists could be just as casual as the locals in their treatment of mummies. John Briggs wrote that when he found a deep hole in a mummy burial chamber, I looked round for something to throw down to try the depth by sound; and, seeing nothing but the remains of the dead, I stuck my candle in a niche of the limestone wall, and raising a mummy hurled it down the pit. There was a short pause; then ‘thud’ it fell with a distinct hollow sound at a great depth. (1859: 212) The foreignness of mummies no doubt made it easier for Westerners to treat them with disdain. It’s hard to imagine John Briggs duplicating his actions back in England and using a skull from a cemetery to sound the depth of a church well. Yet, mummies were not only foreign; due to their embalming and bandaging, they almost appeared to be another species altogether. In a variation on the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly, the mummy, after its short human stage of development, had seemingly enveloped itself in a cocoon and stayed there. Along these lines, people sometimes seemed to view mummies more as a kind of Egyptian produce than as human remains. As one writer commented, a mummy resembled ‘rather wood than a thing which had once possessed life and animation’ (Postans 1845: 46). This analogy made the practical use of mummies not quite as macabre as it might seem. It was stated, indeed, that the new Egyptian railroad used mummies to fuel its engines (i.e. Knox 1877: 285). Such reports have been thought by some modern scholars to derive from an anecdote related by Mark Twain in his whimsical travelogue The Innocents Abroad. In that book Twain wrote of the Egyptian railroad: I shall only say that the fuel they use for the locomotive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose, and that sometimes one hears the profane engineer call out pettishly, ‘D-n these plebeians, they don’t burn worth a cent – pass out a King!’ (Twain 1911: 386) There are, however, reports of the practice predating Twain’s account of his visit to Egypt in 1867. As far back as 1852 an indignant letter to a Boston journal denounced a proposal to use mummies for fuel on what was then the planned Egyptian railroad: ‘It has always seemed to me to be a sort of sacrilege to carry round mummies to different countries for exhibition as

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curiosities; but this plan of actually burning them is a sacrilege of much greater enormity’ (‘Fate of the Mummies’ 1852: 349). The letter writer hoped the proposal was merely a joke, but later accounts described the plan in practice (i.e. Iden 1904: 79; Oliver 1917: 169). A notice in The Scientific American of 1859 stated: There are now over 300 miles of railroads in Egypt. A foreign correspondent gravely states that, on some of these lines, the enginestokers burn ‘mummies’ for fuel, that the latter makes a very hot fire, and that, as the supply is almost inexhaustible, they are used by the ‘cord’. (‘Fuel’ 1859: 365; see also Steel 1866: 21) Whatever the extent of the practice, the idea of Egypt burning up its ancient past to move into the industrial age presents a striking image at the same time as it highlights the perceived expendability of mummies. Another practical employment of mummies was to grind them up for fertilizer. While gathering mummies in Egypt for the British Museum, Ernest Budge was told by a local official that the ‘only use for mummies was to turn them into manure’. On a declaration form, accordingly, he was required to list the skulls he had collected as ‘bone manure’ (1920: 95). Such labelling would certainly offer a novel way of viewing the mummified remains on display in the museum. Many tons of mummies, whether of humans or of animals, were imported in the nineteenth century to enrich British farm land. This practice presented another way of thinking of mummies as food. Responding to the use of powdered mummy to fertilize turnips and wheat, the science master at Marlborough College commented in 1877: ‘Perhaps in this dish of mashed turnips there are atoms of nitrogen from the brain of Sesetasen, and in this penny roll there may be phosphoric acid from the bones of his chief baker’ (Rodwell: 266). The idea was disturbing, but obviously not disturbing enough to stop the practice. It was a utilitarian age. ‘Do anything useful with the dead, eat them, if you like’, wrote one author criticizing the practice of tearing apart and discarding mummies in the search for amulets and other valuables, ‘but do not amuse yourself by pulling them to pieces’ (R.S.P. 1862: 236–7). While some might be taken aback by the thought of farmers flinging handfuls of ‘the crumbled integuments of king and priest, lord and slave’, over their fields, compost was considered a useful end to which to put unwanted mummies (Friends’ Intelligencer 1870: 541). Using mummies as fertilizer might even seem oddly appropriate given that in Egypt mummies were traditionally regarded as having supernatural powers of fertility. Indeed, the god of agriculture, Osiris, was sometimes depicted with plants sprouting from his mummy. (In Jewish lore a magical fertility was likewise attributed to Joseph’s mummy [Stukely 1757: 81; Ulmer 2009: 64].) In modern Egypt, women stepped over mummies when they wished to have children – a practice which surprised one English collector in

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Cairo who found local women jumping over the mummies in his collection (Crowninshield Smith 1852: 342). It may be that a similar notion of the fecundizing power of mummies gave an added attraction to ‘mummy manure’ in England. In any case it must have been somewhat gratifying to the national pride to think of imperial Britain being fertilized by the bodily remains of the ancient Egyptian empire: It is curious to reflect that the phosphate of lime which once formed the frame of a member of the Egyptian aristocracy should, after a quiet repose of some thousands of years, enter upon a new career of usefulness in a distant land as an excellent manure for turnips and other garden vegetables, which may in turn furnish the necessary phosphate of lime to give backbone to the British aristocracy. (‘Human Bodies as Fertilizers’ 1870: 147) Developing on this theme, exploiting and ‘gobbling up’ colonial territories might analogously be perceived as giving ‘backbone’ to the British Empire. If the bodies of mummies made good fertilizer, their wrappings, it was proposed, could be made into fine paper. With the spread of print media in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, paper production had grown substantially. The yards and yards of linen wrappings with which mummies were swathed seemed to some to offer an obvious solution to the ongoing problem of finding sufficient rags to process into paper (the creation of paper from wood pulp was a later practice). This proposal was satirized in Punch in 1847: These are times when not e’en mummies Can longer rest as dummies… So must old Egypt’s gentlemen and ladies… Give up their cerements to the hand whose trade is To turn them into Foolscap or Bath post (paper). (‘Musings on Mummy-Paper’ 1847: 224) Others, however, seemed to take the idea seriously. ‘Repulsive as it may appear to the over sensitive’, wrote the physician Isaiah Deck of the practice in 1855, ‘it is entirely shorn of this feeling when viewed with the anticipated famine of paper material looming in the distance’ Dr. Deck assured his readers that they need not worry about museums being deprived by this commercial use of mummies, for museums already ‘possess such numerous and indestructible records of this great people’ that ‘we can well spare what is merely a tithe of their relics now rotting in the ground in the manufacture of the important article of paper’ (Deck 1855: 20, 92). As for what to do with the bodies left over when the wrappings had been removed for processing, Deck (who may have been writing ironically) had a number of practical suggestions. The aromatic gums could be made into

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incense for use in churches, the bitumens ‘could be made equally serviceable for varnishes, illuminating and machinery oils’, the bones could be made into charcoal and the flesh, being ‘too dry for glue or gelatine’ could be made into soap. The expense of transporting the mummies from their burial sites, in turn, could be defrayed by the sale of the ‘bijouterie’ found on their bodies. This total employment of the mummy for material ends presents a sharp contrast with its symbolic and educational value as an ancient relic. As intensely practical as the proposal outlined by Deck seems, however, it was not lacking in whimsy. The doctor envisioned ‘amorous epistles’ being written on paper made out of ‘the chemisette enveloping the [mummified] bosom of Joseph’s fair temptress’ (the wife of an Egyptian captain according to Genesis), and the New York Times being printed on the shroud of Moses’ Egyptian foster mother (1855: 88–92). With one further leap of the imagination, Deck might have contemplated the shrouds of mummified biblical personages becoming the paper on which Bibles themselves were printed. There are, in fact, numerous anecdotal accounts of mummies being employed for paper making, including ones in which whole mummies, and not just their wrappings, went into the mill. One New York merchant trading in Alexandria in the 1860s reportedly freighted his ship with mummies for the return home: ‘On arriving here, the strange cargo was sold to a paper manufacturer in Connecticut, who threw the whole mass, the linen cerement, the bitumen and the poor remains of humanity into the hopper’ (cited in Munsell 1870: 79). We do not know the extent to which mummies were actually employed for paper manufacture, but it is reasonable to assume that at least some wrappings were put to this end given the industry’s strong demand for rags and the other commercial uses of mummies. There was yet another end to which mummies might be put – paint. A pigment, known as mummy brown, made use of actual ground mummy. (Shakespeare referred to this use in Othello, when he spoke of ‘silk dyed in mummy’.) One nineteenth-century book on paint making noted that when making mummy brown ‘it is usual to grind up the bones and other parts of the mummy together, so that the resulting powder has more solidity and is less fusible than the asphalt alone would be’ (Church 1890: 209). Unlike the employment of mummies for fertilizer, however, paint making did not require large numbers of these relics. ‘A London colourman informs me that one Egyptian mummy furnishes sufficient material to satisfy the demands of his customers for seven years’ (1890). While the increasing difficulty and expense of importing Egyptian mummies put an end to the practice in the early twentieth century, mummy brown was used by European artists for hundreds of years. The aromatic paint was said to give paintings a warm glow of antiquity and to have ‘the advantage of being practically permanent’ (like mummies themselves before they entered the hands of merchants and manufacturers). It came as a

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revelation to many that the brown glaze that gave such a rich tone to paintings actually came from mummies such as one might see in a museum. ‘Do you mean to say’, asks a character in a nineteenth-century story about paint pigments, ‘that that little blot of bitumen was really once in a mummycoffin, like those … at the Boston Art Museum?’ (Champney 1883: 263). Just as mummies were both viewable and invisible in their wrappings, they were both seen and unseen in the paintings to which their bodies lent lustre. While some lauded this metamorphosis of human remains into art – ‘could the most exacting mummy ask for a nobler fate?’– others felt uncomfortable with the notion of using corpses as colouring (‘A Tube of Mummy’ 1917: 351). The author of a tract on the origins of pigments noted that objections to its use were sometimes raised, giving as an instance one artist ‘who had a decided prejudice against smearing his canvas with a possible extract of Potiphar’s wife, notwithstanding he might get excellent effects thereby’ (Handbook 1856: 57). Lawrence Alma-Tadema, well-known for his romanticized depictions of antiquity, was taken aback when he came across his paint preparer grinding up a piece of a mummy in his workshop. When the painter Edward Burne-Jones discovered the true ingredients of mummy brown he held a mock funeral for a tube of the pigment (Day 2006: 36). One nineteenth-century story related the manufacture of mummy brown from the mummy’s point of view: I was brought to England and deposited in a museum. By-and-by comes round a thing called an Egyptologist. He bids his workmen take me out of my coffin with their raw mechanic hands, and says to a vulgar fellow standing by; ‘Here, we don’t want this, you know; you can take the mummy. The case is all we care for, it has some interesting hieroglyphics.’ The fellow was a paint-maker… This miscreant keeps me in a lumberroom in a loft; he comes and breaks off pieces of my limbs and crumbles them in his profane fingers, mixing them up with oils and paste to make his wares. (‘Adventures’ 1888: 152) Ironically, the discarded mummy might well later return to the same museum that housed its coffin in the more artistic form of a painting. Though few museum-goers – or directors for that matter – may realize it, mummies are not only present in exhibits of Egyptian antiquities; they are also on display in galleries of European art.

The Virtual Mummy While mummies are no longer imported as fertilizer or made into paint, they have not lost their attraction as museum pieces or their ability to frighten the susceptible. Many a modern child’s trial of terror has consisted of confronting a ghastly mummy bundle in its glass case (i.e. Lewin 1989: 54). Nonetheless, the idea that children enjoy seeing mummies is commonplace.

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A recent guidebook to England assures its readers that their children will be ‘immediately captivated’ by the mummies in the British Museum, for ‘these 2,000-year-old dead bodies hold a strange fascination for kids’ (Fullman 2007: 39). Physical access to mummies is now highly limited, so all that most people can do is view. However, the material qualities of the mummy still intrigue, and may even take on sociopolitical significance. The colour of mummies’ skin, for example, became important to the twentieth-century Afrocentric movement which aimed to present ancient Egypt as a ‘Black civilization’, rather than the Caucasian one it had usually been considered to be (Lefkowitz and Rogers 1996: 33). While not as ideologically charged, the other sensory traits of mummies also continue to fascinate. Speaking with the supervisor of one of the handling tables at the British Museum, I discovered that, among the articles available for handling, the one that most appealed to visitors was a scrap of mummy wrapping. Furthermore, while the mummies themselves are inaccessible in glass cases, the Egyptian galleries at the museum are the ones in which I saw the most (illicit) touching take place. Responding to this desire to touch, the museum offers a hands-on copy of the Rosetta Stone to complement the real stone now placed behind glass. The practice of tasting mummies, in turn, has not entirely vanished in the twenty-first century. An Egyptologist writes of one of her research projects: ‘The final test consisted of tasting all the joints from the Theban tomb of the Eighteenth-Dynasty prince Amenemhat.… These joints all tasted salty, while, in all but three or four instances, the bandages did not’ (Ikram 2006: 666). The joints being tasted were of ancient Egyptian animals in this case; however, perhaps the savours were not that different from those experienced by previous Egyptologists. As regards the scent of mummies, though it is harder to detect with mummies kept in sealed cases, it too remains a subject of interest. According to one observer at a modern mummy unwrapping, the smell resembled that of ‘some dried edible giant ants I had once bought in South America, and retained for some years past their prime’ (Krajick 2005: 68). The Egyptologist Zahi Hawass has claimed to be able to identify royal mummies by their particular aroma. When the question arose of identifying a mummy long exhibited in the Niagara Falls Museum, Hawass took a look and a whiff and pronounced the mummy likely that of the Pharaoh Ramses I (Strand 2008: 91). Originally brought to Canada from Egypt by a nineteenthcentury collector, the reputed mummy of Ramses I now lies in the Luxor Museum in Egypt, back in the land of its origin, but still contributing to the museum experience. Although public unwrappings of mummies of the sort undertaken by Thomas Pettigrew are no longer performed, there are modern counterparts. For the unwrapping of a mummy at the University of Bristol in 1981, a special table was used with eight moveable trapdoors to enable investigators to examine the body from all sides. While much of the body was badly

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deteriorated ‘the skin of the fingers was sufficiently well preserved to permit members of the Avon and Somerset Police to obtain clear fingerprints’ (Taylor 1996: 76). The whole, two-week-long, operation ‘was transmitted via closed-circuit television to the entrance hall of the City, in which members of the public could watch every stage of the proceedings’ (1996: 82). More recent mummy investigations often make use of nondestructive imaging techniques to explore the body inside the bandages. Such techniques allowed the British Museum to offer visitors the opportunity to view a virtual unwrapping of a mummy: ‘visualizing every feature and amulet’ (Taylor 2006). In order to make the experience more interactive, some museums are now creating virtual mummy exhibits which allow visitors to digitally peel off the bandages from a mummy and even ‘cut a cross-section through the multiple layers of coffin and body’ (Bowdler 2014). Though the techniques have changed, the desire to force the obscure body of the mummy into visibility remains strong.

4 Conversation Pieces: The Arundel Collection The entrance of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is populated with still white bodies. They line the walls of a long gallery, attracting scant attention from the visitors who pass through on their way to the more alluring remains of ancient Egypt. A thoughtful stone orator in a flowing toga is positioned next to a storage cupboard in the lobby, flanked by a bicycle and a fire extinguisher. Two dignified Roman soldiers stand behind the visitors’ desk, their bodies partly obscured by the desk and by a sign proclaiming the museum’s opening hours. One has a tribute of visitors’ backpacks rubbing against its legs. Tucked out of the way, these statues are more difficult to see than the Mona Lisa, behind its shield of glass and its crowd of admirers in the Louvre. There are no identifying labels. I ask one of the older, more knowledgeable-looking, attendants about the statues at her back. She has no information to offer and neither do her two colleagues, though they must have spent many days guarded by the two centurions. Indeed, the attendants seem surprised to be asked. The statues are present, but overlooked. They are evidently not exhibited as particular works of art or as historical artefacts but as generic ‘museum furniture’. The older attendant tells me that, if I’m interested in statues, the museum has an impressive cast gallery. I move away and, as far as the attendants are concerned, the problem is solved. The marble statues and antiquities which greet the visitor entering the Ashmolean may not arouse much interest today, but they were once the talk of London when, newly arrived in the seventeenth century, they served as the centrepiece of the collection of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel. Antiquarians were roused from sleep to begin the task of translating the inscriptions on tablets and tombstones. Artists eagerly scanned the ancient sculptures for inspiration. Surveying the gathered marbles, Rubens graciously proclaimed that he had ‘never seen anything in the world more rare’ (cited by Weststeijn 2015: 52). The sundry statues and busts, in particular, were considered so spirited that they seemed on the verge of speaking. What did these works say then that they are silent on today? And how did they interact with the other rare and curious objects gathered together with great enthusiasm and expense by the ‘art-mad’ earl?

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A Man of Dreams Thomas Howard, the Earl of Arundel, was a man of dreams. He dreamt of restoring the glory of his noble name. He dreamt of being a great leader. He dreamt of having the finest collection of art in England. The earl shows us his dreams in three portraits. In one he confidently points with his staff to his grandson Thomas, future heir to the title. In another he sits with his wife and, holding his staff in one hand, points with the other to the island of Madagascar on a globe, signalling it as his intended site for colonization. In the most famous portrait, by the Dutch artist Daniel Mytens, the earl sits in front of his sculpture gallery, pointing with his staff to a stunning exhibit of ancient statues (Figure 4.1). These three portraits look like representations of actual scenes, but their connection with real life is superficial. They are all, in fact, representations of dreams; the hopes and fantasies of an English Don Quixote. The staff depicted in all three portraits was the ceremonial baton used by Howard in his role as Earl Marshall, director of English pageantry and ritual. He wields it as though it were a magic wand which could conjure his dreams into reality. Thomas Howard started life in disadvantaged circumstances, circumstances well suited to inspiring dreams of glory. Several months before he was born in 1585 his father was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Philip Howard’s principal crime was being a Catholic in an era when Catholicism seemed a treasonable offence against her Protestant Majesty, Queen Elizabeth I. Philip’s own father had been beheaded some years earlier for allegedly supporting the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots’ claim to the English throne. After ten tortuous years in the Tower, forbidden to see his family, Philip died there of dysentery. The Earl of Arundel’s childhood was marked by his family’s disgrace and he grew up socially isolated. By rights he should have been the Duke of Norfolk. That illustrious title, however, had been revoked due to his grandfather’s ‘treason’. One of the earl’s dreams was to recover the old family title and ensure that dukes of Norfolk would once again head the English aristocracy. Though he succeeded to some extent in gaining the respect of Elizabeth’s successor, James I, Thomas Howard always remained an outsider. Not only because of his treacherous family history and his suspicious Catholicism (his conversion to the Anglican faith was seen as merely expedient), but also because of his reserved nature. In an era when the old distinctions and rituals of class were dissolving in favour of a more easy-going familiarity, the Earl Marshall remained proud and aloof. ‘Here comes the Earl of Arundel in his plain stuff and trunk hose … that looked more like a Nobleman than eny of us,’ his fellow peer, the Earl of Carlisle, would comment (cited in Walker 1705: 221). It may have been precisely because he seemed so aloof that King James and his successor Charles never saw fit to restore the dukedom of Norfolk to Arundel, despite the numerous services he rendered them.

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Beneath his unapproachable exterior, however, Thomas Howard had a generous nature. He was affectionate towards his family and loyal to his friends, even when they were political liabilities. He also, despite his sombre upbringing, retained a sense of fun. As his foe the Earl of Clarendon put it, while Arundel affected a grave appearance, his true nature was ‘much disposed to vulgar delights, which indeed were very despicable and childish’ (Hyde 1843: 23). Perhaps he had in mind not only the Collector Earl’s fondness for art but his participation in fanciful court plays. When Thomas Howard was a young man, trying to make a place for himself at court, he fell in love twice. The first time was with a clever, lively heiress, Aletheia Talbot, whom he married (Figure 4.2). The second time was with Italy. Both played key roles in his life, but it was Italy which was with him at the end. The seductive vitality of Italian culture and the exquisite grace of Italian art enraptured Howard. Apparently weak and sickly when he travelled to Italy for his health in 1613, he became extraordinarily animated once there, touring cities and ruins with a fierce determination which amazed the residents. It was an experience which instilled in the earl a profound sense of the unique civilizing power of art and confirmed his vocation as an art collector and patron. The Earl and Countess of Arundel had six sons. Three died in infancy. The eldest and the earl’s favourite, James – godson and namesake of James I – succumbed to a fever in Europe while still in his teens. This was a terrible blow for the earl. The new heir, Henry, had an uncongenial character and his brother, William, was too nervous and fearful to hold out much promise of adding incense to the Arundel altar by his deeds. Thomas Howard turned his hopes instead to the next generation. After his son Henry, the heir to the title was his grandson Thomas. It was in 1635 that Arundel had Anthony van Dyck paint his portrait with his namesake – ‘my little Tom’ as he fondly called him. In this portrait the earl, sheathed in shining armour, places a sheltering arm around a thoughtful Thomas, and with his other hand points to him with his staff. Here Howard seems to be employing all his ritual power as Earl Marshall to invest his grandson with an auspicious future. As a high-ranking nobleman the Earl of Arundel had political duties to fulfil, in particular serving as an escort to members of the royal family on trips abroad. In 1636, Thomas Howard proposed himself for a loftier task, leader of a mission to the German Emperor to negotiate a peace treaty which would end the war which had long embroiled Europe. It was a desperate mission, he told a friend. Perhaps he hoped he might boldly cut through the Gordian knot of conflicting claims and win back the family dukedom as a reward. The political situation called for subtle diplomacy and compromise, however, and the upright earl, with his dislike of intrigue, and his motto of ‘concordia cum candor’ – accord with honesty – was not the man for it. His strongest critic, the Earl of Clarendon, would later say that Arundel had been given a great appointment in which he did ‘nothing of the least importance’ (Hyde 1843: 23). His supporter, Sir Thomas Roe, however, stated that the Earl of Arundel had ‘carried himself very nobly and

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Figure 4.1  Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel, Daniel Mytens (© National Portrait Gallery, London).

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Figure 4.2  Aletheia Talbot, Countess of Arundel, Daniel Mytens (© National Portrait Gallery, London).

