Page 33 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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audience – a ‘miracle of art’ (Belting 2001: 52 –4). This example shows the
growing confusion between religion and art, as the painting’s combination of
classical perfection and religious subject matter became the basis of a new kind
of art-worship. Contemplation of the individual work in isolation from those
around it became almost religious in character. In the late eighteenth century,
and through until the mid-nineteenth century, a miracle story circulated in
which the image appeared in a dream to Raphael. Belting explains how this
myth reinterpreted the Sistine Madonna as if it were itself a vision experienced
by Raphael, so that a miracle becomes the origin of the painting as well as its
content. As a miraculous object, the painting becomes imbued with religious
significance, and the artist becomes a cult figure, the subject of myth and
mystery (Belting 2001: 58).
The emergence of the cult of the artist accompanied the new cult value of the
work of art. Masterpieces become objects of mystery, imbued with an inexplic-
able aura. This notion of auratic experience, derived from the work of the
German critic Walter Benjamin, is discussed in later chapters. My point here is
that works of art gained a new kind of singularity in the museum age. In 1857,
Carl Gustav Carus wrote that Raphael’s Sistine Madonna ‘presented itself ever
more radiantly and in its full significance to my soul’ now that the painting had
been reinstalled in its own chapel-like room in Dresden (Belting 2001: 61).
Carus’ way of describing his experience is a typically Romantic one. By the
mid-nineteenth century, the Romantic notion of aesthetic experience had dis-
placed old understandings of the contemplation of art advocated by eighteenth-
century classicists. For the Romantic, paintings ‘speak’ to the soul. Their
aesthetic qualities are not a matter of conforming to rules and notions of
perfect form, but a mysterious communion between the viewer and the art
object. This communion is akin to the ones that the Romantics were to find in
nature, in the experience of the sublime and the picturesque landscape.
Writing on the museum as a rational instrument of governance has tended to
draw our attention away from the impact of Romanticism on the museum. If we
look at early nineteenth-century museums, and not just at art museums, we see
a deliberate attempt to arrange displays aesthetically, under the influence of
Romanticism. Museums were organized to produce evocative and unexpected
juxtapositions, placing artefacts from different periods alongside one another
for artistic effect. In 1882, the director of the Rouen Museum of Antiquities
defended its displays (dating from 1831) against the current fashion for
‘extravagant classification’. While he recognized the scholarly advantages of
methodical classification, he argued, ‘A picturesque installation speaks more to
the soul than does a dry and cold display inspired by narrow pedantry. It is by
means of the first system rather than by the second that true popularisation is
achieved’ (Jules Adeline cited in Watson 1999: 101).