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like a right English Earl’ (cited by Hervey 1921: 393). Perhaps the two statements were not incompatible. Certainly evidence of his generosity was shown in the food and alms he distributed to the miserable victims of war he encountered en route. Many of the pieces in Arundel’s collection were acquired by his agents overseas. One of these agents, the clergyman William Petty, was remarkable for his diligence: ‘he eates with Greeks on their worst dayes, lyes with fishermen on plancks on the best, is all things to men, that he may attayne his ends’ (cited by Vickers 2006: 8). Petty’s indefatigable efforts are reminders that the earl’s collectibles were the subject of conversations and interactions right from the start of the process of their acquisition, and not only when they were incorporated into the Arundel collection. As is often the case with collectors, the earl’s fortunes were not equal to his expenditures. Financially embarrassed and politically disillusioned, in 1639 the Earl of Arundel fixed on a new project: a scheme of colonization in the island of Madagascar, strategically located on major trade routes. The earl had always been fascinated by tales of exploration: the ruthless old adventurer, Sir Walter Raleigh, had been a boyhood hero (and he stood sympathetically by Raleigh at his execution for violating a peace treaty in 1618). The Madagascar plan combined the earl’s interest in exotic lands with his hopes for a rich colonial bounty and no doubt also, with a fantasy of a New World utopia far from the corrupt kingdom of England. Though Arundel assured potential investors that this was no ‘vayne & ayrye undertaking’, many thought otherwise (Hervey 1921: 506). When, a few years earlier, the king’s nephew had similarly dreamt that he might ‘Don-Quixote-like conquer that famous island’ of Madagascar, his mother had implored him to ‘put such windmills out of his head’ (cited in Bruce 1866: 320–1). No doubt cold water of some kind was poured on the earl’s dream. In the end it all came to nothing. It was for the best, and not only because of the imperialist nature of the project. An attempt at English colonization of Madagascar in 1644 left all but 12 of the 120 colonists starved or killed by the local inhabitants within a year (Gilman 2000: 292). As its only souvenir, the Madagascar scheme left a Van Dyck portrait of the earl and the countess – who looks anything but happy at the prospect of colonizing the jungle – equipped for their project with a globe and navigational instruments. At the far right of the portrait an ancient bust crowned in laurel serves as a portent of the earl’s success and a sign of his past glory. In the background sits a bronze head thought to be of Homer, a prize piece in the Arundel collection. Instead of finding fame and fortune in Madagascar, the Earl and Countess of Arundel would soon find themselves exiled in Europe. The Puritans were coming into power in England and there was no place for the Royalist Arundels in their midst. Taking with them the most portable part of their collections, the earl and countess relocated in the Netherlands. No good news came from England. Their son, Henry, fighting a losing battle for

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Charles I and the old order back in England, wrote: ‘this is like to be a most miserably wasted kingdom’ (cited by Howarth 1985: 213). Sick and tired, Thomas Howard finally settled down in Padua. At least at Padua there were antiquities and art collections to be seen and other English exiles to befriend. The countess did not follow him there, for she preferred to live in the bustling city of Amsterdam. Previously Aletheia had tempered the earl’s melancholy with her zest for life, but now, under such trying circumstances, their personalities were too much at variance to bear close quarters. Perhaps the earl planned to later join his wife and son in Holland or the countess planned to meet up with her husband in Padua or perhaps they thought they would resume their lives together in England when the political troubles were over. Aletheia was not the only family member to seemingly desert the old earl. His grandson Philip had been caught in a Catholic snare, wooed into the Dominican order by, as Arundel saw it, eggs, biscuits, wine and soft words. (Though, as he was raised a devout Catholic, Philip probably did not require too much persuasion.) This was particularly galling for the earl, not only because of his personal repugnance to ‘priestcraft’, but because it would blacken the family name, which the earl had worked so hard to redeem, back in Protestant England. Nor did his grandson Thomas, who was with him at Padua, offer the earl any solace. The earl wrote that Thomas – the ‘little Tom’ on whom he had rested his hopes for the future – was ‘so ill-natured and frentike’ that it caused him ‘huge affliction’ (cited by Hervey 1921: 450). The earl must often have meditated on how differently things might have turned out if his eldest son James had lived, for ‘God never gave to any of our family of so tender yeares a greater proportion of virtue, learning, witt, and courage than to him’ (cited by Hervey 1921: 228). In his last sad years in exile, the old earl was in need of all the stoicism he could muster. Another English exile, John Evelyn, who visited him in Padua in 1646, wrote that he left ‘that great and excellent man’ in tears over the ‘crosses that had befallen his illustrious family’ and ‘the misery of his country now embroiled in civil war’ (cited by Hervey 1921: 449). Despite his deep grief, however, the Earl of Arundel still took care to write his friend a list of all the art and antiquities worth seeing in Italy, including Leonardo’s Last Supper: ‘being the rarest thing that ever Leonardo did’. ‘But now it’s wholy destroyed’, Arundel added in reference to the toll time and ill-treatment had already taken on the great work (cited by Hervey 1921: 452). It was a pessimistic assessment which matched the earl’s mood. Not long afterwards the Earl of Arundel died. As his son William later described it: It pleased God to send him a burning fever, of which, after twenty dayes sicknesse, hee left this world full of miserys to enjoy a glorious crowne in heaven. (cited by Hervey 1921: 462)

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(William had an exalted opinion of his father coupled with a low opinion of himself: ‘I cannot chuse but to be ashamed of my selfe, that I have nothing in mee worthy of such a Father’, he wrote to his mother. However, there he was wrong, as events would prove [cited in Hervey 1921: 462].) In his last days the earl apparently reconverted to his childhood faith and died a Catholic. His son Henry was with him at the end and he accompanied his father’s body back to England for burial. The old earl’s heart, however, remained in Italy, immured in the cloister of Saint Anthony in Padua. The earl’s final dream was that his collection, which had cost him so much effort and money, and which provided the most notable and distinguished memorial to his career and aspirations, should remain intact to serve as a kind of academy of art (Newman 1980). While he could not ensure this dream would be fulfilled after his death, he had done his best to realize it during his life. The galleries at Arundel House functioned as a semi-public museum, attracting and inspiring artists and antiquarians: ‘so many learned men and noble artists are flocking to this house from everywhere’ boasted his librarian and curator Franciscus Junius (1638: 38). Arundel’s collection also served to instruct the gentry in the fine arts. Those who were unable to visit the collection might still benefit from the publications on art and antiquities that he and his wife sponsored. In fact, rather than a tangible museum of the sort the earl imagined would enshrine his memory and carry on his civilizing project, it would be the intangible effects of his collecting zeal on contemporary taste and culture that would serve as his greatest memorial.

Marbles, Pictures, Jewels… Sculptures, paintings, drawings and rarities of all kinds arrived in vast numbers at Arundel House on the banks of the Thames in the early seventeenth century. Artists, including Rubens, Van Dyck, and the etcher Wenceslaus Hollar, were employed by the earl to memorialize his acquisitions. During his time in Italy, Thomas Howard had seen how a great art collection enhanced the stature of princes and popes and he wished to radiate a similar aura of power and pomp in England. The earl’s collecting, however, was not just driven by political motivations: he loved art for its own sake as much as anyone ever did. He wrote to his agent William Petty of a statue of Adonis in Rome: ‘I shall not be quiet till I hear from you that it is absolutely mine, I having been so long in love with it, as you know’ (cited in Howarth 2006: 18, n2). The most prestigious part of the collection, known as the ‘marbles’, consisted of ancient statues, reliefs, inscriptions and other stone monuments. As an acknowledged expert on antiquities, Thomas Howard was consulted by other collectors in this field, notably helping to form the renowned collection of Cardinal Richelieu. However, extracting antiquities from their lands of origin was not easy, even in those days. The earl dearly wished to acquire a giant obelisk that lay broken in a Roman arena, but the authorities refused to let it go. In Constantinople, Arundel’s agents – William Petty and

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Thomas Roe – tried to appropriate six colossal reliefs from the Golden Gate of Constantinople. Petty and Roe hoped that the Muslim inhabitants would not mind their removal, given that artistic representations were contrary to their laws. However, the attempt was ultimately unsuccessful due to the local belief that the carvings were enchanted and that ‘when they should be taken down some great altercation would befall the city’ (Hervey 1921: 276–7). Unable to acquire all the antiquities he desired, Arundel commissioned an Italian sculptor, Egido Moretti, to make him ‘two senators and two armed men’, suitable exemplars of the Roman empire’s political and military prowess. This is the origin of the unidentified statues tucked away by the information desk in the Ashmolean. Though they are little regarded today, these statues were described as ‘exceeding fine’ by the antiquary George Vertue in 1734 (Vickers 2006: 18). The services of a sculptor were also required for restoring ancient statues, which often sadly lacked noses and arms. Among painters, Arundel particularly admired the Italian masters. He also had what he called ‘a foolish curiosity’ for Holbein, an artist who had painted some of his forebears and whom he collected assiduously. One day while he was giving a tour of his collection with its plenitude of Holbeins, a visitor jested that the earl had so many works by the painter that he could afford to give some away. ‘Indeed I could not’, the earl replied with alarm. ‘Ah, then you don’t believe in the doctrine of free will?’ ‘I do, but not in the matter of giving away paintings’ (Hervey 1921: 399). It is an exchange which highlights both the earl’s attachment to his collection and the tangible nature of artworks as objects to hold oneself or hand over to others. While a political failure, the trip to Germany in 1636 was successful on another level, for Arundel was able to acquire many art treasures, including a rich haul of works by Dürer: ‘I wish you saw the Picture of a Madonna of Albrecht Dürer which the Bishoppe of Wirtzberge gave me last week’, he excitedly wrote to William Petty, ‘it is worth more than all the toyes [i.e. artworks] I have gotten in Germanye’ (cited in Hervey 1921: 394). So much did he prize this rare work that Arundel carried it with him in his own coach. Another important part of Arundel’s collection was his cabinet of jewels consisting of antique cameos and intaglios carved on gemstones. These tiny sparkling artworks were much prized by collectors and artists. Rubens, with his passion for colour, loved such jewels best of all antiquities. Engraved gems had the charm of uniting artistic virtuosity with the lure of precious stones – sapphire, topaz, lapis lazuli, carnelian – stones which in the seventeenth century were still attributed medicinal and magical powers. One of the finest pieces in Howard’s cabinet was the Felix gem, a deep red carnelian intaglio created in first-century Rome for use as a seal and now exhibited at the Ashmolean (Figure 4.3). Fittingly illustrating the appropriation of an artwork, the carving on the gem shows the moment in the Trojan War when the attacking Greeks steal Troy’s guardian image, a statue of the goddess Pallas. The scene depicts Odysseus remonstrating with Diomedes for sacrilegiously picking up the sacred statue with polluted hands after having slain a temple attendant.

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Figure 4.3  The Felix gem (© Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford). The Arundel collection comprehended not only artworks and antiquities, but also historical relics, books, ceramics, furniture, shells and exotica. The breadth of Howard’s interests in rarities is evidenced by the fact that he brought a countryman reputed to be 150 years old to serve as a living exhibit at Arundel House. (The man died shortly afterwards, some said from a surfeit of the fine food at the earl’s table.) There was, no doubt, more in common between the Arundel collection and seventeenth-century cabinets of curiosities, such as the Tradescants’ famous ‘world of wonders in one closet shut’, than is generally recognized.

Conversing with Old Heroes Comprised of so many different items with so many different qualities, the Arundel collection engaged the senses in multiple ways. Foremost was the collection’s visual impact. The novelty of seeing lifelike statues (referred to informally as ‘gods’) transplanted from the ancient world to England had an intense effect on those who first encountered the Arundel marbles. When Francis Bacon came into the garden of Arundel House and saw ‘a great number of ancient statues of naked men and women’, he cried out in astonishment: ‘The Resurrection!’ (Bacon 2011: 895). (Curiously, he would later die at Arundel House, on the day ‘then celebrated for our Saviour’s

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resurrection’ [Rawley 2011: 11].) The unusual, and unnerving, scene had called to Bacon’s mind the Day of Judgement when the naked bodies of the dead would rise from the grave. The earl must have been pleased by Bacon’s exclamation, for he hoped his collection would inspire an artistic and intellectual revival in England. His rival collector the parvenu Duke of Buckingham instructed his agents only to purchase works of beauty, not ‘deformed and misshapen’ stones (cited in Howarth 2006: 26). Not so the Earl of Arundel. For the earl and his disciples, poring over the broken remains of antiquity, every little bit helped. Fragmented though some of them were, Arundel’s antiquities helped to shape the visual culture of early modern England. As Franciscus Junius noted, the collection was exposed to ‘the publike view’ (1638: 87), being open to (approved) visitors. Artists and antiquarians spread the fame and impact of the marbles by diffusing their images through their own works (Weststeijn 2015: 53–7). The architect and stage designer Inigo Jones, for example, evoked the marbles in one of his sets, which depicted rows of ancient statues (Peacock 1995: 304–5). Anthony van Dyck, in turn, prominently displayed a marble frieze with gorgons’ heads belonging to the earl in a corner of his painting The Continence of Scipio (Figure 4.4; see Peacock 2000; Vickers 1983).

Figure 4.4  The Continence of Scipio, Anthony van Dyck (courtesy of Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford).

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At the time that Lord Arundel was forming his collection, a broad knowledge of art and antiquities was becoming requisite for gentlemen. Henry Peacham, tutor to the Earl of Arundel’s children and author of The Compleat Gentleman, wrote that such knowledge was necessary to avoid being labelled a dunce abroad. No doubt some of the visitors to the collection at Arundel House came with the intention of acquiring a little cultural polish before facing the virtuosi in Italy. Training in drawing was also promoted as a means of improving one’s aesthetic sensibility. That drawing was still considered a lowly manual skill, however, is evidenced by Peacham’s declaring that it was no more of a disgrace for a nobleman to learn to draw than it was for him to cut up meat for his hawk or play tennis with his page boy (1906: 88). Aside from their artistic, historical and prestige value, antiquities offered an invaluable repertoire of poses, gestures and expressions. These poses were eagerly studied by scholars – Arundel’s curator, Junius, was an expert on the subject – and copied by artists. The seated posture of Scipio in The Continence of Scipio, for instance, mimics the dramatic pose of Diomedes in the Felix gem (Hille 2012: 135), though with a twist. While the gem portrays illicit touching – Diomedes defiantly clutches the stolen statue of Pallas – The Continence of Scipio celebrates tactile restraint – Scipio graciously returns a captive woman unharmed. In a very gesture-conscious age (see Bremmer and Roodenburg 1992), the poses depicted in ancient artworks could also be employed to enrich the corporeal vocabulary of actors and orators. Certainly the earl, who had participated in court theatricals, would have appreciated the dramatic qualities of his statuary. In fact, the costumes designed by Inigo Jones for the earl and his fellow actor-lords in Ben Jonson’s Masque of Hymen had been loosely based on the garments of ancient Greek statues. His youthful experience of acting (or, rather, dancing, as the speaking roles were played by professionals) in this play might have given the earl an embodied appreciation of the ancient figures he would later acquire. The expectation was that good works of art, though directed primarily to the eye, would call up multiple sensations in the viewer’s imagination. Junius mentions approvingly an ancient painter who provided spectators with a little assistance in this regard. The artist hired a trumpeter to sound a martial tune just before his painting of a war scene was unveiled. The viewers could then thrill to the sensation of being in the midst of a noisy and fierce battle (1638: 345). Interestingly, the process of engaging with artworks was frequently conceptualized as a conversation. Referring to ancient statues, Peacham wrote of the ‘pleasure of seeing and conversing with these old Heroes’ (1906: 110). This metaphor was suggested by what Peacham called the ‘lively presence’ of the figures, which made them appear on the verge of speaking. The metaphor conveyed the notion of the works having something to ‘say’, to which their ‘interlocutors’ then answered (see further Warwick 2009). Occasionally statues were actually made to speak by means of pipes (i.e.

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Evelyn 2001: 206; Schmidt 2000: 109); however, even without such artificial aids, lifelike images were often attributed voices by early modern viewers. The seventeenth-century art theorist Roger de Piles explained this phenomenon with regard to paintings. He stated that an effective painting must ‘call the spectator … and oblige him to approach it, as if he intended to converse with the figures’ (1743: 9). From this perspective the gallery tour could be likened to a social gathering in which one discourses with new faces and old acquaintances. Doubtless such metaphorical conversations were sometimes partly actualized, with viewers in fact talking to the images which arrested their imaginations. The following description of the interactions of the artworks in Wilton House near Salisbury (to which many of the Arundel statues were brought by the Earl of Pembroke in the 1670s) evokes the lively discussions that might be said to take place among portraits, statues and visitors in a house filled with artworks. Apollo greeted the visitor in the vestibule, and in the Elizabethan Great Hall the terracotta bust of Pembroke himself sat comfortably on the chimney piece in the company of the colossal Hercules and other antique statues and sarcophagi. In the Double Cube Room, which was the magnificent centrepiece of the house, the visitor entered a space where the family members in the immense Van Dyck portrait were in dialogue with busts of emperors and other family and friends. (Coutu 2015: 18) This description calls to mind the eighteenth-century paintings known as ‘conversation pieces’, which sometimes depicted groups of people and artworks in seeming dialogue with each other. In Arundel House, the statues were coupled with marbles displaying ancient inscriptions. The most important of these was the Parian Chronicle, which set Greek history in stone by offering a time line of noteworthy events, from the mythological (the invention of wheat by Demeter) to the historical (the inauguration of gymnastic contests). With their texts, the inscriptions at Arundel House took part in the gallery conversation. Henry Peacham wrote: ‘You shall find all the walls of the house inlaid with [inscriptions] and speaking Greek and Latin to you’, adding that ‘The garden especially will afford you the pleasure of a world of learned lectures in this kind’ (1906: 112). In contrast to the modern notion of galleries as places of silence, one has the impression of the exhibition spaces at Arundel House being rather noisy, with artworks and inscriptions all clamouring for attention and stimulating ‘the most profitable discourses’ among visitors (Evelyn 2001: 204).

Search Deeper Here Visitors to Arundel House would often have handled the objects on display. The statues would have been particularly appealing, given their lifelike

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forms and the rock-solid evidence they provided of ancient worlds known primarily from texts. As Rubens noted when lamenting the lack of surviving ancient paintings, ‘Those things which are perceived by the senses produce a sharper and more durable impression, require a closer examination, and afford a richer material for study than those which present themselves to us only in the imagination, like dreams’ (1955: 407). Physical contact with the remains of antiquity would have induced a sense of bridging the ages. With classical artefacts right at hand, the Arundels and their guests could attain the intimacy of touching what ancient hands had touched – or, even more thrillingly in the case of sacred images, what ancient hands had been forbidden to touch. Not simply the sculptures, but many works in the Arundel collection, would have been subject to tactile exploration, for such touching was an acknowledged part of connoisseurship. An interesting illustration of this comes from the life of the seventeenth-century sculptor Alessandro Algardi. One day, while Algardi was in the renowned gallery of the Duke of Mantua, he saw a guide accidentally drop a precious vase and by good fortune catch it before it hit the floor. On hearing of this near disaster the duke took the precaution – not of making the vase hands-off – but of having Algardi affix handles and a foot to it so that it could be handled more securely (Bellori 2005: 296). This indicates how important maintaining tactile access to artworks was considered to be. (Unfortunately the vase was later destroyed by invading mercenaries for the sake of its handles, which, though of gilt bronze, were thought to be of gold.) Similarly, rather than risk offending visitors to his superb collection by asking them not to touch, Cardinal Mazarin in France delicately reminded them that if a piece were to fall it would break (Chantelou 1985: 185). The Earl of Arundel likewise, while requesting that visitors to his collections ‘doe not hurt them with theyre handling’, did not think of forbidding such handling in the first place (cited by Newman 1980: 695). Mingled with the appreciation of their tactile forms was the pleasure of possession, and even of tangible comfort, that handling art objects provided. Artworks might also be subject to a playful touch, particularly when they seemed like borderline toys. A poignant example of this comes from when the adolescent Prince Henry, a close friend of Thomas Howard, lay dying of typhus in 1612. At his bedside his twelve-year-old brother, the future Charles I, pressed into Henry’s hands a little bronze horse that had been a favourite with the boys (Brotton 2006: 22). Regarding the occasional overlap between collection piece and toy, John Evelyn related with disgust how the children of one collector used his cameos and intaglios as counters to be thrown in games (1875: 300). Corporeal practices are usually only noted when they excite attention, and during this period it was generally only the more dramatic tactile encounters with art that were recorded. For instance, when Titian’s Ecce Homo of 1543 (a picture coveted by Arundel but acquired by the Duke of Buckingham) arrived in London, Inigo Jones was said to have fallen on his knees and kissed it (Hille 2012: 122). If he had merely given the picture a

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few appreciative strokes it would not have occasioned remark, but this act, calling up thoughts of ‘popish idolatry’, was memorable. On this subject, one imagines that a prominent Catholic family like the Howards would have possessed a certain number of sacred relics and images. Thomas Howard’s great uncle, the Earl of Northampton, owned a highly esteemed relic – a cup said to have belonged to the martyred Thomas Becket and bearing the mottoes ‘Be sober’ and ‘Drink your wine with joy’ (now in the Victoria & Albert Museum). The Earl of Arundel himself owned a comb belonging to the sixth-century queen and saint Bertha of Kent though he may have valued this item more as a historical than a saintly relic. (In fact, the relic the earl most prized seems to have been the sword with which his great-great grandfather reputedly slew James IV of Scotland in the Battle of Flodden Field.) If any devotional kissing or touching of sacred relics took place in Arundel House, it would have occurred in secret, for these were dangerous times for Catholics. In fact, art in general, with its sensuous, as well as potentially ‘idolatrous’, appeal still aroused suspicions of promoting moral and physical corruption. Arundel’s agent Thomas Roe, writing from Constantinople, remarked that he was permitted to export certain antiquities to England because the local authorities believed they would have a softening effect ‘and divert us from the thought or use of arms’ (cited by Peck 2005: 183). Speaking of painting and sculpture, the diplomat and art agent, Henry Wotton expressed concern that ‘these delightful crafts may be divers ways ill applied’: ‘I confess indeed, there may be a lascivious and there may be likewise a superstitious use, both of picture and of sculpture’ (2005). Wotton had undoubtedly observed a good deal of kissing and caressing of artworks during his time in Catholic Italy. With such concerns lurking in Protestant minds, it was important to distinguish the erudite touch of the connoisseur from other ‘corrupting’ touches, and more generally, to emphasize the moral, as opposed to ‘idolatrous’ value of art. This was a task that Arundel’s curator, Junius, took in hand in The Painting of the Ancients, in which he asserted that artworks exercised a civilizing influence and that ‘the physical presence of statues in a house could inspire virtuous and noble deeds’ (Howarth 1985: 80). This notion of the quasi-tactile moral influence of art would often be repeated through the subsequent centuries. The Victorian art historian Anna Jameson, for example, would declare of paintings that, ‘they are dwellers with us under the same roof and their presence should be felt often when not observed’ (Jameson 1844: 260). The sense of touch would also have been extensively engaged by the craft work in the Arundel collection, which combined artistry with functionality. The magnificent chest of drawers known as the Arundel Cabinet (now at the Harley Gallery in Nottinghamshire) was, on the one hand, a piece of furniture to be opened and closed and filled with objects. On the other hand, it was also a work of art. The insides of the enclosing doors were painted with architectural scenes, the drawer fronts featured tiny paintings and there were niches for minute statues. The cabinet was, in fact, a miniature gallery,

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but one in which it was possible to ‘open up’ the ‘artworks’ and look inside, perhaps at rare shells and minerals, or ancient coins and engraved gems. The Latin inscription along the top front of the cabinet employed a cross-sensory metaphor to invite such exploration: ‘Search deeper here. Grapes are concealed beneath the foliage.’ More expansively, all of the pieces in the collection participated in a continuous aesthetic interplay. In their Five Senses series of paintings, Rubens and Brueghel depicted a range of objects evocative of the different senses: artworks, musical instruments, fine furniture, objets d’art, flowers, perfumes, sumptuous dishes, suits of armour, weapons, gardens and vistas. All of these and more would have been present at Arundel House, providing a constant feast (or barrage) of sensory stimuli. That the earl was interested in creating cross-sensory aesthetic wholes is attested to by his various commissions regarding purchases. In one letter, for example, he asks his wife to buy certain carpets and a blue quilt because he thinks they will nicely match an ornamental bed from Japan she has acquired (Howarth 1985: 4). This interest in total experiences can also be seen in the banquets the earl gave at Arundel House in which dinner, music and dancing went hand in hand with art viewing. A visitor who dined there in the 1630s reported being regaled with country dances and theatricals and then shown drawings by Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo (Smuts 1987: 187). From a modern perspective, there might seem to be too much mingling of art and life going on. In another letter to his wife, the earl jumps from inquiring ‘what Sir Thomas Roe has brought of antiquities, Gods [statues], vases, inscriptions, medals, or such like’ to recommending where to acquire flowers for the garden (Howarth 1985: 95). However, such medleys of sensations were not unusual. A letter by Henry Wotton (cited by Hanson 2009: 23–4) describes the contents of a shipment from Venice destined for Arundel’s rival, the Duke of Buckingham: a Madonna and Child by Titian – appearing so three-dimensional ‘that I know not whether I shall call it a piece of sculpture or picture’; David and Bathsheba – a ‘speaking piece’ with its expressive portrayal of movement; a realistic still life of grapes (recalling the tale of Zeuxis’ painted grapes that were pecked at by birds); and ‘the choicest melon seeds of all kinds’. This meandering path from art to nature, touching on one sense after another, illustrates the happy ease with which different aesthetic and natural objects could be played off one another. Returning to the motif of the conversation, we can see that the pieces in the Arundel collection were involved not only in verbal exchanges, but also in the multiple sensory interchanges that formed part of seventeenth-century life in a great house.

The Mysterious Gallery In early seventeenth-century England the notion of creating a room specifically for the display of art was still a novel idea. Galleries had originated within the great houses of England as covered walks, places to go

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for exercise in bad weather. Pictures were placed in the gallery to give family members and guests something to look at as they walked. At first only portraits were hung there, with the notion that one could ‘contemplate their characters, and be inspired by their virtues’ (cited by Girouard 1978: 101). For example, in 1609 a relation of the Earl of Arundel, Lord Howard of Bindon, asked a friend for his portrait to be placed in the gallery I lately made for the pictures of sundry of my honourable friends, whose presentation thereby to behold will greatly delight me to walk often in that place where I may see so comfortable a sight. (cited by Girouard 1978: 101) The Earl of Arundel himself, while collecting paintings of the most varied subject matter, continued this tradition of asking friends for their painted and sculpted portraits to call them to mind when absent: ‘I must have you in picture and marble’ he wrote to his agent William Petty (Howarth 2006: 25). Over the course of time, galleries grew more magnificent in design and began to function as status symbols. Their long empty spaces made them obvious places in which to locate major artworks, once these began to be assiduously collected in Arundel’s day. Smaller works and rarities could be placed in a study, or cabinet. While the gallery was a site of movement, the more intimate cabinet was a place of exploration. The seventeenth century was a period in which movement could be highly ritualized, such as occurred in ceremonial processions and in the perambulations of parishes in England. These perambulations involved citizens walking along the parish boundaries to fix the markers in public memory. The Countess of Arundel’s suburban residence, Tart Hall, lay on a parish boundary and must have regularly witnessed such perambulations (which in this case included whipping a boy at the marker to ensure that he long remembered its location [Clinch 1892: 72]). Touring art collections would also have partaken of ritualized and choreographed elements, as visitors moved from one exhibit to the next, and from one room to another. Visitors to Arundel House, guided by the knowledgeable Junius, would have learned to relate one piece to another and fix them, like boundary markers, in their memory. The tour would have involved movement between interior and exterior, as the majority of the marbles were positioned in the garden in Italian style. One detail we have of the layout of the collection concerns the placement of a head of Jupiter in the back garden ‘so opposite to the Gallery dores, as being open, so soon as yu enter into the front Garden, yu have the head in yur eie all the way’ (cited by Hervey 1921: 101–2). This dramatic arrangement suggests a careful positioning of works for maximum effect as visitors moved through the exhibits. Unfortunately, the appearance of the rooms in which the earl displayed his art remains something of a mystery, as Arundel House no longer exists. When the German artist Joachim von Saandrart toured the exhibits there in 1627, he described seeing a long gallery full of Holbeins which

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opened onto the garden (Hervey 1921: 255–6). We know too that the earl kept his collections of drawings by Old Masters in a dedicated ‘room of designs’. We also have two paintings which appear to show galleries within the house. However, as we shall see, these are mysterious in their own way. One of these paintings, the Mytens portrait of 1618 mentioned above, shows Lord Arundel seated in front of a curtain which has been pulled to one side to dramatically reveal a gallery (Figure 4.1). Within the gallery is a double row of antique statues. The earl looks at the viewer and points at the gallery behind him with a rod. Although there are other paintings of collectors in front of their galleries, this one, of England’s first great art collector, has had an enduring fascination. Certainly the portrait signals Arundel’s distinction in amassing such rare works. The earl is not just showing off a fine collection, however. The scene is as mystical as it is worldly. Although the statues are all neatly in place, all collected, they remain elusive. Why are they there? What is the purpose of this gallery? How can one be initiated into its secrets? The sculpture gallery shown in the painting may never have actually existed in Arundel House. It may be a dream gallery, a representation of an ideal, rather than a reality. The statues may also be idealized. One imagines, however, that the Collector Earl would have wanted some of his greatest acquisitions to be recorded here, and indeed a few of the statues can be identified with surviving pieces from the collection (Haynes 1974, Vickers 2006). Sitting at the entrance to the gallery in his priest-like black gown, the earl seems to be the gatekeeper of knowledge, indicating a path to enlightenment. The fact that he is pointing with the ceremonial baton he used as Earl Marshall suggests that entering the gallery is a ritual act. Once one ascends the steps and crosses the threshold, the gallery urges one forward to the end. Passing between the rows of ‘gods’ on their pedestals becomes an aesthetic and moral ordeal, a test of worthiness. It is no longer a question of whether the collection is good enough, but rather, whether the visitor is good enough. Arundel believed that the artwork of the ancients revealed the ideals of a nobler and wiser age which had been lost in his own dishonest and selfindulgent day. He particularly admired the Stoics, and ‘the austere bearing that seemed such a notable feature of his public and political life’ might well have been a ‘deliberate exercise of the fundamental Stoic virtue of gravitas’ (Parry 1981: 132). The earl modelled himself after the Stoic philosopher-emperor, Marcus Aurelius, who reminded people in his Meditations that the body is a river, the spirit is a wind and the one sure course in this changeable world is virtuous action. At the end of the painted gallery an open window looks out on the Thames, just river and wind. But after having journeyed through the gallery, the initiated visitor, infused with the values of the ancients, will look at this passing scene with new eyes.

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My Lady’s Chamber The companion piece to Myten’s portrait of the Earl of Arundel depicts Aletheia Talbot, the Countess of Arundel (Figure 4.2). Aletheia Talbot was an important collector in her own right, and her inheritance helped finance the earl’s collecting as well. The countess accompanied her husband on his trip to Italy in 1613 and developed her own taste for Italian culture. Back in England she displayed Italian art, constructed Italian gardens, gave Italian dinners and, after one trip, raised eyebrows by bringing home a gondola from Venice. Aletheia Talbot would eventually remodel a London residence, Tart Hall, for her own special use, filling it with imported furniture, porcelain and paintings. A woman of many interests, the countess also appears to have edited an anthology of recipes and remedies: Natura Exenterata: Or Nature UnBowelled (1655). The companion portraits of the countess and earl are very similar in format, with each person depicted seated in front of a gallery. At the same time, they have important differences which express contrasting gender and sensory ideologies and perhaps also differences in the characters of the sitters. The earl is shown presiding over a sculpture gallery, the countess over a gallery of paintings, his and her galleries, as it were. It would seem, in fact, that paintings interested Aletheia Talbot more than the marbles which enthralled her husband. In Rafael Soprani’s Lives of Painters, Lady Arundel is referred to as dama molto amante di pittura (cited by Hervey 1921: 200 n3). The gallery of ancient sculptures, however, was the more prestigious of the two. This higher status is suggested in the paintings by the location of the sculpture gallery on an upper floor, while the portrait gallery is placed on the ground floor. Sculpture generally was considered more masculine in nature than painting, which, with its liquid medium and sensuous colours, was regarded as a softer, more ‘feminine’ art. Nonetheless, there are no sensuous – or sacred – scenes in the countess’s painted gallery, nothing that could suggest laxity or idolatry. The paintings appear to be staid portraits, probably of ancestors: very suitable for the mother of the successors in the family line. While the earl’s is a gallery of ‘gods’, hers is a gallery of worthies. In his portrait, the earl is looking at the spectator and pointing to his collection, manifesting active engagement. The countess, by contrast, looks dreamily into the distance, her hands lying in her lap, a model of passive introspection. He seems to be telling us to look at his collection. She seems to indicate that she won’t prevent us from looking at hers. Even the statues in the earl’s gallery, with their varied poses, appear more dynamic than the stiff portraits hanging in the countess’s gallery. Doubtless the portraits, like the sculptures, are meant to serve as signs of virtue, but they lack the vitality and exalted appearance of the latter. While the countess appears withdrawn in her portrait, contemporary accounts indicate that she was a lively presence in the gallery. Thanks to a gossipy letter written by George Conn, papal envoy to the Court, we can eavesdrop on one of the conversations that occurred in the gallery that looks so empty and silent in its painting. Conn was present in 1637 when Charles I

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and Queen Henrietta Maria were shown the art at Arundel House by their hosts, the earl and countess. When we came to the Gallery, the Countess spoke to me of wishing to give to the Queen a most beautiful altarpiece by the hand of Dürer. A controversy followed between her and her husband. The Queen at first made difficulties, saying it would be a pity to deprive people [meaning the Earl] of what they seemed so much to delight in, but I assured her Majesty that it would be a work of charity to remove any occasion of dissension between husband and wife. (cited in Hervey 1921: 399–400) As with the previous conversation about giving away Holbeins (held on the same visit), this kind of teasing banter evidences that not all the gallery talk was of the high-blown variety. It could, indeed, deal as much with social relations as with artistic values. Perhaps this exchange was prearranged between the countess and the queen as a way of teasing the possessive earl. If the painting under discussion here was the precious Dürer the earl had excitedly carried home in his own coach from war-torn Germany, his wife’s apparent jest would have been pointed indeed. While the sculpture gallery in the earl’s portrait leads to a view of the river, suggesting visuality and a ‘masculine’ world of travel and commerce, the picture gallery leads into an enclosed garden: a tactile and olfactory space for ‘feminine’ retirement. One promises a rebirth, the other a return to the womb. Away from home on his diplomatic duties, the Earl of Arundel wrote his wife that he envied her at home, gardening. The countess, in turn, envied her husband, his travels, for she thrived on the novelty of new places and people. In their portraits, however, they conform to gender type. Both Aletheia Talbot and her husband are dressed in black in their portraits, he with a wide ruff, which would soon be out of fashion, and displaying the order of the Garter, she with copious trimmings of lace and ample jewellery. The countess wears the same dress in her two portraits by Rubens, but in one of these, where she is pictured with attendants, we see her commanding personality and love of show much better than in the Mytens portrait. In this picture, entitled Portrait of Lady Arundel and her Train, the countess is surrounded by signs of status and amusement: a brocaded standard with the Arundel arms, a jester, a dwarf, a courtier and a fawning hunting dog with a jewelled collar matching the countess’s bracelet. Here we see Aletheia Talbot as a powerful woman, the queen of her court. Like the mysterious lady in the medieval Lady and the Unicorn tapestry series, she seems to be saying: ‘I do as I please’.

Dispersal While visitors move through collections in particular ways, collections themselves are moved from place to place. This happened with the Arundel

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collection, part of which followed the earl and countess in their European exile during the turbulent years of the English Civil War. The most significant movement of the collection, however, occurred after the earl’s death, when it began to disintegrate due to contending family claims and financial pressures. In his will the Earl of Arundel left his estate to his wife, Aletheia, who had played such an important role in its formation and who had largely financed it with her inheritance. The countess was immediately faced with difficulties of administration, particularly as she was living abroad. The artworks she had with her in Amsterdam served her and her son William as a ready source of cash when other income was not forthcoming. The countess’s eldest surviving son Henry, the new Earl of Arundel, was alarmed by the thought that his mother and brother might be throwing away his inheritance abroad while he remained in England. He fiercely disputed the countess’s control of the property. Such family difficulties had already been foreseen by the old earl in his will when he wrote in vain hope that ‘as I am most assured [the Countess] will prove ever a kind Mother to my Sonne [Henry], so I doubt not …. [he] will shew a Duty and love answerable’ (Hervy 1921: 439). Henry, however, did not cease to vent his ill-will towards his mother, harassing her with law suits and slandering her character. Nor did he hesitate to make use of the anti-Catholic sentiment in England against her, charging, for instance, that his mother ‘had cost her husband fifty thousand pounds in going beyond sea to kiss the pope’s great toe’ (Tierney 1834: 507). Henry Howard hoped to acquire the bulk of his mother’s property after her death, but fate decreed otherwise for he died before her in 1652. The new Earl of Arundel was his eldest son Thomas – the ‘little Tom’ whose frantic behaviour had so distressed his grandfather years earlier. Since then Thomas had been deemed insane and he lived secluded at Padua under guardianship. In consequence, Henry Howard had legally ensured that when his disturbed son should die, the title and inheritance would go to his second son and namesake, Henry. In 1658, the Countess of Arundel, worn out from her trials, died in Amsterdam. William Howard, her only surviving son, saw himself as the legitimate heir to her property. He proceeded to sell some of the artworks to eager buyers in Holland. His nephew Henry, the designated Arundel heir, went to court to claim the property for his side of the family. Countering Henry’s claims, William asserted that his nephew was keeping his elder brother Thomas (who became the fifth Duke of Norfolk when the ancestral dukedom was restored in 1660) in ‘cruel slavery’ in Italy (Causton 1862: 99). How well Thomas may have been mentally fit for release we shall never know, for he remained immured in Padua, like his grandfather’s heart, until his death in 1677. The end result of the court case over Aletheia’s estate was that it was to be shared between her son William and his nephew Henry. William kept Tart Hall, the countess’s favourite residence in London, and Henry kept Arundel House. After his wife died, Henry scandalized his family by bringing

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the daughter of a Gentleman of the King’s Wine Cellar, Jane Bickerton, to live with him. Even more shocking to his class-conscious relatives, he married her and made her a duchess when he became the sixth Duke of Norfolk after his elder brother’s death. In the meantime, Henry’s younger brother Philip, the grandson Thomas Howard had wished to blot from his memory for his ‘treacherous’ choice of a religious vocation, was made a cardinal, helping to confirm the family’s association with Catholicism. From 1678 to 1681, England was caught up with rumours of a ‘popish plot’ to assassinate the Protestant Charles II. Along with other Catholic nobles, the members of the Howard family fell under suspicion. It was said that at Tart Hall statues from the Arundel collection were buried for fear they should be destroyed by a mob mistaking them for ‘idolatrous’ images of saints. Although the statues were spared the wrath of the conspiracy mongers, however, the owner of Tart Hall, the old earl’s youngest son, William, was not. He was falsely accused of involvement in the plot and condemned to death. While during his life William Howard had been dismissed as weak and quarrelsome, he died bravely as a martyr to his faith. Onlookers at his execution eagerly soaked up his blood with their handkerchiefs to create precious relics (which, in turn, would themselves become valuable collection pieces [Hardy 1866: 21]). When the old earl imagined himself the progenitor of an illustrious line he cannot have predicted that his most illustrious descendants would be a Catholic martyr and a cardinal (nor could he have imagined that his father would one day be a saint – Philip Howard was canonized in 1970). One celebrated collector of art would appear among the earl’s descendants. This was Charles Townley. In the eighteenth century, Townley was renowned for his ‘Townley Marbles’, an impressive collection of antique sculptures which would be purchased by the British Museum after his death in 1805 (see Coltman 2009: ch. 7). Ironically, Townley descended from the earl by way of a daughter of Henry Howard and Jane Bickerton, of whom the proud old earl would not have approved. The fate of the Arundel collection was entwined with many of these lives and events, as pieces moved from hand to hand, changing ownership and location. That part of the collection which came into the hands of William Howard remained largely intact until the contents of Tart Hall (which itself would later be demolished) were sold in 1720 after the death of his eldest son. This sale, with its abundance of rare artworks, oriental porcelain and historical relics, was a magnet for collectors. The finest piece, an ancient bronze head of ‘Homer’, which had featured in the Earl of Arundel’s Madagascar portrait by Van Dyck, was bought by the physician and collector Richard Mead and later donated to the British Museum. The other part of the collection, inherited by the old earl’s grandson, Henry, sixth Duke of Norfolk, was dispersed in a more piecemeal fashion, as shall be shown in the next chapter.

5 A Trail of Scent: The Afterlife of Collections Visitors to Knole, a country house in Kent, might notice an old-fashioned fragrance pervading the rooms. Long before hotels thought of branding themselves with signature scents, Knole had its own unique fragrance, emanating from bowls of dried flowers and spices. It was the creation of Lady Betty Germaine, heiress to part of the Arundel collection in the eighteenth century and a frequent visitor at Knole House. The author Vita Sackville-West, who grew up at Knole at the turn of the twentieth century, remembered the bowls of potpourri well: ‘if you stir them up you get the quintessence of the smell, a sort of dusty fragrance, sweeter in the under layers where it has held the damp of the spices’ (1923: 12). This description serves as a good metaphor for the process undertaken in this chapter: burrowing into old histories to raise a cloud of narratives concerning the afterlife of the Arundel collection – the first major art collection in England. Exploring the fate of this collection reveals how ideas and experiences of art can shift within different social and material settings. It also serves to situate works of art within the context of the complex lives of the people who owned and lived with them, rather than in the seemingly timeless and impersonal setting of the museum.

Old Arts and New Sciences That part of the Earl of Arundel’s collection which remained at Arundel House was still being visited in the mid-seventeenth century. An antiquarian of the day reported seeing the Mytens portrait of the Earl of Arundel in front of his sculpture gallery on a visit to the house: ‘In the long Gallery are divers Ritrattos & the Old Earl sitting, & his gallery of statues in prospect and he pointing you to it’ (Figure 4.1; cited in Hervey 1921: 522). One can see that by this point Thomas Howard, through his portrait, had become a distinguished piece in his own collection. One can also see by reading visitors’ accounts that the gallery tour retained its multisensory characteristics. Samuel Pepys, who visited in 1661, saw ‘some fine flowers in [the] garden, and all the fine statues in the gallery, which … is a brave

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sight’ and finished his tour with ‘two bottles of good ale’ in a ‘blind, dark cellar’ (1661: 30 May). Henry Howard, sixth Duke of Norfolk and master of Arundel House, was attracted to the growing field of natural philosophy, and when he travelled he scouted out, not just masterpieces like his grandfather, but items of interest to the Royal Society (Peck 2005: 145–7). These items included something the members of that early science club dearly desired: an Egyptian mummy, which took pride of place in the Society’s catalogue of its museum when it was presented by the duke. (The catalogue entry begins with a minute description of the body and wrappings and ends with a consideration of the use of ‘mummy’ in medicine ‘against Contusions, clodded Blood, Hard Labour, &c’ [Grew 1681: 3].) We catch sight of the mummy Henry Howard donated to the Royal Society again in 1763 when it was anatomized by the physician John Hadley. As the mummy was unwrapped, its colours, textures, savours and scents were meticulously noted in keeping with the practice of the time: black, hard, brittle, alkaline in taste and smelling like myrrh. The account of this event in the Times provides some social context, and also indicates the overlap between mummy as scientific curiosity and mummy as medicine: The origin of the mummy was supposed to be that of an Egyptian princess, of about three thousand years old, but as to the particulars of her life, no information is to be derived either from history or tradition. In the language of surgery, however, she cut up swell.… As soon as the operation was over, the remains of her Royal Highness were carefully deposited in her box, and the company, after the custom of ancient funerals, dined together, and afterwards poured libations to her memory. The flesh of mummies is reckoned very useful in some medical preparations, and at times brings a very high price. (Hadley 1809: 77–83) The reader is almost left with the impression that the participants in this unwrapping finished up their labours by dining on the valuable mummy flesh they had ‘cut up swell’. Returning to the seventeenth century, after the Great Fire of 1666 necessitated a change of headquarters, the Royal Society met at Arundel House to conduct its experiments. One of the members of the Society, Thomas Sprat, praised Henry Howard for thus allowing ‘new Inventions to flourish among the Marbles… so that the present arts, that are now rising, should not aim at the destruction of those that are past, but be content to thrive in their company’ (Sprat 1667: 253). Samuel Pepys experienced this integration of science and art when he participated in one of the society’s experiments at Arundel House (1668: 2 April). The diarist and science buff tested out an ear trumpet which allowed him to ‘plainly hear the dashing of the oares of the boats in the Thames’ from the window of the Arundel gallery (perhaps the same gallery pictured in the Mytens portrait of the earl).

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Within the context of the contemporary ‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’, an ongoing debate over whether ancient or modern culture was superior, Sprat’s comments presented Arundel House as a site in which both could be valued. Preferring the ‘new inventions’ to the ‘marbles’, however, the duke was notoriously lax about the care of his antiquities. Nor was he particularly careful about his other inherited collectibles. As we shall see, an important part of the collection slipped through the sixth Duke of Norfolk’s hands during his lifetime. Most of the rest slipped from the grasp of his successors. In fact, of the thousands of pieces that originally formed part of the Arundel collection, only a few remain with the family today, including some portraits, several Greek altars and a votive foot (Vickers 2006: 84).

Jewels The rich cabinet of engraved jewels belonging to the Earl of Arundel was inherited by his grandson Henry, who was said by John Evelyn to have been cheated out of many of the gems by ‘painters, panders and misses’ (Evelyn 1875: 300). One of these painters was Peter Lely, who painted portraits of Henry at his most magnificent and his second wife, Jane, at her most fetching. One of the ‘misses’ was precisely that second wife, to whom Henry presented the remaining jewels, probably with the thought that she could sell them to help support herself and their children after his death. This, indeed, is what took place. In need of money after Henry’s death in 1684, and pressed by her second husband, Jane sold the cabinet to the Earl of Peterborough. The jewels were afterwards inherited by the Earl of Peterborough’s wife and she passed them on to their daughter, Mary Mordaunt. In a curious twist, the sixteen-year-old Mary Mordaunt was married to Henry’s eldest son, also called Henry, who became the seventh Duke of Norfolk. In this way the gems once again came into the Howard family. The marriage was unhappy, however. The seventh duke reputedly had vicious habits, and Mary became involved with a soldier of fortune, Sir John Germaine. The result was a sensational divorce case which was the talk of England in the late seventeenth century. The divorce settlement in 1700 directed that the duchess should be repaid the 10,000 pounds she had brought to the Duke of Norfolk as dowry and that she, in return, ‘should restore a box of jewels of great value’, the cabinet of engraved gems, to her former husband. The duke did not get around to discharging his debt, however, before he died in 1701. The duchess, therefore, kept the box of jewels, along with, according to contemporary accounts, ‘the most valuable part’ of what was left of the Arundel collection (Causton 1862: 269). Six months after her ex-husband’s death, Mary Mordaunt became the wife of John Germaine. Just four years later, she herself was dead, and the Arundel gems, along with much of her property, became the inheritance of her second husband.

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In 1706, the sixty-year-old Germaine married the twenty-six-year-old daughter of the Earl of Berkeley, Elizabeth, or Betty as she was known. When Germaine died in 1718, he left his property, including artworks from the Arundel collection and the cabinet of gems, to his young wife. Lady Betty Germaine lived a long and independent life, becoming a fixture in the English social scene, an ‘old goody’ with scores of interesting tales to tell of times past. She was an avid collector herself, and the interiors of her home were described as being ‘covered with portraits’ and ‘crammed with old china’ (Walpole 1941: 90). After the British Museum declined to purchase it, Lady Betty gave the cabinet of gems as a wedding present to a favourite great-niece, Mary Beauclerk. As part of the marriage settlements, the jewels were passed on to Mary’s future brother-in-law, the fourth Duke of Marlborough, who integrated it with his other gem collections. The Duke of Marlborough doted on his new acquisition, praising his favourite gems as incredibly beautiful and ingenious. In a large family portrait at Blenheim Palace, the duke is shown clutching an ancient cameo, while his son holds one of the red cases in which they were stored, as if eager to receive them as an inheritance. The gems were indeed inherited by this son, the fifth Duke of Marlborough, in 1817. The fifth duke however, dissipated much of the family fortune through his extravagant lifestyle. (He once remarked to a friend that he knew he was frittering away the family fortune, ‘but I can’t help it; I must live’ [cited in Soames 1967: 150].) The sixth duke tried to maintain Blenheim on loans, but in 1875 his indebted son, the seventh duke, felt obliged to raise money by auctioning some of the family collections, including the engraved gems. The gems were bought by a wealthy collector from Manchester, and when he died they passed on to his daughter who put them up for auction in 1899. Thus, though it left the Howard family early on, an important part of the old Arundel collection survived virtually intact almost into the twentieth century. At this auction, however, the gems were dispersed into the hands of many different buyers and, while some are now in museums,  the location of the majority is unknown. The illustrious Felix gem, described in the previous chapter, was bought by a private collector and eventually donated to the Ashmolean in 1966 (Boardman 2009). So much of the pleasure in these minute artworks came from handling them and holding them to the light, that they suffered perhaps the most of any of the works in the Arundel collection from becoming purely visual objects within museums. Thus, although described as one of the ‘treasures’ of the Ashmolean, the Felix gem attracts little attention from visitors. (Even a museum attendant I spoke with was unaware of its presence in the museum.) Given that part of the original allure of these jewels consisted of the ‘magical’ essences they supposedly contained and  the powerful deities they often evoked, their demystification in modern culture would be another reason for their present rather lacklustre appeal.

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Pictures The seventh Duke of Norfolk – the one who had the acrimonious break-up with Mary Mordaunt – was induced by financial circumstances to sell many of the paintings at Arundel House, together with other possessions and properties. When he died childless in 1701, the title passed to a nephew, Thomas Howard, and after that to another nephew, Edward, who became the ninth duke. In the eighteenth century, Duke Edward and his wife Mary renovated a family mansion, called Worksop Manor, and relocated many of the remaining works of art from the Arundel collection there. In 1761, when the renovations were complete and the rooms were being readied for occupation, a fire broke out, leaving the manor a smouldering ruin. When the duke heard the news he reportedly said: ‘God’s will be done! No matter, we can build it up again’ (‘Anecdote’ 1768: 98). The duke did indeed construct a new Worksop Manor, but the artworks lost in the fire were irreplaceable (Causton 1862: 324). A number of the Holbeins, which the old Earl of Arundel valued so highly, have, nonetheless, survived to the present day. One of these, a fulllength portrait of Christina of Denmark, sparked a public outcry when it became known in 1909 that the fifteenth Duke of Norfolk planned to sell it to a wealthy American. A cartoon in Punch showed Uncle Sam dragging a resisting Christina out of her frame and muttering ‘Once aboard the liner and the gyurl is mine!’ (Figure 5.1). In England, an ultimately successful campaign aimed to raise enough money to keep ‘the girl’ at home. (The brouhaha caused by the sale inspired Henry James to write a novel entitled The Outcry centred on a controversial art transaction.) The animated public reaction to the possibility of losing a ‘national treasure’ illustrates how art can be vivified – pulled out of its frame, as it were – by a strong affective impulse. The portrait of Christina was originally commissioned so that Henry VIII could decide if the sixteen-year-old widow might serve as his fourth wife (to which possibility she replied that if she had two heads, one should be at the King of England’s disposal). The painting now hangs peacefully in Room 4 of the National Gallery in London (Finocchio 2014). One curious painting in the Arundel collection, and likely also by Holbein, was a diamond-shaped Allegory of Passion. This painting shows a rider on a galloping horse above a motto in Italian: E cosi desio me mena (‘Thus Desire Carries Me Along’). The motto seems to provide a fitting description of the old earl’s passion for collecting and also for the impetuous lives of some of his descendants. In 1653, a visitor to Arundel House mentioned seeing this work in the study of Lady Anne, the first wife of Arundel’s grandson, Henry. After this, all trace of the painting was lost until the 1930s, when it turned up in an auction of the collection of an English clergyman. The clergyman being deceased, no one could say where the mysterious painting had come from (Fredericksen 1982). It is now owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum in California, an artistic emigration which also occasioned controversy (Norman 1980).

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Figure 5.1  The ‘Kidnapping’ of Holbein’s Christina of Denmark, Bernard Partridge (Punch, 12 May 1909).

Some of the Arundel paintings are presumed to have been inherited by Lady Betty Germaine, by way of her husband’s first wife, the scandalous Mary Mordaunt, Duchess of Norfolk. When Lady Betty died in 1769, one prize painting, The Laughing Boy, presumed to be by Leonardo, went to the collector and diplomat Sir William Hamilton. This small painting shows a curly-headed infant smilingly holding up a puzzle: two wooden tablets

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bound with straps, under which is a fishbone (Figure 5.2). The puzzle, a common children’s toy, is constructed so that when it is closed and opened again, the bone will appear to have disappeared. (Leonardo was fascinated by magic tricks of this kind.) Hamilton, whom we encountered in Chapter 2 displaying his wife as a work of art, took The Laughing Boy to his residence in Naples where he was the British ambassador. There it was greatly admired by visitors, one of whom wrote: that ‘the piece which captivated me above all … [was] a sweet

Figure 5.2  The Laughing Boy, Bernardino Luini (from Tancred Borenius, Catalogue of the Pictures at Elton Hall. London: Medici Society, 1924).

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smiling boy at his play. It is a rare painting by Leonardo’ (cited by Jenkins and Sloane 1996: 281). Overspending obliged Hamilton to sell off some of his collection, including The Laughing Boy. It was bought by his cousin William Beckford, one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Beckford, who had a romantic and reclusive nature, had the idea of building a Gothic ‘abbey’ for his private residence. When it was completed, Fonthill Abbey was the most fantastic private home in England (Figure 5.3). The stained glass windows, the intricate carvings, the vaulted ceilings, the endless corridors and the soaring central tower were all calculated to produce a feeling of awe. There was even an organ and a pretend chapel, redolent with incense. It was to this abbey that The Laughing Boy came after Beckford purchased it from Hamilton. The small, cheerful painting might seem out of place in the solemnity of the abbey, but Beckford aimed for dramatic juxtapositions: Aladdin’s caves of treasures within monastic halls, intricate detail juxtaposed with dizzying heights, a dwarf (one of Beckford’s servants) opening thirtyfive-foot-high doors… One particularly striking effect was achieved with a concealed gallery: ‘It seemed clos’d by a crimson drapery held by a bronze statue, but on [Beckford’s] stamping and saying “Open!” the statue flew

Figure 5.3  Fonthill Abbey, John Rutter (from John Rutter, Delineations of Fonthill. London: John Rutter, 1823).

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back and the Gallery was seen extending 350 feet long’ (cited by Pearce 1995: 131). To the remark that there was no need to see Fonthill when one could visit the British Museum, Beckford haughtily replied: All the revenge I should inflict on such people would be to bring them to the place, and witness the utter sense of self-annihilation they must exhibit on being brought underneath this magnificent tower. (1859: 234) The Laughing Boy joined an impressive collection of art at Fonthill. What most attracted Beckford, however, was not so much paintings as objets d’art: finely wrought cups, coffers and cabinets (including some from the Arundel collection), which he could handle and arrange. The crafty nature of much of Beckford’s collection ran counter to the rising trend to limit aesthetic appreciation to the visual arts and relegate handicrafts, with their tactile elements, to the realm of mechanical production. This point of view can be seen in the critique of the collection at Fonthill by William Hazlitt: It is … a cathedral turned into a toyshop, an immense Museum of all that is most curious and costly and, at the same time, most worthless in the productions of Art and Nature…. tables of agate, cabinets of ebony, and precious stones … rich in the materials, rare and difficult in the workmanship, but scarce one genuine work of art. (1843: 285) ‘As a choice privilege’, Hazlitt sneered, a visitor might be permitted ‘to touch baubles so dazzling and of such exquisite nicety’, but how much better ‘to see, at least, a few fine old pictures’ (1843: 285, 288). The new sensory order was evidently asserting itself. His income falling, Beckford was forced to sell his dream abode and collection in 1822. The upcoming sale aroused immense interest and the curious flocked to Fonthill to see the fabled abbey. It must have been some consolation to Beckford for his enormous loss to see his imaginary medieval sanctuary become an actual site for pilgrimage. In the end, Beckford found a rich manufacturer of gunpowder who bought the whole abbey, contents included, and he went to live at Bath. When the new owner of Fonthill decided to sell the abbey’s collection shortly afterwards, Beckford took the opportunity to buy back some of his favourite pieces, including The Laughing Boy. A few years later the hastily built tower at Fonthill collapsed and the abbey was later largely demolished. It had been like a palace built by a genie, not meant to have more than an ephemeral existence. When Beckford died, his possessions went to his eldest daughter, Susannah, who had catered to his social pretensions by marrying his cousin, the future tenth Duke of Hamilton. The Duke of Hamilton believed himself heir to the throne of Scotland and on this basis built a ‘royal’ palace on his ancestral Scottish estate. The art historian Gustav Waagen wrote of this palace in 1851 that ‘a full crimson [the Hamilton colour] predominated in

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the carpets, a deep brown in the woods of the furniture, and a black Irish marble [on the floor]’ creating an effect of ‘the most massive and truly princely splendour, at the same time somewhat gloomy’ (1854: 318). It was amid this gloomy splendour that The Laughing Boy smiled out at visitors, next to a grim entombment of Christ by Poussin. The tenth Duke of Hamilton died in 1852. It was the age of Egyptomania and the duke, ever self-important, had arranged for the prominent mummy expert, Thomas Pettigrew, to mummify him. He was then buried in an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus in a colossal mausoleum he had built on the palace grounds. The eleventh Duke of Hamilton held on to the palace and the collection, though he preferred living in Europe. However, in 1882, his son, the twelfth duke, put the palace contents up for sale in what was one of the greatest auctions of art Britain had ever seen. The sale included Florentine cabinets; armoires from the Louvre; paintings by Boticelli, Mantegna, Velazquez and Rubens and the famous Laughing Boy, with its prestigious Arundel pedigree. The Laughing Boy was considered by many the most important work on sale – ‘Nothing surely can exceed the masterly execution of the Picture’, the sale catalogue boasted (Hamilton Palace 1882: 99). Though ‘everyone expected to hear it was bought by the nation’, the ‘rare painting by Leonardo’ was purchased by the Manchester businessman and collector Stephen Winckworth (‘Some Remarkable Pictures’ 1882: 445). (The purchase of many of the art treasures at nineteenth-century auctions by ‘businessmen’ shows how power was shifting from the landed aristocracy to the new masters of capitalism.) Hamilton Palace was demolished in 1927. Its location was no longer desirable, for it was now threatened by subsidence caused by mining and surrounded by coal and iron works, ‘putting forth their perpetual fumes of smoke and noxious vapours in every direction’ (‘Furniture’ 1882: 104). Only the mausoleum (now famed for producing the longest-lasting echoes in the world) and the palace dining room survived, the latter because it was dismantled and reinstalled in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Seven years after The Laughing Boy was bought at the Hamilton Palace sale, it was sold again, in 1889, to the fifth Earl of Carysfort. The painting, however, had undergone a major reattribution. It was no longer said to be the work of Leonardo da Vinci but of one of his students, Bernardino Luini. (The same boy appears in several of Luini’s works.) This was not such a comedown as one might think, as Luini was immensely popular in Victorian England for the sweetness of his portrayals. A tough reassessment of Luini in the twentieth century, however, condemned the painting’s creator as trite and sentimental. This had the effect of relegating the artist and his works to virtual anonymity. It was also pointed out that there was no proof that The Laughing Boy had ever formed part of the prestigious Arundel collection, only that it had been owned by Betty Germaine, who had inherited a number of works from that collection. Perhaps it had come from the family of her husband’s first wife, Mary Mordaunt, as Lady Betty is known to have also inherited some of the Mordaunt collectibles – including an Aztec stone which the Elizabethan magician, Dr. Dee, used to conjure up spirits.

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According to old inventories, The Laughing Boy seems to have once been owned by Charles I and kept at his palace at Greenwich before he was executed and his collection sold. The 1649 inventory of the pictures at Greenwich (made after the Earl of Arundel’s death in 1646) describes it as ‘a naked boy playing, on 2 boards, done by Leonardo’ (Hewlett 1890: 212). Today The Laughing Boy (now called Boy with a Puzzle) can be seen at Elton Hall, the home of the descendants of the Earls of Carysfort. Once so renowned that even the dismissive Hazlitt felt obliged to include it in his Criticisms on Art (1843), it is now scarcely known to anyone but scholars of Italian Renaissance art. The vanishing trick the boy laughingly exhibits seems in retrospect to poignantly refer to the celebrity of the painting itself and, more generally, to the ephemerality of aesthetic values.

Marbles In 1667, John Evelyn wrote to Henry Howard, sixth Duke of Norfolk, that it pained him to see ‘some of the noblest antiquities in the world, which your grandfather purchased with so much cost and difficulty, lie abandoned, broken and defaced in divers corners about Arundel House and the gardens’ (cited by Causton 1862: 142). Even if an exaggeration, this description provides an idea of Henry’s lack of interest in the marbles, most of which had remained at Arundel House as they had been too cumbersome to transport abroad in the days of the old earl’s exile. Indeed, so little regarded were some of these remains of antiquity that they were used as building materials in the repair of the house. For example, the top half of the Parian Chronicle, that unique marble record of ancient Greek history, had been put to the practical purpose of serving as a hearthstone. This was a far cry indeed from the earl’s dream of a museum in his ancestral home. Evelyn, the old family friend, had already persuaded Henry to donate his grandfather’s impressive library to the Royal Society. (Most of this library was sold or traded by the society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries [Peck 2005: 333].) Now Evelyn turned his attention to the neglected Arundel marbles. Evelyn, with an eye to sharing in the glory of the benefaction, suggested the duke make a present of them to the University of Oxford. Henry agreed to a partial donation, excluding the statues which were the most valuable part of the collection. Evelyn then had them piled up and carted away. The Greek and Latin marble inscriptions were placed in the walls around the Sheldonian Theatre, the ceremonial hall of the University of Oxford. Evelyn described these as ‘one hundred and fifty of the most ancient and worthy treasures of that kind in the learned world’ (cited by Causton 1862: 147). However, he noted that, in their new location, ‘some idle persons had begun to scratch and injure them’ and he ‘advised that a hedge of holly

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should be planted at the foot of the wall, to be kept breast-high only, to protect them’ – which the vice-chancellor promised to do ‘next season’ (1862: 147). The handsome donation was commemorated on a slab of marble – conveniently cut off the back of one of the ancient inscriptions (Vickers 2006: 38). In 1678, Henry Howard decided to pull down Arundel House in order to convert the extensive property into a profitable real estate development. A part of the garden was reserved for a projected new ducal mansion to be financed by the project. The duke, who evidently saw no role for them in his new palace, put the remaining marbles at Arundel House up for sale. Many of those which had been located within the house, primarily busts, were bought by Thomas Herbert, later Earl of Pembroke. He took them to his house at Wilton where they were joined by a selection of statuary purchased from the collection of Cardinal Mazarin. This collection, which the Earl of Arundel had helped form when it originally belonged to Cardinal Richelieu, had met a sad fate. On Mazarin’s death, his palace and part of his collection went to his favourite niece, Hortense Mancini. Hortense’s husband was of a puritanical frame of mind and, after his young wife ran away, he gave vent to his anger over the immorality of the age by smashing the nude statues in the palace with a hammer and daubing the naked figures in the paintings with paint. One imagines how this act of destruction would have horrified Mazarin, who disliked visitors touching his pieces for fear of the damage they might do. Some of the statues bought by Pembroke from this collection still bore the marks of hammer blows (Michaelis 1882: 45). To each statue the Earl of Pembroke gave a name and an identity, whether justified or not, for he saw each as a representation of a great historical figure or deity who must take its place in his pantheon of marble heroes. Horace Walpole related that one day the earl ‘took it into his grave head to give eyeballs with charcoal to all his statues at Wilton, and then called his wife and daughters to see how much livelier the gods, goddesses and emperors were grown’ (cited by Coutu 2015: 18). If this anecdote is true, the effect would have made a startling contrast with the dignified appearance of the statues we see in the Mytens portrait of the Earl of Arundel (Figure 4.1). The sculpture collection remained largely intact at Wilton House until the mid-twentieth century when various works were sold. One of these, a statue of Faustina the Elder, can now be found at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Remaining at Arundel House in the late seventeenth century, after the indoor statuary had been sold, were the statues in the garden. These were brought to the reserved part of the garden and placed under a colonnade backing on to a wall while the transformation of the estate into a housing development proceeded. The workmen on the project damaged a number of these statues by carelessly throwing construction waste over the wall into the reserved garden, causing the collapse of part of the colonnade (Haynes 1975: 13).

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Henry Howard died in 1684, without seeing his real estate project completed. No new ducal mansion, in fact, was ever built on the site of Arundel House and the entire estate was developed into new housing. Recalling the past glories of the area, the poet John Gay would later compare the aesthetic offerings of Arundel House with the new Arundel Street: Here Arundel’s fam’d structure rear’d its frame, The street alone retains the empty name; Where Titian’s glowing paint the canvas warm’d And Raphael’s fair design, with judgment, charm’d, Now hang’s the bellman’s song and pasted here The coloured prints of Overton appear. Where statues breath’d the work of Phidias’s hands, A wooden pump, or lonely watch-house stands. (1716: 44) The sensory contrast is distinctly unfavourable. After Henry Howard, the sixth duke, died, the sale of the statues continued. In 1691, the upwardly mobile Sir William Fermor bought the greater part of the remaining statues for a bargain price of three hundred pounds. These served to invest the new mansion he was building, Easton Neston, with an air of distinguished antiquity. The estate and its marbles were inherited, in turn, by Sir William’s son, who became the first Earl of Pomfret. Impressed by the statuary he had seen during a trip to Italy, this earl placed the Arundel statues in the hands of a restorer in order to ‘improve’ their appearance. Unfortunately, the sculptor was poorly qualified (though perhaps not much worse than others of the time) and ‘hardly ever have any antiques been so shamefully tampered with as in the tasteless additions made by this shallow butcher’ (Michaelis 1882: 39). Some of the statues and busts were distributed around Easton Neston, but most were kept protected within a conservatory, where insufficient space produced an appearance of clutter, ‘as if it was the shop of a statuary’ (cited by Michaelis 1882: 40). Horace Walpole, who visited Easton Neston in 1736, saw not an elegant conversation taking place among the works, but a disorderly tirade: in an old green-house is a wonderful fine statue of Tully haranguing a numerous assembly of decayed emperors, vestal virgins with new noses, Colossus’s, Venus’s, headless carcases and carcaseless heads, pieces of tombs, and hieroglyphics. (cited by Michaelis 1882: 40) After the death of the Earl of Pomfret, his estranged heir put the statues up for sale. They were salvaged by his mother, the classically inclined Countess Dowager Henrietta-Louisa, who presented them to the University

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of Oxford in 1755 (see Dudley 2004). This generous donation was celebrated with speeches and poetry. One poem announced that: The sculptur’d column and the breathing bust; Stand here, deliver’d from oblivion’s dust. (in Vickers 2006: 93) This sentiment was somewhat optimistic, as the statues were placed in an ill-lit room in the old school of astronomy at Oxford, where they stood in a sleepy inertia awaiting a more suitable display space (Figure 5.4). Interest in the collection declined over the ensuing years, with an author of 1846 remarking that it had gone from being ‘the most significant depository of Art in Oxford’ to being ‘one of the most unknown and insignificant of its sights’ (Burgon 1846: 7). After remaining at the university for over a century, the statues were finally placed in a new sculpture gallery in the relocated Ashmolean Museum. There they joined the Arundel inscriptions that had earlier been removed from the walls around the Sheldonian Theatre.

Figure 5.4  The Statue Gallery, Ashmolean Museum (1814), William Westall, after Charles George Lewis (Courtesy of Wellcome Images).

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Not all of the sculptures were condemned to oblivion. The so-called ‘Oxford Bust’, a portrait of a woman composed of pieces from two different ancient statues, attracted much interest in the nineteenth century. Many copies were made of this bust and it was incorporated into several nineteenthcentury paintings. In 1868, notably, it served as the model for G. F. Watts’s painting The Wife of Pygmalion – a picture that threw the poet Swinburne into an ‘ecstasy of admiration’ (Vickers 2006: 56). The popularity of the Oxford Bust provided a late glimmer of celebrity for the Arundel marbles. It should be noted that only those marbles deemed most presentable and significant were placed in the new sculpture gallery at the Ashmolean. In 1882, the art historian Adolph Michaelis complained that ‘most can only be found after wearisome search in the gloomy cellars of this palatial building, even into their darkest recesses’ (1882: 41). It was a reburial of sorts, this time within the vaults of a museum. Michaelis ventured to hope that ‘this is the last stage of ill-treatment which the famous Arundel marbles have had to suffer, and that for them there may even yet be at some time a day of final resurrection’ (1882). With museum space limited and interest slight, however, visitors to the sculpture gallery at the Ashmolean today still only see a sample of the forty wagon loads or so of the marbles carted by straining horses from Easton Neston to Oxford. It remains to recount the fate of the marbles which were left on the grounds of Arundel House after the rest were sold. The seventh Duke of Norfolk gave away a number of broken pieces to his gardener, Abraham Boydell Cuper, who used them to decorate a ‘pleasure garden’ he owned called Cuper’s, or Cupid’s, Gardens. Here they mingled with the London masses, who could visit the gardens for a fee, and sadly suffered from their rough attentions. In 1717, two connoisseurs of the antique purchased these fragments from Cuper’s son for £75 and brought them to their homes – in one case placing them in a sham Gothic ruin. The origin of these fragments was forgotten over time until Denys Haynes, keeper of the Greek and Roman Department at the British Museum, rediscovered them in the 1970s (Haynes 1975: 16). One of these pieces, a draped male torso (now in the Ashmolean Museum), was recognized by Haynes as ‘all that survives of one of the most celebrated of the Arundel statues’ (1975). This was the so-called Homerus, depicted by Rubens and other artists and seen in the gallery of statues in the 1618 Mytens portrait of the Earl of Arundel (Figure 4.1, third down on the right). Another of the assorted fragments taken from Cuper’s Gardens, a smashed Roman head, recently sold for £15,000, indicating that ancient sculptures (especially those with good stories behind them) still have cultural currency among collectors (‘Roman Marble Head’ 2014). Whatever sculptures remained at Arundel House, the seventh duke removed to a piece of land he held on lease on the Thames. These consisted of ‘eight or nine mere trunks, a number of heads not fitting any of the bodies, some of them with noses, chins and lips defaced, besides fragments of hands, fingers, toes etc.’ (‘Historical Introduction’ 1769: 572). Such incongruous body parts must have furnished a rich subject for humour among the

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workmen who transported them, or the visitors who saw their fellows at Cuper’s Gardens. In the process of being removed, a headless statue of a seated man fell into the Thames where for many years it was used at low water by boatmen to fasten their boats, a ring having been attached to it for this purpose. This piece was rescued in the eighteenth century and incorporated into the large collection of Henry Blundell (Michaelis 1882: 357). The marbles on the river bank were gradually buried under deep layers of rubbish and earth from construction work. When the site was being developed in 1712, some of these ancient fragments resurfaced. A Hellenistic relief depicting a wedding was acquired by the Earl of Burlington and placed at the base of an obelisk in his gardens at Chiswick, where it can still be seen. Someone else took a fragment of a column to be used as a roller for his bowling green (Michaelis 1882: 38). More important pieces were taken to Worksop Manor, the home of the ninth Duke of Norfolk, where they were presumed destroyed in the fire that burnt the renovated manor in 1761. However, a battered male torso (part of a frieze from the famed Pergamon Altar) survived, and was built into the wall of a nearby house. In 1960, the then owner of the house, who thought the fragment was causing dampness, extracted the marble and tried to sell it to a cemetery mason to be turned into graveyard chips. It is now in the Worksop Public Library (Harbison 2015: ch. 1). Many leftover marbles remained on the site of Arundel House and ended up under the new streets and houses constructed there. Some of these, including part of a sarcophagus, were subsequently discovered in the cellars and foundations of these houses. In the late nineteenth century, a London judge, the formidable Mordaunt Snagge, encountered a labourer in the underground carrying a marble head under his arm. When asked where he had acquired it, the worker said he had found it while digging the foundations of a house in Surrey Street (on the former grounds of Arundel House) and now wished to sell it. The judge bought it from him for a pound, and it was later donated to the Ashmolean, where it is known as the Snagge Head (Vickers 2006: 72). When the site of Arundel House was again being excavated for a new construction in the 1970s, another piece came to light, the marble frieze with gorgons’ heads depicted in the seventeenth-century painting, The Continence of Scipio by Van Dyck (Figure 4.4; Haynes 1975: 14). (This frieze is now exhibited at the Museum of London.) When the Earl of Arundel had his sculptures disinterred from the soil of classical lands – ‘seized from the jaws of the Underworld’ as his curator Junius put it (1638: 30) – he could have hardly imagined that some of them would end up being buried for centuries in England. In 2010, part of the head of Jupiter that the Earl placed at the back of his garden to keep an eye on visitors was discovered in an English Heritage storeroom, where it had lain, unnoticed, amidst the remains of stone saints defaced by the iconoclasts (Foster 2010). This piece had previously adorned a fanciful ‘temple of Jupiter’ on the grounds of a nearby estate. It may have been among the antiquities left behind when Arundel House was demolished,

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for the eighteenth-century owner of the estate had bought a house in the new development, in which he reportedly found part of a statue. Alternatively, it may have been among the pieces at Cuper’s Gardens, as one of the men who acquired them from the gardens was a nephew of the owner (Haynes 1975: 13). Whatever the case, it seems likely that this important find does not mark the end of the rediscovery of the antiquities brought to London by the Earl of Arundel, and that new pieces will continue to turn up in the future. One of the outcomes of the dispersal of the Arundel marbles was that it brought a touch of antiquity, once the sole privilege of the wealthy and noble, into the lives of many ordinary people who came into contact with sculpture fragments through working on the Arundel estate or in the classically adorned pleasure gardens they frequented. In this respect the dispersal was perhaps similar to the sale of the massive collection of Charles I by the Parliamentarians, which exposed fine art to the view of merchants and tradespeople, and even allowed them to own some of these works. (The king’s former plumber, for example, received payment in the form of furnishings and masterpieces, including, suitably, a painting of the Flood [Brotton 2006: 243].) However, the marbles were distinct in that, being stone, they could be seen not just as artworks or as antiquities, but as material objects to be put to practical use. Indeed, for many people, unfamiliar with or unsympathetic to the culture of art collecting, using the fragmented Arundel marbles as building material would have made much more sense than setting them apart as collection pieces. Thus, as their social and material contexts shifted over time, the sculptures flickered between being art and being ‘stuff’. Even as the former they were malleable, for ancient statues were often altered to suit contemporary notions of aesthetics and propriety, or to make them fit their proposed identities: Cicero, Venus, Homer and so on. Hence stone, which may seem the most permanent of all materials out of which to fashion works of art, proved to be surprisingly fluid.

Scents As this chapter began with an olfactory overture it is fitting to end it with a trailing note of scent by exploring some of the ways in which aromas enveloped the lives of the collectors and the collections discussed here. Although the ephemerality of scent denies it the lasting presence of material artworks, such artworks were, nonetheless, often experienced within scented atmospheres. A number of the ancient statues and more modern sacred paintings in the Arundel collection, for example, would originally have received tributes of incense from the devotees of their cults. In Protestant England, this union of art and scent was suspect due to its associations with idolatry. Even so, works of art continued to participate in the general redolence of their settings. This was perhaps particularly the case in England

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for ‘the English were almost unique in their love of surrounding themselves with objects of beauty … in the rooms in which they and their families passed their lives’ (Hermann 1972: 3). Even the galleries might be a ‘hub of everyday life, where children played, ladies embroidered, read and played cards, and gentlemen took exercise’ (Jackson-Stops 1990: 31). Significantly, the period of the Arundel collection’s formation was one of extensive perfume use. Casting bottles were used to sprinkle freshening fragrances, herbs were strewn on the floor, incense was burnt to purify the air and aromatic fires were lit when the wind blew cold – at least, by the wealthy. In one of his verses the Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton describes how such atmospheric odours might seem to be breathed out by the very pictures in the room. The fire, of precious wood; the light perfume, Which left a sweetness on each thing it shone, As everything did to itself assume The scent from them, and made the same their own: So that the painted flowers within the room Were sweet, as if they naturally had grown; The light gave colours which upon them fell, And to the colours the perfume gave smell. (1887: 59) Perfumes were also commonly worn on the person. Clothes and gloves were scented, and fans doused in perfume, while pomanders stuffed with spices and miniature perfume bottles worn on chains offered an ever-ready supply of personal fragrance. (The handkerchief Lady Arundel holds in one hand in her Mytens portrait might well have been scented.) This extensive perfuming was intended to mask malodours and protect against their associated diseases, but it also expressed the widespread pleasure taken in fragrance. It was the aesthetic qualities of scent (along with a desire to evoke ancient theatrical practice) that led Ben Jonson to employ a mist of perfume in The Masque of Hymen, a play in which the Earl of Arundel performed as a young man. As luxury items, fine scents were an olfactory marker of prestige and power (see Classen, Howes and Synnott 1994). An aristocratic, expensively perfumed visitor to the galleries at Arundel House would therefore have invested a distinguished collection with scents of distinction. Scents might also play a role in the traffic of artworks. When Willam Petty went to acquire antiquities for the Earl of Arundel in the Ottoman Empire, he was well-stocked with tobacco to sweeten his deals (Vickers 2006: 9). While the practice of smoking tobacco had only recently been introduced to the region from North America, the inhabitants had quickly acquired a taste for it. The prominent seventeenth-century art dealer Daniel Nys, from whom the Earl of Arundel acquired his cabinet of jewels, was also a dealer in perfumes. After Nys negotiated the sale of a large part of the Duke of Mantua’s magnificent collection to Charles I in 1630, the dealer

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consoled the bereaved duke with rare fragrances. More generally, gifts of perfume, like gifts of paintings, were useful for cultivating political liaisons and strengthening friendships. The prominent Renaissance patron and collector Isabella d’Este was famous for presenting her own perfume creations to friends and potential allies. When Peter Paul Rubens was sent by the Duke of Mantua on a diplomatic mission to the King of Spain, he carried a rock crystal vase of perfume, along with gifts of paintings and other luxury items. Entrusting this mission to a painter ensured that any damage incurred to the paintings en route could be readily restored, which, in this case, proved necessary (Lamster 2009: ch. 1; Ray 2015: 36). From a Puritan perspective, both perfumes and pictures were associated with depravity and deceit. As sensuous luxury goods they promoted selfindulgence and immorality, and as cunning artifices (perfumes could mask malodours and pictures, misrepresent reality) they concealed the truth. Perfume use in England was therefore curtailed when the Puritans came into power but it returned in full force with the restoration of Charles II in 1660. The grandson of the Collector Earl, Henry Howard, was passionate about perfumes, which he called ‘sweets’ according to the custom of the day. ‘I am the greatest lover and hunter after sweets in the world’, he declared (cited by Peck 2005: 146). In quest of such sweets, Howard ordered quantities of perfumes, perfume bottles and scented linens from abroad. Regarding perfumes, he instructed his agent to: [Get] what quantity you can of the spirit … of orange flowers, which is the most delicate smell in the world … also for delicate waters such as the aqua di cordova in Spain and Portugal or in Italy, the aqua d’angely or aqua narisa etc…. (cited by Peck 146) Howard was also interested in acquiring certain perfume boxes, the tops of which ‘show the flowers whereof the perfumes are made’ (Peck 2005: n. 199). As noted above, the sixth Duke of Norfolk belonged to the Royal Society, a group by no means immune to the popular interest in perfume. At its meetings, members discussed techniques for making perfumed gloves and distilling floral waters. During one such discussion John Evelyn noted that the duke had a very large collection of recipes for excellent perfumes – as one might expect of such a lover of fragrance. Another learned member proposed a method for preserving rose petals and placing them in a china jar, ‘which being at any time stirred with the finger would perfume a room’ (bringing to mind the potpourri described at the start of this chapter). Yet another participant described a Chinese cabinet with a different scent to every drawer (Birch 1757: 75–8); a description which indicates that the sense of smell was not left out of the appreciation of collection pieces. Countering such sweet odours were the malodours of crowded urban life, in particular, the smell of the coal smoke that blanketed London. As the population of England grew during the Renaissance and as forests disappeared, many cities, and most notably London, had become reliant on

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coal for fuel. At first the odour of coal smoke was considered so offensive that ladies would not enter a room where coal had been burnt, nor eat food tainted with its scent. Even Queen Elizabeth found herself ‘greatly grieved and annoyed with the taste and smoke’ of coal (cited by Brimblecombe 1987: 30). The Earl of Arundel was a leader in the campaign to reduce coal smoke but ultimately to no avail (Cavert 2016: 80). By the mid-seventeenth century, coal use was so widespread in London that the scent of its smoke had come to seem an almost natural part of city life. Londoners knew better than to wear white in the city, and as for marble statues, they were soon darkened and corroded. Even the museum of the Royal Society was described in the eighteenth century as ‘covered with dust, filth, and coal-smoke’ (cited by Hunter 1989: 154). Under the less than assiduous care of the Earl of Arundel’s grandson, Henry, the marbles at Arundel House would have been begrimed and redolent of soot. During the Great Plague of 1665–66, however, the scent of London temporarily altered. Amid the stench of disease and death, lavender, juniper and cinnamon were burnt in the streets and houses to ‘cleanse’ the air of infection (Classen, Howes and Synnott 1994: 58–62). In his book of 1661 entitled Fumifugium, John Evelyn recommended that noxious industries be removed from London and the city be encircled and purified by a green belt of aromatic plants. While this ambitious plan was never pursued, gardens nonetheless provided important sites of olfactory and visual refreshment (see Dugan 2011: ch. 6). In the case of the Earl of Arundel, his enjoyment of gardens was perhaps second only to his enjoyment of art. He was apparently of the same mind as his friend Francis Bacon, who delighted in the ‘breath of flowers’ (1838: 298), for we hear of him planting flowers which would fill the air with scent. Shortly before his death in Padua, the earl requested that the caretaker of his country estate at Albury plant a ‘store of Roses Chesmine [jasmine] woodbines & the like sweetes’ against the gallery and house (Hervey 1921: 450). With the windows open, the gallery would have been flooded with fragrance. It was in the aromatic enclaves of his gardens that the earl placed the majority of his marbles, thereby combining his two passions and acquainting his countrymen with the Italian practice of displaying statuary in natural settings. (An imaginative re-creation of this garden was recently made at Arundel Castle in West Sussex.) When the Arundel House gardener, Abraham Boydell Cuper, decorated his public pleasure garden with broken pieces of the Arundel marbles, this fashionable new aesthetic was brought to the masses. The garden also served as a source for indoor fragrances. Aletheia Howard gave advice on how to prepare floral perfumes in her recipe collection. Betty Germaine’s instructions for making the potpourri which perfumed the artworks in her possession began with ‘Gather dry, double violets, rose leaves, lavender, myrtle flowers, verbena, bay leaves, rosemary, balm, musk, geranium…’ (Sackville-West 1923: 172). After she became a widow, Betty Germaine spent much of her time with family friends at Knole

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House, a curious place built to evoke the calendar, with 365 rooms, 52 staircases, 12 entrances and seven courtyards. Lady Betty endowed Knole House with a number of collectibles, as well as with her famous potpourri. Through the following centuries, the aroma of this floral blend continued wafting over the artworks at Knole, including a Van Dyck portrait of the Earl and Countess of Arundel. A late-nineteenth-century visitor to Knole would describe the galleries as being ‘sweet with potpourri lying in great china bowls’ (Frazer-Crichton 1892: 279), just the way Victoria SackvilleWest would remember them from her childhood. William Beckford in his pretend medieval abbey at Fonthill, similarly celebrated the scented life. The turf walks at Fonthill were planted with aromatic herbs and the gardens odorized with fragrant flowers – which Beckford complained were increasingly difficult to find due to the trend for eye-catching but scentless blooms (1957: 94; see further Classen 1993: ch. 1). The recluse wrote of his garden to a friend: The walks are divinely beautiful – roses everywhere, [laurel bushes] covered with flowers, cloud-mountains in the air gilded by the rays of the sun, the most brilliant effects of chiaroscuro… I wish you were here to see these picturesque mists and, above all, to breathe the scent… (1957: 91) Picturesque effects were all the rage in landscaping at the time, but Beckford, one could say, complemented painterly vistas with a ‘picturesque of scent’. Inside Fonthill Abbey, rooms were scented with roses and strawberries in the summer and perfumed coal and aromatic fires in winter. It was not possible for the abbey to always be in good odour, and Beckford made note of the stenches: the smoking chimneys, the smelly wallpaper, the malodorous servants.… He displayed his acerbic sense of humour when he had water closets concealed behind second-rate family portraits in the galleries. However, even stenches had dramatic value. ‘You know that Burke said there was something sublime about really good stinks’, Beckford commented to a friend (1957: 226). The important thing was to avoid mediocrity. As Beckford was both a recluse and a social outcast, the abbey was only rarely used for entertaining. The one important exception occurred early on in 1800, when he invited his cousin Sir William Hamilton and his wife Emma, along with her lover, Admiral Nelson, for a visit. In his youth Beckford had penned a Gothic romance called Vathek, in which an Arabian caliph builds palaces devoted to each of the senses. On the occasion of this great visit, he determined to turn Fonthill Abbey into a palace which would stimulate all of the senses at once. Lights swung from trees, music sounded in the woods and drums rolled on hilltops, as the honoured guests approached the abbey. Inside, sumptuous medieval dishes were served at a long, monastic table while fragrant cedar logs blazed in a giant fireplace. The company then mounted a staircase lit by hooded figures holding torches and toured the masterpieces and treasures in the galleries accompanied by strains of music. Afterwards they refreshed themselves with spiced wine and confectionaries

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served in golden baskets amid the rare manuscripts in the library. In return for this splendid reception, Emma favoured the company with a display of her poses based on ancient statuary, which were known to reduce spectators to tears. Beckford, indeed, would later write to Sir William that ‘The only glorious object I have set my eyes upon since [returning from Europe] is the Breathing Statue you have brought over’ (cited by Williams 2006: 154). On that theatrical evening, art was but one strain of aesthetic enjoyment within a symphony of sensations. However, the trend of the times was rather to constitute art as the subject of single-minded and single-sensed appreciation. There would be no perfumes, no feasts, no music, no china bowls of potpourri in the modern museum. These were deemed to detract from, even contaminate, the aesthetic experience. Or so it seemed, until, as we shall see in the next chapter, museums began to return to their senses in the late twentieth century. Shaken by the winds of change, even the gallery displaying the Arundel marbles at the Ashmolean is no longer simply the austere, unchanging site it might appear to be during visiting hours. It is now possible to rent the gallery for weddings, banquets and receptions: to eat, play music and dance there. While there are no bowls of potpourri in the gallery, during a reception the space may well be scented by vases of flowers. And while the sculptures may no longer inspire artists, their images are now disseminated in hundreds of wedding photographs. It’s true that, for the most part, the ancient statues are more classical backdrop than the centre of attention in these events. Yet, for better or worse, they have evidently once again been pulled out of their hermetic retirement and set afloat in the sensory stream of life.

6 The Museum Retouched: From Empire of Sight to Sensory Playground Children and adults are clambering over a structure of multicoloured netting and swinging on pods which hang down from the ceiling like drops of melted crayons. It looks like a scene from a playground or a fair, but it’s taking place in the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. The exuberant artwork seems completely at odds with the staid paintings hanging in nearby rooms. A surprised visitor feels almost dizzy at the juxtaposition of children spinning around on rainbow-coloured pods with such venerable masterpieces as The Crowning of Saint Catherine by Rubens and El Greco’s The Agony in the Garden. Our expectations of what a museum should be are overturned. Is it a temple of art or a fun house? In many contemporary museums, as in that of Toledo, the answer is increasingly: both. It took a hundred years to educate the public in museum etiquette – no running, no jumping, no climbing, no shouting and no touching. A hundred years to convince people to relate to the museum as a realm of pure visuality. Why try to undo this painstaking process of civic education in orderly behaviour and art appreciation? Why transform the museum from a quiet haven of adult contemplation to a noisy sensory playground? One answer is because the nature of art itself has changed. Artists no longer confine themselves to the kinds of works that can be appreciated by gazing at them from behind a rope or painted line on a museum floor. They are creating art which must be moved through, handled, played, smelled and even eaten. The colourful installation in the Toledo Museum, entitled Harmonic Motion and hand-crocheted by Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam and Charles MacAdam (Figure 6.1) would lose half its aesthetic value if it was reduced to a solely visual work. It was made not just for hands-on but for ‘bodies-on’ appreciation. Museums which want to include such innovative artworks have to stretch their traditional sensory and social boundaries, just as the yarn netting of Harmonic Motion stretched to accommodate its eager visitors.

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Figure 6.1  Harmonic Motion (2013), Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam and Charles MacAdam (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma (MACRO); Photo: R. Boccaccino courtesy of Enel Contemporanea).

Another answer is that ideas about museums have changed. Contemporary museums are increasingly interested in engaging visitors through interactive exhibits and immersive environments: Exhibits should invite visitors to participate and become intellectually involved, let visitors touch objects, manipulate machines, smell an environment and hear sounds.… The interaction between museum and visitor should not be limited to exhibits but should extend to the gift shop, food service, and all areas of the museum. (Falk and Dierking 2016: 132; see also Black 2005) Recent scholarship has furthermore brought out the underlying physicality of the museum, both in terms of the museum space itself and as regards the collections it houses, with their overlapping sensory and social attributes (i.e. Pye 2007; Candlin 2010; Dudley 2010, 2012; Rees Leahy 2012; Howes 2014; Levent and Pascual-Leone 2014; Chatterjee and Hannan 2016). Expanding the ways in which museum pieces can be perceived has a number of benefits beyond that of responding to the new directions being taken by artists and museologists. It makes museums more accessible to the visually impaired. It brings in visitors who may find the conventional formal visualism of museums disengaging or daunting. It asserts the value of physical collections in an era of image banks. It may help contextualize

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pieces by evoking the ways in which particular works were originally experienced. It can open up a space for traditional non-Western and women’s art forms which were previously considered too tactile to be ‘fine art’. It may also stimulate visitors into thinking about old artworks in new ways through unexpected sensory conjunctions. With so many potential advantages, one might think that there would be little to say against the sensory revitalization of museums. However, there is, in fact, a good deal of resistance to the idea. This last chapter explores the multiple ways in which museums are extending their sensory horizons and considers the arguments for and against such ‘sensationalization’ of cultural heritage. First, however, we will look at how and why museums initially became ‘empires of sight’ (Stewart 1999: 28).

The Empire of Sight Reading the journals of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travellers, one sees that the sightseers of those days approached collection sites with a fullbodied interest. When Celia Fiennes visited Oxford in 1694, she admired the ‘very good bread and beare’ at Corpus Christi College, the ‘fine sweet wood’ in Trinity College Chapel and the ‘very fine gravel walk’ at Magdalen College. At the Ashmolean Museum she handled a number of exhibits and at the Botanical Garden, she smelled, sampled and manipulated the plants (1949: 33–7). As Zacharias von Uffenbach wandered through Oxford in 1710, he stroked a marble relief in the collection of the Bodleian Library, patted reindeer hair in the Ashmolean Museum, admired the ‘unusually beautiful’ Arundel inscriptions in the wall around the Sheldonian Theatre, deplored the insupportable reek of the dining hall at Christ Church College and, like Fiennes, enjoyed the ‘thoroughly agreeable and excellent perfume’ emanating from the cedar wood in Trinity College Chapel (1928: passim). There is no suggestion in these accounts of needing to subdue one’s senses within collection settings. Rather all of the senses are called on to provide a full assessment of the sites visited. Though officially museums might prohibit handling – in the eighteenth century the entrance ticket for the British Museum warned that ‘persons admitted are not to touch any thing’ – judging by visitor accounts such prohibitions were only selectively enforced. Various factors, however, would work to restrict the sensory liberties taken by collection visitors. One of these was rooted in class distinctions. From the perspective of the elite, it may have seemed fine for the upper classes to handle the works in museums, as they traditionally had in private collections. However, it was disturbing to see the working classes exercise the same manual privileges. The elite, it was thought, could assess the objects on display with a refined touch, while the masses simply pawed everything mindlessly. Uffenbach, though he thought it well to handle artefacts himself, was appalled at the presence of ‘country folk’, and especially women, at the Ashmolean ‘running here and there, grabbing at everything’ (1928: 24, 31).

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As visitor numbers increased in the nineteenth century, the risk of damage to collections, even theft, increasingly became a cause of concern. An article entitled ‘London Exhibitions’ discussed the issue in 1839: The vulgar, and even very many, who, upon other occasions would not be reckoned among the vulgar, cannot keep their hands from fingering what is curious, scrawling upon walls and columns, amusing themselves with defacing, mutilating, cutting or chipping off some little remnant of any object that tickles their fancy, [even] slyly appropriating a portion of some relic that is rare and precious, a bone, or a tooth of an old warrior, a tatter of some old standard, or a rag of an old vestment. (1839: 299) In an era obsessed with the ill-effects of effluvia arising from the ‘great unwashed’, there were also concerns that the very presence of working-class people in museums might contaminate the air and the exhibits (Rees Leahy 2012: 160). The art historian Gustav Waagen, for example, complained bitterly about the malodours arising in the National Gallery from wet nurses with babies and ‘filthy’ labourers, whose ‘exhalation, falling like vapour upon the pictures, tend to injure them’ (cited by Trodd 1994: 42–3). It was not just a matter of protecting museum pieces from harm, however, but also of ensuring that they be treated with respect. Here, as well, who did the touching and how it was done made all the difference. Near the end of the eighteenth century Sophie von La Roche was pleased to finger the antiquities in the British Museum herself, but felt repelled by the sight of the crown jewels in the Tower of London being handled by a slovenly caretaker. A woman opens an old smoky cupboard by the light of two old tallow candles, shows crowns and sceptres, and really by her demeanour and the way she has of handling the things, turning them round and putting them back again, shows a disdain of these tokens of might and power to which one inevitably succumbs. Even the gold loses its power to impress which it usually possesses; for it seems impossible that a woman, furthermore so ungainly in appearance, should be put in charge of pure gold and all that a crown implies. We all found it shocking. (1933: 129) As this quote makes clear, the problem with allowing ‘ordinary people’ to touch collection pieces was not just that they might injure them through rough handling, but that they seemed to make those pieces ‘ordinary’ by association. Even worse, through such familiar contact the ‘lower orders’ learned to ‘disdain … these tokens of might and power’. (Interestingly, both Uffenbach and La Roche seem particularly disturbed by female handling, suggesting that the touch of working-class women was at the bottom of the tactile hierarchy [see Classen 2012: ch. 4].) Making a similar point, the author of ‘London Exhibitions’ noted that ‘in recently passing through the British Museum, we observed that some brutal fellow had just thought proper to spit into the sarcophagus of some great Egyptian personage’ (1839: 239).

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Irreverence directed towards museum pieces, it was suspected, might readily develop into irreverence towards the social groups which collected such pieces and employed them as signs of power and authority. The French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century provided a dramatic illustration of how the unrestrained touch of the masses could topple statues and rulers alike. LouisSébastien Mercier described visiting a post-Revolutionary museum of displaced monuments in Paris in 1797: I walked on tombs, I strode on mausoleums. Every rank and costume lay beneath my feet. I spared the face and bosoms of queens. Lowered from their pedestals, the grandest personages were brought down to my level; I could touch their brows, their mouths. (cited by McClelland 1994: 166–7, see also Mercier 1929: 225–9) Repeated incidents of worker unrest in nineteenth-century Britain kept the authorities anxious about possible attacks on that country’s storehouses of cultural icons (Miller 1974: ch. 7; Auerbach 1999: 38–9; Bennet 1995: ch. 2). One way of keeping disruptive crowds out of museums was to restrict public access, and various techniques, such as requiring written application for admission or keeping entrance fees high, aimed to accomplish this (Hudson 1975: 9–17). However, the hope of many in power was that museums would have a civilizing effect on working people, who would come to prefer the pleasurable viewing to be had in museums, to the ‘sensuous riot’ in which they might otherwise spend their leisure hours (‘London Exhibitions’ 1839: 248). For this to happen, it was necessary to admit the general public into museums. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, only guided tours for small groups were available at the British Museum and many similar institutions. Accommodating the general public necessitated taking measures to ensure that good order was preserved. Museum architecture strove to encourage a high-minded attitude in visitors by mimicking the appearance of an awe-inspiring Greek temple. This was the design chosen for the British Museum in the early nineteenth century, and eventually it became a generic symbol for ‘museum’. Forbidding touch within museums obliged visitors to discipline their ‘unruly’ bodies and refrain from ‘manhandling’ exhibits. Guidelines on museum etiquette were published in the popular press to prepare a public new to museum-going for the decorum that would be expected of them. ‘1. Touch nothing 2. Don’t talk loud 3. Be not obtrusive’, future visitors to the British Museum were instructed (‘British Museum’ 1832: 14). An increase in the number of museum guards helped ensure that such rules were followed. Even so, questions were raised about whether a social class supposedly mired in the world of touch, taste and smell could ever elevate their thoughts sufficiently to see in an aesthetic sense. The novelist Anthony Trollope protested that workers used the National Gallery as ‘a place of assignation, of shelter from the rain, a spot in which to lounge away an idle 10 minutes,

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a nursery for mothers who are abroad with their infants, a retirement place for urban picnics…’ – anything but a place to view fine art (cited by Rees Leahy 2012: 158). He concluded that it was impossible that those ‘who are doomed to lives of manual labour, should really care for pictures’ (2012: 158). The worker’s hand and the connoisseur’s eye could not exist in the same body. On the whole, however, the move to make museums more open to the public was deemed a success. Though the possibility of an attack remained (and remains) a concern, no ransacking of the British Museum occurred. With only a few exceptions, such as the case of a man who slashed a painting by pointing at it with his crutch, ‘uncouth’ labourers did not poke holes in the masterpieces in the National Gallery. (Suffragettes, in fact, would prove more of a threat with their politically motivated attacks on art [Fowler 1991].) A nineteenth-century official wrote with relief that one could see working men at the National Gallery ‘sitting, wondering and marvelling over those fine works, and having no other feeling but that of pleasure or astonishment, they have no notion of destroying them’ (cited by Teather 1984: 4). The satirical magazine Punch presented the ‘Young Mob’ (i.e. the reformed working class) as much better behaved than its wild father, the ‘Old Mob’. Indignant at being disparaged, ‘Young Mob’ protests: Am I not seen with my wife and children wondering at Mr. Latard’s Nineveh Marbles quietly, and I will add, if you please, reverently? Have I, in fact, chipped the nose of any statue? Have I wrenched the little finger from any mummy?… Do I scratch Raphael in the National Gallery? (‘Open House’ 1851: 43) The museum, in fact, became a place where at least some members of the working classes could contradict stereotypes and show that they knew the rules of polite behaviour and were ‘worthy’ to mingle with the most precious objects in the land. It was not only workers who had their behaviour modified by the emphasis on disciplined bodies in the museum, but everyone who passed through its doors. The museum spread its regulatory net over virtually all visitors, high and low. The removal of formerly expected tactile privileges from the upper classes was not so contested as it might have been because touching as a mode of appreciation was quickly becoming bad form (see Classen 2012: 155–6). Why bother about touching, when the important thing was to see? ‘High-culture’ art and antiquities museums led the way in forbidding tactile access to exhibits. Other, less ‘refined’, collection sites often continued to permit a certain amount of tactile access. One of the most hands-on institutions in London was the Royal Armoury, which held a wide-ranging collection of historical weaponry (Figure 6.2). Employing an impressive range of terms to refer to modes of handling, a nineteenth-century

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Figure 6.2  The Royal Armoury, London (from Claude de la Roche Francis. London: Historic and Social. Philadelphia, PA: John C. Winston, 1901).

visitor to the armoury detailed just what one was permitted to do with the exhibits: Like most visitants, I suppose, I handled the Spanish [spears]… – thrust my arm into the shield with a little pistol-barrel … shook sundry long iron-shod pikes… – brandished Danish and Saxon war-clubs – flourished a two-edged cross hilted Saxon broad-sword – felt the edge of the axe which beheaded the beauteous Ann Boleyn … rolled about divers starshot, chain-shot, and link-shot found on board the Armada – screwed up my thumb in a little trinket very prettily contrived for that operation … – essayed to endue my neck in an iron cravat – poised a Spanish boardingpike…; and strutted about with Hal’s [Henry VIII’s] walking staff, armed with three match-lock pistols. (Wheaton 1830: 122) One might think officials would be more reluctant to let museum visitors wield war-clubs than touch a statue, but apparently not. In fact, the Royal Armoury, realizing the peculiar tactile appeal of its collection, was slow to let go of this aspect of site visits (and even today offers object handling sessions). Most major collection sites, however, copied the arts and antiquities museums and made their collections hands-off during the course of the nineteenth century. Not everyone was pleased with this state of affairs. One London seamstress no doubt expressed the views of many when she grumbled: ‘Look

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at them orficers of the British Museum with their uppish, interferin’ ways. It’s ‘you musn’t touch this’, and ‘visitors is requested not to ‘andle that’, when it’s we ‘ad ought to be ordering them’ (Mew 1981: 345; see also Hoberman 2011: 181). More literary museum patrons expressed their sense of alienation from the encased exhibits by imaginatively supposing that the exhibits themselves felt their isolation from human contact. In his poem ‘Haunting Fingers’, Thomas Hardy presented the musical instruments in the museum as missing their former touchability: ‘And they felt past handlers touch them/Though none was in the room’ (1994: 560). Museum officials acknowledged that a certain amount of illicit touching of works by undisciplined visitors still occurred in their empires of sight, but felt it had been reduced to a relatively harmless level: a mere petting of a marble lion or stroking of a painted cheek.

Dizzy Pains and Tactile Values Early modern artists often complained of the heavy labour required by their crafts; one speaks of his hands being so torn with his work that ‘I was forced to eat with my fingers wrapped in bandages’; another notes the necessity of grinding paint pigments ‘as much as ever you can stand’ (cited by Smith 2004: 104, 111). Such fierce toil stood in sharp contrast to the ease with which sculptures and paintings could be viewed when displayed as finished works. Sight could simply glide over surfaces which had taken touch intense effort to produce. However, even when gallery-goers confined themselves to looking at artworks, they still might be deeply and physically affected by what they saw. Strong emotional and physical responses to art were not only characteristic of early modern viewers of art (as discussed in Chapter 2), but also occurred among modern spectators. The poet John Keats famously felt a ‘most dizzy pain’ when seeing the sculpted figures of the Parthenon friezes in the British Museum (1895: 368). Admiring the masterpieces of Florence in 1817, the French novelist Stendhal felt his heart race and thought he might faint with emotion – a response which later gave rise to the term ‘Stendhal syndrome’ to describe strong physiological reactions to art (1826: 102; Elkins 2002: 34). Similarly, when viewing the Sistine Madonna by Raphael, George Elliot felt her heart swell painfully and had to hurry from the room (Fraser 2014: 96). Ordinary gallery-goers were (and still occasionally are) also known to swoon or dissolve into tears on seeing stirring or sentimental paintings and sculptures (see Elkins 2004). These visceral reactions blur the distinction between physical sensations and emotions, and constitute a way in which visitors may be ‘touched’ by museum pieces even within purely visual collection sites. Not everyone enjoyed gallery-going, and for some the sensations of pain they experienced in museums had nothing to do with the evocative power of the exhibits. Mark Twain complained of an Italian art tour: ‘You wander

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through a mile of picture galleries and stare stupidly at ghastly old nightmares done in lampblack and lightning’ (cited by Elkins 2004: 39). Nathaniel Hawthorne no doubt spoke for many when he described visiting the British Museum as ‘a most wearisome and depressing task’ (1872: 348). He found the Egyptian antiquities passably satisfying, ‘for, though inconceivably ugly, they are at least miracles of size and ponderosity, – for example, a hand and arm of polished granite, as much as ten feet in length’ (Figure I.2). By contrast, the masses of lifeless specimens displayed in the Natural History department made his heart ‘ache with a pain and woe that I have never felt anywhere but in the British Museum’ (1872: 349). Such negative responses, however, could be dismissed as arising from a failure to appreciate the wonders on offer. Another way in which corporeal sensations claimed a place in the ‘museum of sight’ was through the influence of the late nineteenth-century field of physiological aesthetics. Mulling over the corporeal effects of spectatorship, and reading up on psychology and evolutionary biology, a number of art historians of the time determined to arrive at a more embodied and ‘scientific’ understanding of the aesthetic experience (Allen 1877; Brain 2015). Two prominent followers of the new approach were Vernon Lee and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson. The pair toured galleries carefully noting their bodily reactions – muscular sensations, breathing, posture, movements, emotions – to works. Anstruther-Thomson, for example, described her sensations on seeing the Venus de Milo as follows: The pressure of my feet on the ground is pressure I see in a marked degree in the feet of the statue. The lift-up of my body I see done more strongly and amply in her marble body, and the steadying pressure of my head I see in a diminished degree in the poise of the statue’s beautiful head. (cited by Veder 2015: 90) The conclusion of this research was that we physically imitate and experience the forms and postures of the art we view, making ‘aesthetic seeing’ dependent on ‘bodily conditions and motor phenomena’ (Veder 2014: 96). The best known exponent of the field was the art historian Bernard Berenson. Berenson held that a painting must transform ‘retinal impressions’ into ‘tactile values’ to make a forceful impression: ‘I must have the illusion of being able to touch a figure, I must have the illusion of varying muscular sensations inside my palm and fingers corresponding to the various projections of this figure, before I shall take it for granted as real, and let it affect me lastingly’ (1896: 5; see also Candlin 2010: 1). What Berenson describes here sounds very like the sensations that prompted viewers in early modernity to reach out and touch lifelike images. However, neither Berenson nor Lee and Anstruther-Thomson say anything about actually touching artworks. All of their tactile and kinesthetic sensations are conveyed through sight alone. There is no caressing of the statue that imprints its forms on one’s body, no stroking of the painting that makes one’s palms tingle. By ‘spoiling’ the appealing illusion, actual touching would presumably be ‘anti-aesthetic’.

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Physiological aesthetics was heavily critiqued from a number of perspectives. One fear was that if the field became too influential the current emphasis on visual aesthetics would be replaced by a ‘muscular aesthetics’, obliging artists to produce works which would elicit gratifying neuromuscular responses in viewers. Many important artworks would furthermore be sidelined due to their depiction of awkward corporeal poses. ‘We would scarcely find pleasant our attempts to mimic the uncomfortable position of the nude in Manet’s “Olympia”, or the contortions depicted in the best work of El Greco’, warned one critic (cited by Veder 2015: 311). Ultimately, the new school of thought had a limited impact on art theory and practice, and presumably on the ways in which museum-goers experienced exhibits. It did, however, signal a continuing interest in the role of the body in aesthetic perception, and perhaps also a yearning to establish a physical bond with artworks in an eye-minded age.

Optimal Viewing The growing emphasis on visual perception in the modern museum led to a corresponding interest in visual display. If all information about museum pieces were to come through the eyes, then it was essential that those pieces be displayed in circumstances favourable to optimal viewing. Visual fatigue was a frequent complaint of visitors as exhibitions grew ever larger in the nineteenth century. Seeing gallery after gallery crammed with dramatic pictures and eye-catching objects proved almost as wearisome as eating too much rich food. It was difficult to appreciate any one painting when it was surrounded by others seemingly clamouring for equal attention. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of his experience of this problem: Nothing is more depressing than the sight of a great many pictures together, it is like having innumerable books open before you at once, and being able to read a sentence or two in each. They bedazzle one another with cross lights. (1900: 22) If the museum was to have an educational role and not simply serve to amaze and awe, then an orderly presentation was obviously needed (Rees Leahy 2012: ch. 2). Visitors’ eyes could not be wandering all over the place, they must be made to follow a predetermined sequence of well-organized exhibits. When visitors were led by a guide, this sequence could be established by the tour itinerary. As guided tours grew more uncommon and the public was set free to make its own way through, and its own sense of, museums, it became clear that instruction must be provided in the form of written labels and visual ‘object lessons’. As a result of these considerations, and also of changes in display trends, some of the visual clutter of the museum was reduced (though far too little to satisfy Hawthorne, who thought one painting per room enough to look

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at [1900: 22]). Artefacts were also more consistently arranged in order to exemplify periods, places and schools of art (Bazin 1967: 159). This was in keeping with the advice of, among others, Prince Albert, who urged that exhibitions illustrate the history of Art in a chronological and systematic arrangement … [so as to] enable, in a practical way, the most uneducated eye to gather the lessons which ages of thought and scientific research have attempted to abstract. (cited in Pergam 2011: 22) Influenced by the nineteenth-century emphasis on public education, the museum sacrificed some of its power to dazzle in order to increase its ability to enlighten. (This interest in visual education continues to inform museum practice today [i.e. Kennedy 2015]). The arrangement of museum pieces could also be used to convey social lessons about the superiority of modern Europeans to earlier humans and non-Westerners. A prime example is the scheme proposed in the late nineteenth century by Augustus Pitt Rivers for a concentric museum in which the most ‘primitive’ artefacts would be placed in the centre and the most ‘advanced’ in the outermost rings (1891). Such arrangements were indeed instructive of nineteenth-century notions of social evolution. Another lesson that might be learned by surveying the bounty of nations on display in such institutions as the British Museum was that the country that had been able to wrest such treasures from their lands of origin was a force to be reckoned with (Classen and Howes 2006). Optimal viewing in the gallery required yet a further refinement: good visibility. Much discussion took, and takes, place over how to position artefacts so as to facilitate ‘attentive looking’ (i.e. Alpers 1991). Good lighting was key. In fact, one reason why visitors had traditionally picked up museum pieces was in order to see them better. With improved lighting this should no longer be necessary. Museums worked to achieve this by increasing the light coming into their galleries through new window technologies. The installation of gaslight, and later electric light, in the late nineteenth century enabled exhibits to remain visible even on foggy days or past sunset. The expectation of Henry Cole, the director of the South Kensington (later Victoria and Albert) Museum, was that a well-lit museum would prove a powerful attraction for the working classes: The working man comes to this museum from one or two dimly lighted, cheerless dwelling rooms … accompanied by [his family]. The looks of surprise and pleasure on the whole party when they first observe the brilliant lighting inside the museum show what a new, acceptable and wholesome excitement this evening affords them all. (cited in Pearce 1995: 138) The visual allure of the museum, Cole hoped, might divert workers from the gustatory pleasures of the ‘gin palace’. With this end in mind, museum

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opening hours were extended and working people were invited to view exhibits and profit from their object lessons after the day’s labour was done. Admirers of the new electric lighting in the British Museum enthused that it provided even better viewing conditions than daylight: ‘the classical sculptures looked more characteristic, more like themselves, so to speak, under the new light than even in daylight’ (‘Electric Light’ 1890: 164; Figure 3.1). With such advances in the visual presentation of collections, there seemed no reason to ever return to the ‘dark ages’ when museum pieces were handled by visitors.

Touch Tours ‘If you have always enjoyed art and design’, asks a disability consultant at the Victoria and Albert Museum, ‘why should you stop when your sight fails?’ (Ginley 2013). Not so long ago the answer to that question would have seemed obvious: because art is visual and if you can’t see it, you can’t enjoy it. According to the Enlightenment encyclopaedist Denis Diderot, ‘beauty is only a word for the blind’ (cited by Classen 1998: 139). In the 1930s the prominent psychologist Géza Révész came to the same conclusion after undertaking a study on the aesthetic sensibilities of the blind. Criticizing what he saw as the inability of his blind subjects to identify sculpted busts or judge their artistic worth, he declared: ‘We have to deny absolutely the ability of the blind to enjoy [art] works aesthetically’ (1998: 139). Unable to appreciate art, Révész held that the blind were equally unable to create it. As the works by the blind he examined appeared to reflect tactile rather than visual experience, he condemned them as distorted. The possibility of elaborating a tactile aesthetics was too alien to the psychologist to be considered. Touch could only lead to sensuous pleasure, never to the ‘blissful appreciation of artistic values’ afforded by vision (Classen 1998). With such attitudes widespread, museums and galleries saw little need to make their collections accessible to the visually impaired. Even if such visitors could by chance ‘make sense’ of certain exhibits by touching them, the practice was considered too damaging. There were a few early attempts by museums to accommodate the visually impaired (i.e. Wygant 1997: 37). For the most part, however, it was not until the late twentieth century that this became a serious concern for museums. This was after much pressure from advocacy groups, the passing of disability discrimination acts and the linking of funding to the improvement of access. Work was put into producing descriptive audio guides of galleries, posting braille labels beside exhibits and even creating tactile illustrations composed of raised-line drawings which could be ‘read’ with a finger. The matter of allowing actual museum pieces to be handled, however, was controversial. Although damage to museum pieces is apparently more likely to occur during professional processes of restoration, transport and installation than

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during supervised visitor handling sessions, conservators were reluctant to let exhibits be touched by nonprofessionals (Candlin 2004; Johnson 2007: 217). To determine which pieces could best withstand the tactile onslaught of the visually impaired, all the most durable materials in museums were put under the microscope. (Some museums took the precaution of requiring visitors to don gloves to handle artefacts on touch tours.) Curiously, different museums reached different decisions. The Tate Modern decided that bronze was the most impervious material, and therefore chose bronze pieces for its touch tours. The British Museum went with stone, and centred its touch tour – the first permanent one in Britain – on the seemingly eternal monuments of ancient Egypt in Room 4. Participants in this ongoing tour are able to legitimately touch the artefacts that many visitors to the Museum touch without permission; among others, a colossal stone beetle, a red granite lion complete with carved whiskers and the giant left arm of the statue of Amenhotep III (Figure I.2). Customarily, only the visually impaired are allowed to touch artefacts on touch tours. While this helps conserve artefacts, it means that participants can’t fully share their museum experience with their sighted companions. It also perpetuates the stereotype of the blind living in an inaccessible world of their own. Another concern with touch tours is that, because resistance to touch is a key factor in selecting works, the pieces made available are not representative of a museum’s holdings. In this situation, touchable copies can play an important role by enabling a greater variety of works to be handled, at least in facsimile. Even tactile copies of paintings, such as the 3D copy of The Jewish Bride discussed in Chapter 2, can be useful, for there is no substitute for encountering an object with one’s own senses and having direct experience of its physical form. Responding to this fact, the Prado Museum recently opened an exhibition for the visually impaired featuring enhanced tactile reproductions of some of its best known paintings. ‘This is a brilliant exhibition’, one blind visitor commented. ‘There are many things you can discover and that you love discovering’ (‘Spain’s Prado Museum’ 2015). The issue of object selection does not just become a sensory matter in the case of touch exhibits, however. As ‘empires of sight’, museums place high value on visual attractiveness, and often exclude objects that are deemed visually uninteresting from precious display space. Artefacts may have tactile or olfactory dimensions which are highly significant in their cultures of origin, but if they are ‘nothing to look at’, they typically remain hidden in the vaults. Museums, therefore, are always engaged in a process of sensory selection, and not simply at those times when they choose objects for a tactile exhibition. The notion of fine art only being accessible through sight still remains strong. From this perspective touch tours for the visually impaired are literally misguided. Discussing the issue, one docent at the Tate Modern stated bluntly that: ‘for the vast majority of artworks, handling them would provide nothing of significance in relation to developing a personal

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engagement with or a critical understanding of art’ (cited by Candlin 2010: 136). The point being made is that, while touch may give access to the material basis of art, this information is irrelevant because artworks are not fundamentally about materiality, but about conveying concepts through visual representation. This position is influenced by the stereotypical association of touch with the body and the material world and sight with the mind and the world of ideas. There is no reason, however, why ideas cannot be conveyed by touch, as well as by sight. The best proof of this is the languages used by the deaf and blind, which convey thoughts through tactile signs. Moreover, artworks don’t just have static meanings or single points of engagement; meanings are created by particular users approaching the work in particular ways. As we have seen in previous chapters, the material nature of art is not mere packaging for immaterial concepts, but a carrier of meaning itself. Moreover, given that thousands of artefacts originally intended for multisensory use, from Navajo sand paintings to Christian icons, are transformed into purely visual works in museums, that some primarily visual works might be transformed into tactile pieces should not cause concern. The practice of holding handling sessions for the visually impaired has been expanded to include other social groups. Researchers are now exploring how such diverse groups as university students, the elderly and hospital patients may benefit from hands-on encounters with artefacts (Noble and Chatterjee 2008; Chatterjee and Hannan 2016). Such tactile encounters enhance the appreciation of artefacts and promote feelings of well-being by allowing people to literally be in touch with valued heritage objects (Chatterjee and Noble 2013; see also Clintberg 2014 on the ‘Stimulating the Senses’ programme at the National Gallery of Canada). So it seems that nonvisual encounters with art and artefacts have something to offer to almost everyone. Although the visually impaired suffer the most from the lack of sensory access at museums, all visitors are somewhat disadvantaged by being cut off from all but the visual appreciation of what are inherently multisensory objects. One can trace this broadening of awareness in the changing mandate of the Art Beyond Sight organization based in New York City. The organization expanded from ‘developing multisensory tools for blind audiences [to appreciate art]’ in the late twentieth century to becoming a ‘think-tank’ centred on promoting ‘multisensory learning for all museum audiences’ (Levent and Pascual-Leone 2014: xiv–xv). When I attended a conference held by the group at the Metropolitan Museum in 2009, I encountered a mix of art historians, museum docents, disability consultants, artists and others, all exploring the role of the senses in art. Museum curators have also been in the forefront of this development. The ‘Please Touch’ exhibition held at the British Museum in 1983 broke ground by being open to the general public, rather than restricted to the visually impaired. The exhibition focussed on animal sculptures, a subject

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which took advantage of the broad appeal of animals, as well as their tactile attractiveness (Pearson 1984). Since the turn of the twenty-first century, numerous touch exhibits have been staged in museums. Notably, in 2005 the Victoria & Albert Museum held an interactive exhibition entitled ‘Touch Me’, which highlighted the role of touch in design. There were objects to touch and others which showed the marks of touching, such as a christening spoon with teeth marks and a cane with a worn handle. ‘I think I upset the Victoria and Albert a bit when I suggested we might not be showing beautiful things’ the curator Hugh Aldersey-Williams admitted with regard to his decision to foreground touch, rather than sight, in this exhibit (cited in Roux 2005). The ‘Touch Me’ exhibition also featured imaginative interplays of touch and sight, such as a ping-pong table which rippled with light when struck by a ball, and a plant wired to create an electronic jungle on an adjacent screen when touched. Taking a more traditional approach, in 2011 the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore explored the tactile interest statuettes had for Renaissance collectors, with replicas of figurines available for handling by visitors, and in 2016 supplemented an exhibition of medieval art with the sounds of bells and the smell of incense (Levent and McRainey 2014: 63; Bagnoli 2016). In such exhibits, the nonvisual senses are no longer regarded as simply second-rate ways of apprehending art for those who can’t see, but rather as modalities through which anyone can receive meaningful and stimulating impressions. What these exhibits lack, however, is permanence. While the works in a museum are always there to be seen, only rarely are pieces always available to be touched. There are, indeed, a few small museums where touch, rather than sight, is the dominant modality. In Greece, the Tactual Museum offers visitors the opportunity to handle copies of ancient sculptures and artefacts. In Japan (a country which has traditionally valued tactile aesthetics) Gallery TOM invites both the visually impaired and the sighted to experience its collection of tactile artworks (Classen 1998: 150; Howes and Classen 2013: 23). There are also a number of independent ‘micromuseums’ with hands-on exhibits (i.e. Candlin 2016: 125–6). The challenge for mainstream museums, however, has been one of integrating permanent tactile exhibits into their gallery space. Some museums have responded to this challenge by placing hands-on stations within exhibition rooms. The British Museum set up such stations in several galleries. The Louvre created a Tactile Gallery presenting themed displays accessible to all visitors. How do museum-goers react to this opportunity to experience the museum through touch? Positively, it seems. Where casts are used, as in the Tactile Gallery at the Louvre, the handling experience centres on the appreciation of the physical forms of objects. Where actual artefacts are used, as at the hands-on tables at the British Museum, visitors seem to most value the sense of physically connecting with the people who originally created and used the artefacts. ‘Just to handle [an ancient artefact] makes

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you feel more in touch with what they were actually doing’, as one visitor put it (‘Touching History’ 2008). These various initiatives are perhaps only partially satisfying as they are conceptualized as adjuncts to the central gallery viewing experience, rather than as a fundamental means of engaging with museum collections. However, they show how the new interest in sensory museology is transforming the traditional notion of the ‘touch tour’ from a nuisance which must be reluctantly accommodated into a creative challenge which can help revitalize the museum.

Sensory Playground In 1857, a benevolent employer paid for 1,200 of his factory workers to travel from Sheffield to Manchester to visit the Art Treasures Exhibition being held in that city. Unaccustomed to extended aesthetic spectatorship, a thousand of them left the exhibition before lunch was served. Commenting on the apparent failure of this philanthropic gesture, Charles Dickens concluded that the exhibition was too academic and too still to hold the attention of working men: ‘They want more amusement, and particularly something in motion, though it were only a twisting fountain’ (cited in Rees Leahy 2012: 57). The stillness of the museum, though an essential factor in its constitution as an empire of sight, also made it seemingly lifeless and dull. Of course, the museum has never been just a place to see collections. It has also been a place to meet and to mingle, to stroll and to find shelter in inclement weather. However, these activities have not been considered intrinsic to the appreciation of the collections themselves. Now, by contrast, a new movement is making movement central to the museum experience. In fact, if what the factory operatives in 1857 needed to hold their interest was ‘something in motion’, then they would have been quite taken with the ‘Play Time’ exhibit held at the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) in 2015. Aside from the climbable netting of Harmonic Motion described above, installations included Jillian Mayer’s Cloud Swing, a swing positioned in front of an image of clouds, and Edith Dekyndt’s Ground Control, a giant helium-filled ball that moved around the gallery in reaction to the presence of visitors. What were the curators thinking of when they introduced these pieces into a museum with an enviable collection of traditional artworks (including some that hung on the walls of that same Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857 [Pergam 2011: 323])? When I posed the question to one of them, Halona Norton-Westbrook, she responded that the aim of the exhibition was precisely to show that art can be playful, as well as serious. In keeping with this philosophy, a public block party promoting the ‘Play Time’ exhibition featured ‘tons of fun and games’ and a performance by the Redmoon Theater troupe in which musicians serenaded the crowds while perched incongruously on a metal crane (‘Play Time’ 2015).

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While not the usual museum fare, ‘Play Time’ is arguably in keeping with the Toledo Museum of Art’s history of reaching out to a nontraditionally museum-going public. Toledo is, after all, primarily a manufacturing city, not a centre of arts and learning, and its inhabitants sometimes required an added incentive to enter the column-fronted Greek Revival building housing the museum. However, the TMA, while perhaps particularly adept at engaging visitors (I saw a number playing board games in the medieval gallery) is not alone in encouraging playfulness. In 2007, the Tate Modern invited visitors to forgo the stairs and elevator and descend to the main floor via a curving multistory slide (Test Site by Carsten Höller). The Manchester Museum instigated a ‘Playful Museum Project’ in 2010 which involved relaxing rules about proper museum behaviour and creating more play opportunities within galleries. Whereas nineteenth-century visitors deplored not having the time to see each museum exhibit properly, with a more playful attitude this need no longer be a problem. Artist Martin Creed provocatively asks: ‘Why do we have to look at paintings for a long time? Why not look just for a second? One way isn’t necessarily better than another way’ (Higgins 2008). To illustrate this, a 2008 work of Creed’s (Work No. 850) had a runner racing through a gallery, transforming a formal exhibition space into something ‘exciting and fun and enticing’ (2008; see also Rees Leahy 2016: 87–8). In this and in multiple other works and projects which aim to make movement central to the museum experience, one hears a faint resonance of the original notion of the gallery as a place for physical exercise. This notion is, of course, nothing new to children, for whom one of the chief attractions of museums has long been the tantalizing spaces they offer for running and playing. The possibility of actualizing the delicious kinetic potential of the museum has traditionally been denied to children, however. In fact, children themselves were sometimes denied entry to museums due to their supposedly disorderly nature. They, or their parents, are now fighting back. The argument is that museums should be places of discovery for children, as well as for adults. For this to happen, children need to explore them in their own way – a way that involves movement, play and touch, as much as looking. A researcher on the subject writes provocatively that: My research into the way children under three-years-old move around in museums found that zooming around is a good way for kids to learn.… When children are exploring and learning about a place with their bodies, even if that involves running, jumping and dancing around, they are developing a particular way of knowing about and being in that place. (Hackett 2014; see also Warwicker 2014) Putting such notions into practice, one playful event at the Manchester Museum invited children to participate in a jumping game within a gallery. The intention was for participants ‘to leap from a static point … indicated

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with tape on the floor, and to land safely’. However, one parent ‘told his son to take a running jump to get the furthest, and the child obviously skidded on his knees and nearly crashed into the wall, but it was OK!!’ (‘Museums at Play’ 2016). Such antics are definitely not okay with everyone, however. Presenting the conventional view, art critic Julian Spalding asserted that art galleries work when ‘visitors stop and become visually absorbed’, and that ‘running wild isn’t looking’ (cited in Warwicker 2014). Spalding was responding to an incident in 2014 when a minimalist sculpture at the Tate entitled Climbing Frames was actually climbed on by a girl, her parents standing indulgently by. A passerby who snapped a photo and posted it on the internet slammed the errant family and declared decisively: ‘it is a museum not a playground’, reasserting the traditional distinctions between the two (cited by Dubuis 2014). The parents were having none of it, however. They claimed that their daughter was ‘seduced by [the sculpture’s] ladder of jewel-coloured shelving’ and that she was simply acting in accordance with her ‘anti-establishment’ tendencies (Churchill and Rasaq 2014). The obvious response to this controversy is to point out that there are children’s museums full of touchable objects and play spaces which give kids ample opportunity for embodied learning without disturbing the peace or threatening the exhibits in ‘adult’ museums. How much can young children benefit from being exposed to works they are hardly able to appreciate anyway? Plenty, according to the Kids in Museums advocacy group founded in 2003 by Dea Birkett after she was expelled from a Royal Academy exhibition when her toddler enthusiastically shouted ‘Monster!’ at an Aztec statue. In fact, no children are deemed to be too young to benefit from a museum visit. Museums are ‘social, sensory, stimulating places’, the group’s manifesto states, ‘perfect for babies’ (‘Manifesto 2013’). A number of museums, evidently of the same mind, now offer baby tours, in which parents and babies are guided through a selection of artworks with bright colours and interesting shapes calculated to appeal to infantile eyes. At the one I attended at the TMA, the babies, if not particularly focussed on the artworks, seemed quite content with the novel experience. As I listened to the baby tour guide at the TMA provide background on the different works we were viewing, however, it became evident that the tour was as much for the parents as it was for the babies. In fact, making museums more kid-friendly is not just about catering to children, but also about attracting adults, some of whom might not visit museums on their own. Indeed, while the idealized art connoisseur never has any children tagging along, many caretaker parents may not be able to go to galleries without their children. The playful museum, therefore, is likely to be the well-attended museum. (After all, no matter how celebrated its pieces are, a museum without visitors is simply a storehouse or a laboratory.)

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The Scent of Monet’s Garden In 2010, I was invited to give a talk on the sensory qualities of Impressionism for an exhibition on ‘Impressionist Gardens’ at the National Gallery of Scotland (see Willsdon 2010). While, unfortunately, the funding for the talk did not come through, I was inspired to do some reading on the subject and found myself fascinated by the interplay of colour and scent in Monet’s work. Monet’s paintings have often been said to metaphorically fill the air with scent. In fact, a review of the ‘Impressionist Gardens’ exhibition declares of the cascading blooms in the artist’s evocative House among the Roses: ‘you can almost smell them’ (O’Brien 2010). In Monet’s own time, the art critic Octave Mirbeau described the painter as ‘this man whose paintings breathe, are intoxicating, scented.…’ (cited by Murray 1994: 58). No doubt this impression of scent arose not only from Monet’s often fragrant subject matter but also from his hazy painting style, which suggested an aromatic mist rather than a visual clarity of form. Monet was an assiduous gardener, carefully selecting varieties of water lilies for his pond, filling his garden with a mixture of old favourites and Japanese exotics, and covering the trellis below his bedroom window with his prized climbing rose: the creamy, fragrant ‘Mermaid’. An admiring art historian who visited Monet in his garden at Giverny wrote a heady description of the experience: One penetrates the water garden through an arched bridge, covered with wisteria. In June, the fragrance is so thick that one seems to be passing through a tunnel of vanilla. The drooping flowers are white and mauve – a mauve so light that it appears to have been painted with watercolours – and they hang heavily like fantastic bunches of grapes amid the watery green of the vines. The passing breeze harvests the scent… The sun rises. Bursts of perfume escape from the perspiring roses. (Elder 1924: 10–13; Figure 6.3) Immersed, as Monet was, in this scented atmosphere, it is small wonder that his vibrant garden scenes seem almost aromatic. The fragrance that one can imagine smelling in Monet’s work, however, has now been given material form by scent designers. In 2015, the Denver Art Museum filled a room with the re-created scent of Monet’s garden for an exhibition entitled ‘In Bloom: Painting Flowers in the Age of Impressionism’. Created by perfumer Dawn Spencer Hurwitz, ‘The Impressionist Garden Scent Experience’ enveloped visitors in aromas of roses and violets as they strolled through a room displaying a mural of Monet in his garden at Giverny (Cousins 2015). While a novel museum offering, this inclusion of a dash of perfume seems suitable for an exhibit on an artist who considered his colourful, fragrant garden his greatest work of art (Murray 1994: 4). Odours have entered the museum of late not only as sensuous adjuncts to evocative paintings, but also as stand-alone works. The Tinguely Museum in

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Figure 6.3  Claude Monet with a visitor in his garden (Wikimedia).

Basel, to give one example, recently hosted an exhibition of olfactory art as part of a series of shows dealing with the senses. Describing the exhibit, the museum asked: What happens when our nose suddenly plays the principal role in the experience of art? How does art smell? Can scents … be of use as a medium of artistic expression and creativity? (‘Belle Haleine’ 2015) A photograph on the museum’s website shows visitors facing the bare walls of a room. That there is nothing for them to look at is irrelevant as they are all intently smelling the scents clinging to the walls in Sissel Tolaas’s work The Fear of Smell – The Smell of Fear (Figure 6.4). A visitor with whom I spoke remarked that ‘it was amazing seeing nothing in the room, but at the same time feeling such powerful sensations’.

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Figure 6.4  Experiencing The Fear of Smell – The Smell of Fear, Sissel Tolaas (Tinguely Museum).

Along with aromas, savours and sounds are also entering previously scentless, tasteless and (relatively) silent gallery spaces (see, for example, Bubaris 2014; Levent and Mihalache 2016). In 2015, the ‘Tate Sensorium’ exhibition brought new sensations into the Tate’s collection spaces. The project created by the ‘Flying Object’ studio had visitors experiencing sounds and savours in conjunction with viewing selected artworks, for example, sampling chocolate and listening to urban noise while looking at a stark Francis Bacon painting. (This being the age of biotechnology, participants were given wristbands to record their ‘electrodermal activity’ for future analysis.) Even the conservative National Gallery dipped its toe into mixed media with its 2015 hosting of ‘Soundscape’, a pairing of six Gallery paintings with sound tracks created by invited sound artists. Purists objected, arguing that ‘great paintings do not need the emotional prompt of music and sounds to make them come alive … all you have to do is look at them’ (Jones 2015). Yet though they may be somewhat awkward, should such tentative efforts be nipped in the bud? Perhaps artists and audiences may grow together in this nurturing of multisensory aesthetics. ‘What we are doing is testing out, with the public, a new way of experiencing art, a new way of presenting art’, explains Tony Guillan at Tate Media (Davis 2015). This ‘new way’ of presenting art actually has a rich history (see Classen 1998: chs. 5 and 6). In the 1950s and 1960s, Fluxus offered a range of works engaging the ‘lower’ senses, including Spice Chess (Takaiko Saito) and Finger Boxes (Ay-O). In the early twentieth century, the Futurists

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invented a multisensory cuisine and created Futurist aromas (some of which have been re-created by the olfactory art historian Caro Verbeek). In the nineteenth century, the Symbolists experimented with adding scent to theatre. Prior to that, as discussed in previous chapters, art forms played off each other in such multisensory spectacles as court banquets and church feasts. The novelty of the current developments lies not so much in combining sights with savours and scents, but in the fact that nonvisual art is being allotted floor and wall and air space in the visualist galleries of museums. One may question the value of a particular work or exhibition, but thanks to these sensuous interventions, the museum is tentatively becoming a place in which any sense may serve as a channel for aesthetic engagement. Another key way in which the senses are entering – or circling around – the museum is through the increasing overlap between museum pieces and museum merchandise. In fact, it is in the museum shop that one can most consistently find a multimodal presentation of art and antiquities: chocolates wrapped up in images of Old Masters, hand-sized replicas of famous sculptures and even, as I spotted in the gift shop of the British Museum, lip balm in a miniature ‘mummy coffin’. On the internet the integration of artworks and art-based products is even more seamless. After looking up a painting by Van Gogh on a museum website recently I was surprised to see an ad pop up inviting me to purchase the picture in the form of a mug, a cushion, a scarf and a variety of other products. From a commercial perspective, art is obviously not just something to see, it is also something to drink from, sit on and wear. Art is also something to smell. Already in the 1980s, Monet’s evocative paintings were transformed by marketers into perfume (prompting the New York Times to proclaim that museum-goers could now experience ‘Monet’s famous gardens in a bottle, not on a wall’ [‘Monet’ 1991]). More recently, the Denver Art Museum announced that its aromatic re-creation of Monet’s garden at Giverny was ‘available in the Shop as eau de toilette sprays, room sprays, sample sets and pure perfumes’ (Cousins 2015). The National Gallery Shop in London, in turn, sells a Monet water-lily scented candle, complementing the artist’s painting of a water-lily pond on display in the Gallery. These cross-sensory ‘tie-in products’ make it clear that, one way or another, art is no longer for the eyes alone.

The Virtual Museum A key element in extending the sensory bounds of the museum has been the use of new media, such as films and sound tracks. Such media entered the museum as means of providing visitors with more information about collections. Unlike many collection sites, however, museums of art and antiquities resisted employing new media in their galleries. Such technological aids might be given a role in adjacent lecture halls, but not

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in the heart of the museum where the artefacts were displayed. This was because films and sound tracks were thought to distract from the main business of contemplating the objects on display. Furthermore, such modern modes of communication might destroy the ‘timeless’ aura of museum pieces, suggesting, for example, that the paintings on a nearby wall were an outdated form of media. With the advances in media technologies in the late twentieth century, however, even conservative museums became interested in what new media could bring to the collection experience. Audio guides, which could be carried and heard by individual visitors, and which were a technological extension of traditional guided tours, became popular in galleries in the 1980s. Films, however, continued to be viewed with suspicion. The video that was shown as part of the ‘Living Arctic’ exhibition at the British Museum in 1987 was said to be: ‘Splendid in a temporary exhibition, but distracting and difficult to service in a permanent gallery’ (Wilson 1989: 64). Since that time, the media offerings at museums have become much more sophisticated. Immersive IMAX theatres, for example, are now popular adjuncts to the exhibitions in many museums – though not in art museums, which are still wary of allowing competing visual imagery into their precincts (see Griffiths 2008: 96). Audio guides remain more acceptable experience enhancers for traditional museums, and such guides have been developed in various ways. Visitors to the National Gallery in London can now choose an audio guide which will enliven paintings with sounds of church bells and splashing water. The British Museum, for its part, offers interactive multimedia guides which provide commentary and videos, along with museum exploration games. They can also serve as visual memory banks, keeping track of what a visitor sees, and creating a personal digital souvenir of a tour. Another way in which new media have entered museums is through touch screen computer stations which offer close-up views and interpretations of the works on display. Digital media have the potential to bring interactive elements to visual exhibits and virtually animate ‘dead’ gallery space. However, they can only do so much to compensate for the lack of other sensory input. Perhaps in the future, touch screens will allow visitors to virtually touch exhibits. For now, they just add more glassy surfaces to those already in place in museums without offering any more of a physical connection. In the audio clip describing the Holy Thorn Reliquary at the British Museum, Gregorian chant plays evocatively in the background while a commentator describes the artefact as ‘one of the most important relics in the Christian tradition’. Yet this very important relic remains off-limits to the touch of the faithful and therefore alienated from its religious traditions. Significantly, the purpose of using the latest media devices in the museum is not just to enhance the visitor experience. These devices serve to signal that a museum is not as buried in the past as its exhibits might seem to

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suggest but, on the contrary, is a centre for innovation. They also help museums compile data on visitors. Already in 2002 the head of new media at the British Museum was able to proclaim: We logged around 800 hours of … public use on five workstations during April this year.… We recorded some 2,260 user sessions. The average user session was 21 minutes. The average number of museum artefacts looked at in each session was 18. (cited by Henning 2011: 312) While providing plenteous information for number crunching, however, such data reveals nothing of visitors’ sensations – or lack of sensations – and so remains locked within its self-bounded world. New media also enter the museum in the form of artworks which employ electronic technologies (i.e. Jones 2007). This use of innovative technology helps position such artworks as cutting edge. Thus, when they involve tactile elements (Salter 2016), the sense of touch is likely to be culturally repositioned from being considered ‘unaesthetic’ or ‘primitive’ to being allied with creative innovation. Ironically, linking tactility with the ‘masculine’ field of engineering, also gives it the artistic cachet it lacked in its more traditional association with homey ‘women’s work’ (see Classen 2005; Candlin 2010: ch. 2). The other face of the virtual museum is the one presented online. The online world is where many of the photos snapped by museum visitors end up. Together they create an alternative visitors’ view of museum pieces, which differs in its informality and inclusion of people from the formal object portraits offered by the museum itself in books and online. Though they may look scruffy, the pictures posted on social media serve as advertisements, and so, while museums lose some control over their imagery by allowing photography, they gain valuable publicity. The websites of museums themselves often allow visitors to scan collections and occasionally to virtually navigate galleries. This glowing dematerialized museum, which can be visited any time of day with a minimum of physical effort, has proved popular with the public. More people, in fact, visit such virtual museums than go to see the actual ones. For example, in the 2015 fiscal year, attendance at the Toledo Museum of Art was 406,878. This is a healthy number for the TMA, but it was still topped by the 477,608 visits to its website (Gedert 2016). The question arises: if museum-going is all about looking and if such good images of collections can now be seen right at home, why bother with physical visits anymore? What can museums offer to attract visitors in a digital age? The answer is: the real thing. The great strength of the museum is its possession of actual multisensory objects. It is impossible to appreciate this material reality at a distance; one has to be there. Even when objects cannot be touched, their physical presence – canvas and paint, sculpted stone, worn wood, thick embroidery – exerts an almost palpable influence on those who view them in person.

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Along with the lure of storied physical objects, the museum also offers the attraction of an outing, an activity, which can be combined with other pleasurable activities. One recent visitor to the TMA commented on a travel website: ‘TMA is consistently rotating their art pieces and are showing new exhibits all the time. Friday night music is a blast and their café has wonderful food’ (‘High Quality Art’ 2015). Another noted ‘My seven-year-old grandchild … is very enthralled by the painting of the man that as you walk past him his foot goes from sideways to straight. They also have a wonderful section in the museum [where] children can make their own art’ (‘Bigger on the Inside’ 2015). These are experiences you cannot have browsing the internet at home. The trump card of the museum, therefore, is that it is not just a collection of images, it is a museum of the senses.

The Multisensory Society The move towards multisensoriality in museums is taking place in a range of venues. Science (and to a lesser extent, natural history) museums have a tradition of presenting interactive exhibits (see Griffiths 2008). Open-air, or living, museums, are multisensory by nature, as they allow visitors to enter into the re-created historical life of a village. Museums which aim to entertain, such as ‘trick art’ museums, likewise often allow hands-on interactions with their exhibits. Other institutions have come to their senses more recently. Some museums of history have created ‘experience’ spaces which contain no actual artefacts, but give a ‘feel’ for a particular period. One example of this is the recently offered ‘Trench Experience’ at the Imperial War Museum in London, which incorporated odours, sounds and tableaux of World War I trench life (Crowest 1999). In 2010, the National Trust in Britain initiated a ‘Bringing Houses to Life’ project aimed at making its historic houses more engaging and more ‘true-to-life’. This was done by such things as removing ‘do not touch’ signs, lighting fires in fireplaces, playing music, allowing visitors to try on period costumes and eat period food and adding opportunities for play (Howie and Sawer 2010). Along the same lines, Knole House in Kent recently offered visitors a chance to re-create the historic potpourri which traditionally fragrances its interior. I have written elsewhere about sensory developments in ethnographic museums (i.e. Howes and Classen 2013: ch. 1). These museums have been among the most open to bringing new sensory dimensions into exhibits (i.e. Drewal 2012). In such classic ethnographic museums as Paris’s musée du quai Branly and Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum, for example, exhibits are accompanied by regional music and videos of local life. These ‘add-ons’ are intended to provide the visitor with a sense of cultural immersion. In the case of the Paris museum, the multimedia programming sensationally promises, for instance, to ‘plunge the visitor into the midst of an evening of seduction among the nomadic Peuls of Niger’ (cited in Howes and Classen 2013: 30).

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Due to the notion that ‘exotic’ artefacts need extra explanatory techniques to be understood, and to the perception that ethnographic museums contain no ‘high culture’ to protect, the latter are not usually criticized for taking a multimedia approach to exhibitions. Not so with art museums, as we have seen. It would be novel for an exhibition of Renaissance art to feature videos of period houses and a soundtrack of barking dogs and rumbling carriages, or to sensationally promise that it will ‘plunge the visitor into the midst of an evening of seduction’ among the European aristocracy. Such display strategies would be seen as trivializing great works in order to cater to plebeian tastes. However, those who are against supplementing the sensory offerings of collection sites or supporting new ventures in multisensory aesthetics should consider that there are other entities than museums bent on cultivating our senses. Sensations are hot property and product manufacturers are actively working to create, publicize and trademark distinctive colours, shapes, scents, savours and sounds to boost sales of their wares (Howes and Classen 2013: ch. 5). As discussed above, museum pieces are not exempt from being transformed into multisensory merchandise. If artists and cultural institutions are not to stray from traditional perceptual strategies, then a large part of our sensory imaginations will increasingly be fed by the marketers alone. The conflicting views about the role of the senses in art and in the museum are social and political in nature, as well as aesthetic. The stereotypical association of indigenous peoples with nonrational sensuality supports immersive and sensuous representations of their cultures. Similarly, the notion that engaging the ‘lower’ senses in an art museum or historic house is simply a ploy to attract the ‘lower’ classes helps maintain high culture as the visual and intellectual preserve of the elite. Such inferences are almost impossible to disentangle from the debate over which of our senses should be stimulated in collection sites. The politics of the senses in museums goes beyond issues of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, however. It also enters into a host of ethical questions. For example, when in 2016 Greenpeace activists scaled the columns of the British Museum to protest the sponsorship of exhibits by British Petroleum, a company linked to disastrous oil spills, the topic of movement in the museum took on a whole new meaning. The issue of who has sensory access to works is also deeply political. Should only curators be allowed to touch museum pieces, even though there are communities, such as the visually impaired or certain religious or indigenous groups, for whom such touch might be deeply meaningful? What of artefacts whose ownership is contested? The British Museum may enlarge on its display of the Parthenon Marbles with computer graphics and hands-on replicas, but the thorny question still remains of whether the Marbles should be handed back to Greece. Might there be cultural conflicts in notions of good conservation practice? ‘I don’t know why museums think that we don’t care for [our ceremonial objects]’ protests a Blackfoot man from Canada, responding to the argument that museums are better caretakers

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of indigenous artefacts than indigenous peoples, ‘We smudge [cense] them every day’ (McHugh 2015: 218). What of the stuffed animals in natural history museums? ‘Feeling the plush fur of a black bear … for an animal lover it doesn’t get much better than this’, comments a volunteer in one such museum (Stack 2016; see also Colley 2014). But would an animal lover be so pleased if she or he learned that the bear had been killed to become a museum ‘trophy’? While it can provide mental and physical stimulation and attract new publics, increasing the playfulness and sensory content of museums cannot address such ethical concerns. Many museums are currently wrestling with these issues and, at times, breaking with historical practice in their responses. As regards indigenous artefacts, for example, in some cases these have been returned to their cultures of origin by museums. In other cases, a certain amount of access to such artefacts has been conceded (see, for example, Phillips 2011). Thus, at the Canadian Museum of History, members of the Iroquois Nation ritually feed the sacred Iroquois masks kept there (Clavir 2002: 91). Participants in a research project in which I was involved invited Inuit elders to handle and reminisce about Inuit artefacts in the McCord Museum of Montreal (a process as informative for the curators as it was meaningful for the participants [Gadbois 2014]). The challenges and conversations arising from such questions of ethics and justice are an essential part of contemporary museology and belie the conventional idea of the museum as a politically neutral place for viewing ‘timeless treasures’. While the sensorially engaged museum may at times function as a sensory playground, therefore, it also has an important role to play as a sensory forum.

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INDEX

Abraham 51, 57, 112 Adam 51 Addison, Joseph 20 ‘Address to the Alabaster Sarcophagus’ 4 ‘Address to the Mummy in Belzoni’s Exhibition’ 50 Adoration of the Lamb 36 aesthetic theories 41–3, 83, 123–4. See also multisensory aesthetics Agony in the Garden, The 115 Albert, Prince 125 Aldersey-Williams, Hugh 129 Alexander III, Pope 12 Alexander the Great 26 Alexandria 22, 49, 67 Algardi, Alessandro 84 Allegory of Passion 97 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence 68 Amenhotep III 3–5, 127 Amsterdam 25, 36, 77, 91, 139 animals and art 28, 29, 42, 128–9 in museums 123, 141 Anna Karenina 37 Anne, Queen 14 Anstruther-Thomson, Clementina 123 Anthony, Saint 78 antiquities. See also Egypt, antiquities of in early modernity 71, 78–9, 80–4, 87–8, 94–5, 103–8 in modernity 21, 71, 108–9, 114 architecture 1, 100, 119 Aristotle with a Bust of Homer 26 Arnold, Ken 20 art. See aesthetic theories; crafts; multisensory aesthetics; painting; sculpture; specific artists and works Art Beyond Sight 128

Art Treasures Exhibition 130 Arundel, Aletheia, Countess of as a collector 89–90 life of 73–8, 91 Arundel, Philip Howard, 1st Earl of 72, 92 Arundel, Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of as a collector 78–92, 108, 110 life of 71–8, 112 Arundel, Henry Howard, 3rd Earl of 73, 76–7, 91 Arundel Cabinet 85 Arundel Collection 6, 78–80, 93–5 acquisition of 76 dispersal of 90–2, 95–109 display of 86–90, 106–7 sensory qualities of 80–6, 110 Arundel House 78, 80–1, 86, 87–90, 93–4, 103–5, 107 Ashmolean Museum 4, 71, 79, 80, 96, 106–8, 114, 117 audio guides 127 Aurelius, Marcus 88 Austen, Jane 1 Aztecs 102, 132 Bacon, Francis 80–1, 112, 135 Bateman, Henry 1 Beauclerk, Mary 96 Becket, Thomas 11–12, 21, 23, 85 Beckford, William 100–1, 113–14 Belzoni, Giovanni 49, 50, 51, 56, 58, 63 Berenson, Bernard 26, 123 Bernard of Clairvaux 39 Bernard, William Bayle 53 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 30, 40 Bertha of Kent, Saint 85 Bible 4, 14, 50–1, 67 Bickerton, Jane. See Norfolk, Jane, Duchess of

164

Index

Birkett, Dea 132 Blarney Stone 18, 24 Blenheim Palace 96 blindness in art 25 and art appreciation 126–30 Blundell, Henry 108 Bodleian Library 117 Boleyn, Ann 121 books 39, 41 Boothby, Guy 59 Boston Museum 55, 102 Botanical Garden of Oxford 117 Boy with a Puzzle. See Laughing Boy, The breath in museums 1, 118 as spirit 12 Briggs, John 56, 64 ‘Bringing Houses to Life’ 139 Bristol, University of 69 British Museum 1–4, 9, 14, 23–4, 44, 47–9, 52–5, 69–70, 117–20, 123, 125–9, 136–8, 140 British Petroleum 140 Browne, Thomas 58 Brueghel, Jan, the Elder 86 Bryson, Norman 43 Buckingham, George Villiers, 1st Duke of 81, 84, 86 Buckland, William 19, 20 Budge, Ernest 60, 65 Bullock, William 49 Burlington, Earl of 108 Burne-Jones, Edward 68 Butterworth, Hezekiah 55 Byron, Lord 33 Cabinets for the Curious 20 cabinets of curiosities 20–2, 80, 87, 117 Cairo 47, 52, 59, 66 cameos. See gems Canada 69, 128, 140 Canadian Museum of History 141 Candlin, Fiona 5 Canterbury Cathedral 12 Carlisle, Earl of 72 Carysfort, Earl of 102, 103 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon 31 Charlemagne 22 Charles I, King 77, 84, 103, 109, 110

Charles II, King 14, 92, 111 charms 17–18 ‘Childe Harold’ 33 children in museums 1, 131–2 Christ Church College 117 Christianity. See Protestantism; Roman Catholicism Christina of Denmark 97, 98 Christopher, Saint 38 Cicero 109 Clarendon, Earl of 73 Climbing Frames 132 Cloud Swing 130 Cole, Henry 125 collections. See Arundel collection; museums colour in art 30, 39, 67–8, 89, 115 of mummies 60–2 Compleat Gentleman, The 82 Conn, George 89 Constantine I, Emperor 11 Constantinople 10, 78–9, 85 Continence of Scipio, The 81–2, 108 Coronation Chair 14, 15, 16 Corpus Christi College 117 Cotán, Juan Sánchez 43 ‘Country Commissions’ 63 craft compared to visual art 101 of reliquaries 12 tactile interactions with 83–6, 115 Creed, Martin 131 Cromwell, Oliver 22 cross, Christ’s 20, 38–40 crown jewels 16, 118 Crown of Thorns 11, 23 Crowning of Saint Catherine, The 115 Cuper, Abraham Boydell 107, 112 Cuper’s Gardens 108–9 dance 82, 86 darkness in art 26, 39 in museums 49, 125 David and Bathsheba 86 De Piles, Roger 83 Deck, Isaiah 66 Dee, John, Dr. 102

Index

Dekyndt, Edith 130 Denver Art Museum 133, 136 Dickens, Charles 58, 130 Diderot, Denis 31, 126 Diomedes 79, 82 Dowsing, William 40 Doyle, Arthur Conan 54–6 Drayton, Michael 110 Dresden Museum 20 Dudley, Sandra 5 Dürer, Albrecht 29, 79, 90 E cosi desio me mena 97 Eastern Orthodox Church 22–4, 37, 43 Easton Neston 105, 107 Ebner, Margaret 39 Ecce Homo 84 Edinburgh 24 Edward I 16, 22 Egypt. See also mummies antiquities of 1, 3–5, 47, 48, 69, 127 colonialism and 6, 47–8 railroad in 64–5 Victorian tourists in 55–7 Egyptomania 47, 49, 53, 102 El Greco 115, 124 electronic art 129 Elizabeth I, Queen 72, 112 Elliot, George 122 Elton Hall 99, 103 emotions on experiencing art 28, 32, 33, 120, 122–3 religious 38, 50–1 on viewing mummies 51–5 England. See also Arundel Collection; English Heritage; London; Oxford; National Trust; and specific museums mummies in 45–55, 64–6 relics in 11–20 English Heritage 108 Erasmus 14 Evelyn, John 77, 84, 95, 103, 111–12 eyeglasses 25 Fear of Smell - The Smell of Fear, The 134 Felix gem 79–80, 82, 96 Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor 30

165

Fiennes, Celia 117 Finger Boxes 135 Five Senses 86 Flaubert, Gustave 63, 64 Florence 32, 33, 56, 64, 122 Fluxus 135 ‘Flying Object’ 135 Fonthill Abbey 100–1, 113 food. See also restaurants; taste in art 31–2, 86 in museums 120, 139 museum pieces as 21 relics as 19, 20 France. See also French Revolution; Giverny; Paris; and specific museums mummies in 60 relics in 11 Francis of Assisi, Saint 10 Frankenstein 53, 60 French Revolution 119 Fumifugium 112 Futurism 135–6 Gabriel, Angel 32 Galileo 32 galleries 86–90. See also museums Gallery TOM 129 gardens as collection sites 87, 107, 112, 117 fragrance of 112–13, 133–4 Gardiner, Marguerite 49 Garrick, David 17 gems 79–80, 96 Genesis 51, 67 Geneva 34 Germaine, Betty 93, 96, 98, 102, 112–13 Germaine, John 95–6 Germany 22, 79, 90 Ghent 40 Ghiberti, Lorenzo 41 giants 4 Giotto 28 Giverny 133, 136 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 36 Granville, Augustus 60–2 Great Plague 112 Greece antiquities of 83, 103

166

Index

Greenberg, Clement 43 Greenpeace 140 Gregory of Tours, Saint 13 Grew, Nehemiah 20 Ground Control 130 Guathier, Théophile 57, 63 Guillan, Tony 135 Gysbrecht, Cornelis 30 Haggard, H. Rider 52, 54–5 Haight, Sarah Rogers 59 Hamilton, Alexander, 10th Duke of 101–2 Hamilton, Emma 35–6, 113–14 Hamilton, William 35–6, 98–100, 113–14 Hamilton Palace 102 Handel, George Frederic 21 hands painting with 27 sculpted 3–4, 123 Hardy, Thomas 122 Hare, Augustus 19 Harmonic Motion 115–16, 130 Hart, Emma. See Hamilton, Emma ‘Haunting Fingers’ 122 Hawass, Zahi 69 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 123–4 Haydn, Joseph 42 Haynes, Denys 107 Hazlitt, William 31, 101, 103 Healing. See medicine Hearing. See also audio guides; sound in early modern science 94 in museums 137, 140 stimulated by artworks 32, 33, 82–3, 116 Heaven 9, 14, 15, 16, 23–4, 37, 50, 52, 77 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 5, 41–2 Henrietta Maria, Queen 90 Henry Frederick, Prince 84 Henry II, King 12, 31 Henry VIII, King 12, 16, 17, 97, 121 Herbert, Thomas 104 Herder, Johann Gottfried 41 Heurnius, Otto 48 Heywood, John 14 Hilton of Cadboll Stone 24 history of the senses 5–6 Hogarth, David 59

Holbein, Hans 79, 87, 90, 97–8 Holland 76, 77, 91 Hollar, Wenceslaus 78 Höller, Carsten 131 Holy Thorn Reliquary 23, 137 Homer 26, 76, 92, 109 Hoogstraten, Samuel van 27–30, 44 Hooke, Robert 20–1 Horsley, John Calcott 33 House Among the Roses 133 Howard of Bindon, Lord 87 Howard, Henry, 3rd Earl of Arundel. See Arundel, Henry Howard, 3rd Earl of Howard, Thomas. See Arundel, Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Howard, William, 1st Viscount Stafford. See Stafford, William Howard, 1st Viscount Hugh of Lincoln 19 Hunterian Museum 24 Hurley, Elizabeth 2 Hurwitz, Dawn Spencer 133 iconoclasm 33, 40–1, 92 idolatry 37, 41, 85, 109 imperialism 6, 42, 47–8, 58, 66, 76, 125, 140–1 Imperial War Museum 139 ‘Impressionist Gardens’ 133 ‘In Bloom: Painting Flowers in the Age of Impressionism’ 133 indigenous artefacts 140–1 Innocents Abroad, The 64 intaglios. See gems Inuit 141 Ireland 16, 18 Iroquois 141 Isabella d’Este 110 Italy 32–3, 73, 77–8, 82, 85, 89, 91, 105, 111. See also Padua; Rome, ancient J. Paul Getty Museum 97, 104 Jacob 16, 25, 32, 37, 51 Jacob Shows Joseph’s Blood-Stained Coat 37 James I 72 James IV 85 James, Henry 97

Index

James, Saint 38 Jameson, Anna 85 Jesus 40, 51 in art 25, 27, 39 relics of 10, 20, 23, 137 touch of 14, 25 Jewish Bride, The 25–7, 127 Johnson, Samuel 14 Jones, Inigo 81–2, 84 Jones, Jonathan 9, 23 Jonson, Ben 82, 110 Josephine, Empress 27 Junius, Franciscus 28, 78, 81–2, 85, 87, 108 Jupiter 87, 108 Kant, Immanuel 41 Katherine of Valois, Queen 17, 59 Kaulbach, Wilhelm von 37 Keats, John 122 Ketel, Cornelis 27 Kids in Museums 132 kinaesthesia. See also playfulness; running and aesthetics 122–4 in collection sites 1, 87, 122–3, 124, 130, 140 expressed in art 82, 123 kiss of peace 12 kissing. See also kiss of peace of art 33, 40, 43, 84 of museum objects 9 of relics 9, 11–13, 23–4 Knole House 93, 113, 139 La Roche, Sophie von 21, 118 Lady and the Unicorn 90 Laodamia 35 Last Supper, The 77 Laughing Boy, The 98–103 Lee Penny 18 Lely, Peter 95 Leonardo da Vinci 6, 31–3, 77, 86, 98–100, 102–3 light electric 44–5, 125–6 Lives of Painters 89 ‘Living Arctic’ 137 Livingstone, David 53 Lockhart, Simon 18

167

London 71, 107–9, 111–12. See also Arundel House; British Museum; National Gallery; Royal Armoury; Thames River; Tower of London; Victoria & Albert Museum; Westminster Abbey ‘London Exhibitions’ 118, 119 Louis IX, King 11, 23 Louvre 3, 56, 71, 102, 129 Luini, Bernardino 99, 102 Luke, Saint 38, 39 MacAdam, Charles 115–16 MacAdam, Toshiko Horiuchi 115–16 MacDonald, George 33 MacGregor, Neil 9 Madagascar 72, 76, 92 Madden, Richard 62 Madonna and Child 86 Magdalen College 117 Magdalene, Mary 19, 25, 27 Magic Lantern, The 44 Manchester 96, 102, 130 Mancini, Hortense 104 Mander, Karel van 28 Manet, Édouard 124 Mantua, Ferdinand, Duke of 84 Mantua, Vincenzo, Duke of 110–11 Mark, Saint 22 Marlborough, 4th Duke of 96 Marlborough, 5th Duke of 96 Mary, Queen of Scots 72 Masque of Hymen 82, 110 Mayer, Jillian 130 Mazarin, Cardinal 84, 104 McCord Museum 141 Mead, Richard 92 media modern 45, 68–9, 136–9 Medici Venus 32–4, 36 medicine Asian 22 mummies as 58, 94 and museums 129 and painting 39 and relics 13, 14, 18, 20–1, 23 senses in 18 Meditations 88 men. See also specific artists; collectors and critics

168

Index

in museums 120–5 responses to portrayals of women of 32–5, 114 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien 119 Metropolitan Museum 128 Meux, Lady 50 Michaelis, Adolph 107 Michelangelo 25, 86 Modernism 43 Mona Lisa 32, 71 Monet, Claude 133–4, 136 Mordaunt, Mary. See Norfolk, Mary, Duchess of Moretti, Egido 79 Morgan, David 5 Moses 67 Moyaert, Claes 36 multisensory aesthetics 86, 93–4, 100, 113–14, 128–30, 135–6, 139–41 mummies in literature 53–5, 56, 57 in museums 47, 49–55, 68–70 popularity of 47–9 sensory interaction with 6, 54–62, 94 symbolism of 6, 50–1, 62–3 unwrapping of 49, 60–2, 69–70 uses of 62–8, 94 Mummy, The 53–4 ‘Mummy’s Foot, The’ 63 Murray, Margaret 55 Musée du quai Branly 139 Musée Grévin 47 Museum Bodies 5 Museum, The 50–1 museums. See also galleries; touch, in museums; and specific museums behaviour in 3–4, 23–4, 115–22 early 20–2 ethnographic 5, 139–41 contemporary 6–7, 71, 115–17 restrictions in 1, 9, 23–4, 117–22 shops in 136, 140 virtual 136–9 music 37, 86, 114, 130, 135, 137, 139 mysticism 13 Mytens, Daniel 72, 74–5, 88, 90, 93–4, 104, 107, 110 Nanteos Cup 20, 23 National Gallery 97, 118–20, 128, 133, 135–7

National Gallery of Canada 128 National Gallery of Scotland 133 National Library of Wales 20 National Trust 139 Natura Exenterata: Or Nature UnBowelled 89 natural history exhibits 21, 24, 123 Nelson, Horatio, Admiral 35, 113 New York Times, The 67, 136 Niagara Falls Museum 69 Nightingale, Florence 56, 64 Nilsson, Christina 37 Noli me tangere 25, 27 Norfolk, Thomas Howard, 5th Duke of 73, 91 Norfolk, Henry Howard, 6th Duke of 91–2, 93–4, 95, 103–5, 110 Norfolk, Henry Howard, 7th Duke of 95, 97, 107 Norfolk, Edward Howard, 9th Duke of 97, 108 Norfolk, Jane, Duchess of 95 Norfolk, Mary, Duchess of 95, 97–8, 102, 108 Northampton, Earl of 85 Norton-Westbrook, Helena 130 Nys, Daniel 110 Octave Mirbeau 133 Odysseus 79 Olympia 124 ‘On the Aesthetic Education of Man’ 42 optical values 43 Osiris 52, 65 Othello 67 Ottoman Empire 47, 110 Our Lady of the Pillar 38, 43 Outcry, The 97 Ovid 35 Oxford 4, 71, 80, 103–4, 106–7, 117 Oxford Bust 107 Oxford, University of 4, 105–7, 117 Padua 77–8, 91, 112 pain and art creation 122 on experiencing art 122–3, 124 and relic veneration 15 representations of 34–5 paint pigments 39

Index

painting (as a practice) in early modernity 82 tactile aspects of 25–6, 122 Painting of the Ancients, The 85 Paintings. See also specific artists and works in Arundel collection 72, 79, 81–2, 85–6, 89–90, 97–103 in judicial punishments 34–5 moral value of 85 sacred 37–40 verisimilitude of 28–32 Pallas 82 Paré, Ambrose 18, 58 Parian Chronicle 83, 103 Paris 11, 23, 47, 87, 119, 139. See also Louvre; Musée Grévin; Musée du quai Branly; Sainte Chapelle Parrhasius 28 Parthenon Marbles 122, 140 Peacham, Henry 82–3 Pembroke, Earl of 83, 104 Pepys, Lucas 33 Pepys, Samuel 17, 28–30, 93–4 perfume 93, 110–11, 133, 141 Pergamon Altar 107 Peter, Saint 13 Peterborough, Earl of 95 Pettigrew, Thomas 49, 69, 102 Petty, William 76, 78–9, 87 Phantastes 33 Pharos the Egyptian 59 Phidias 105 Philes, Manuel 32 Philip Neri, Saint 38 Philip of Marnix 41 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy 36 Philostratus 31–2 photography 2, 24, 28, 114 ‘Play Time’ 130–31 ‘Playful Museum Project’ 131–2 playfulness 115, 130–2 ‘Please Touch’ 128 pleasure of art 29–31, 33 of museums 130–2 Poe, Edgar Allen 53 politics and mummies 64–5, 69 and museums 139–41

169

Pomfret, Earl of 105 Pomfret, Henrietta Louisa, Countess of 105 Portrait of Lady Arundel and her Train 90 Potiphar 68 Prado Museum 127 Protestantism 13–14, 18, 72, 77, 92. See also Puritanism and art 40–1, 85, 109 and mummies 50–1 and the senses 14 Punch 33–4, 66, 97–8, 120 Puritans 40–1, 76, 104, 111 Pygmalion 32, 35–6, 40, 107 Pynas, Jan 37 Quin, Henry 32 Raleigh, Walter 76 Ramses I 69 Raphael 37, 86, 105, 120, 122 Redmoon Theatre 130 Rees Leahy, Helen 5 relics. See also charms in Arundel collection 84–5 celebrity 17–18 historical 21–2 history of 10–12, 14 reliquaries for 12, 23–4, 38, 137 royal 14–17 touch windows in 11–12 religion. See also Protestantism; Puritans; Roman Catholicism in museums 9, 23–4, 137 Rembrandt van Rijn 6, 25–8, 30, 36, 43, 45 restaurants 1, 21 Révész, Géza 126 rhinoceros’ horns 22 Richelieu, Cardinal 78, 104 Rijksmuseum 24–5, 45 ‘Ring of Thoth, The’ 56 Rivers, Augustus Pitt 125 Rodin, Auguste 33 Roe, Thomas 73, 79, 85–6 Roman Catholicism. See also relics, history of; saints and the Howard family 72, 77, 92 tactile rituals of 12–13, 37–40, 43

170

Index

Rome, ancient antiquities of 37, 78–9, 82 religion of 37, 88 Romer, Isabella 64 Rosetta Stone 47, 69 Rosetti, Christina 53 Royal Academy 132 Royal Armoury 120–1 Royal Society 20, 94, 103, 111–12 Rubens, Peter Paul 71, 78–9, 84, 86, 90, 102, 107, 111, 115 Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor 28 running 131 Rupert of Deutz 40 Russia 23–4 Saandrart, Joachim von 87 Sackville-West, Victoria 93, 113 Sainte Chapelle 11 saints in art 37–40 relics of 9–14, 22–4 Salt, Henry 53 Sandby, Paul 44 Sanderson, John 47 Schiller, Friedrich 42 Schopenhauer, Arthur 42 science. See also natural history exhibits early modern 18, 20, 21, 32, 94–5 and mummies 60–2, 69–70 senses in 18–20 Scientific American 65 Scotland 16, 18, 22, 85, 101, 133 sculpture in Arundel collection 76–7, 82–3, 87–8, 103–9 lifelike qualities of 30, 32–5, 37 touching of 30–1, 41, 84 senses. See hearing; kinaesthesia; sight; smell; taste; touch sensuality 33, 85, 140 Shakespeare, William 17–18, 32, 67 Shaxton, Nicholas 41 Sheldonian Theatre 103, 117 Shelley, Mary 53, 60 sight. See also blindness; trompe l’oeil; visualism and art 25–40, 81–2, 124, 131 of mummies 53–4, 60–2

in museums 1, 9, 21, 118–22, 123, 124–6 of relics 12 Sloane, Hans 17, 21 smell and art 27, 31–2, 109–10, 116, 133–6 of collection sites 117, 118 in history 93, 109–13 of mummies 57, 60, 94 of relics 13, 18 Smith, Horace 3–4, 50, 51 Smith, James 63 Snagge Head 108 Snagge, Mordaunt 108 ‘Some Words with a Mummy’ 53 Soprani, Rafael 89 sound. See also speech in art 135 in museums 119 ‘Soundscape’ 135 Southey, Robert 48, 53 Spain 18, 38, 43, 111, 127 Spalding, Julian 7, 132 Spectator, The 21, 24, 37 speech and artworks 71, 82–3, 86, 89–90 Spice Chess 135 Sprat, Thomas 94–5 St John, James Augustus 57 Stafford, William Howard, 1st Viscount of 73, 77–8, 91–2 Stendhal 122 ‘Stendhal syndrome’ 122 Stoics 88 Stoker, Bram 55–7 Stone of Scone 15–16, 18, 22 Stratford 17 Susannah 101 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 107 Symbolism 136 synaesthesia. See also multisensory aesthetics aesthetic 42 tableaux vivants 35–7, 114 tactile values 26, 123–4 Tactual Museum 129 Talbot, Aletheia. See Arundel, Aletheia, Countess of

Index

Tart Hall 87, 89, 91–2 taste. See also food; restaurants and art 31, 42 of mummies 58–9, 69 in museums 20–1, 135 of relics 13, 19, 24 Tate Modern 127, 131 ‘Tate Sensorium’ 135 Test Site 131 texture in art 26–7, 29–30 Thames River 58, 78, 88, 94, 107–8 theatre 17, 130 influence of art on 36–7, 82 tableaux vivants in 36 Thebes 49, 50, 55 Tinguely Museum 133, 135 Titian 84, 86, 105 Tolaas, Sissel 134–5 Toledo 131 Toledo Museum of Art (TMA) 5, 115, 130–3, 138–9 Tolstoy, Leo 37 touch and art 6, 25–40, 38–40, 116, 122–4 of mummies 54, 55–7 in museums 1–4, 21–2, 115, 117–22, 126–30 of relics 9–19, 21–4, 137 royal 14–17 ‘Touch Me’ 129 touch pieces 14 Tower of London 16–17, 72, 118 Townley, Charles 92 Tradescants 80 Treasures of Heaven 9 ‘Trench Experience’ 139 Trinity College Chapel 117 Trollope, Anthony 119 trompe-l’oeil 28–32, 39, 42, 43 Tropenmuseum 139 Troy 79 Twain, Mark 64, 122

Van Dyck, Anthony 73, 81 Van Ecyk, Hubert and Jan 36, 40 Van Gogh, Vincent 136 Vasari, Giorgio 32 Vathek 113 Venus de Milo 123 Verelst, Simon 28 Victoria & Albert Museum 2, 23, 85, 125–6, 129 Vincent of Saragossa, Saint 13 Virgin Mary 38. See also Our Lady of the Pillar visualism 41–5, 101, 124–5, 127–8, 132 Vondel, Joost van den 36 Vredeman de Vries, Hans 28 Waagen, Gustav 101, 118 Walpole, Horace 35, 104–5 Walters Art Museum 129 Watts, G.F 107 Webb, Jane 53–4 Wedel, Lupold von 16 Westminster Abbey 14, 16–17, 22, 59 Wife of Pygmalion, The 107 William the Conqueror 11 Wilton House 83, 104 Winckelmann, Johann 41 Winckworth, Stephen 102 Winifred, Saint 13 Winter’s Tale, A 32 women as artists 35, 117 as collectors 50, 89–91 as models 33, 35–6 in museums 118, 120, 121–2 representations of 32–6, 41–2 working classes in museums 4, 117–20, 121–2, 124–5 Worksop Manor 97, 108 Wotton, Henry 85–6 Young, Edward 17

Uffenbach, Zacharias von 16, 21, 117–18 Uffizi Gallery 32–3 unicorn horns 18, 22 United States of America 97 Urban VIII, Pope 40

171

Zeuxis 28, 42, 86 Zurbarán, Francisco 39, 43