Practice makes perfect
Last Sunday I went to the stunning Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination show at the British Library. The curators have created a tour de force, bringing out the jewels of the manuscript collections, demonstrating not only the quality and range of their holdings, but also the commissioning and collecting practices of the British monarchs behind these texts. We see the complicated history of such objects from the medieval context behind their creation, to the Renaissance and Enlightenment discourses that led the British monarchy to collect and preserve them. My personal favourite was the map by Matthew Paris which shows the pilgrimage route to the Holy Land via key European cities. The best type of interactive alongside the manuscript also brings this map to life.
But, if you look closely, this show also tells you some interesting things about changing practice once these manuscripts entered the more institutional museum environment, which is what interests me here. Many of the pages on display featured a red ‘Museum Britannicum’ stamp, harking back to when they were part of the earliest founding collections of the British Museum in the 1750s and 1820s. This shows the eighteenth-century changes which led Georges II and IV to give these treasures to the British nation, rather than keeping them for personal aggrandisement. Many such stamps, however, are bang slap in the middle of an illuminated page. If you read The Island of Lost Maps by Miles Harvey it’s clear how great the security risk to such pages can be, even in a fortress like the British Library, and therefore how helpful it can be to mark them. Yet, affecting the integrity of the object with such a stamp is something which we would never do today. Conservation and display practices have changed too. Think about one of my favourite objects in the V&A collections: the giant fig leaf which the Victorians added to protect the modesty of their cast of Michelangelo’s David. Likewise, conservators frown on the browning varnish which ‘protected’ oil paintings in the nineteenth century, and collections managers despair at the 1970s policies which disposed of ‘duplicates’ in once whole historic numismatic collections.
Yet, our current practices are also controversial. Tate Britain’s recent John Martin show (discussed in a recent post) featured, extensively restored, The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, damaged by water in the 1920s, of which 20% had to be repainted. This is now done in such a way that modern changes remain visible and reversible while maintaining the overall ‘feel’ of the work. But the question remains whether this should still be displayed as solely John Martin’s work. What will we be saying about such practices in fifty years’ time? If this blog, or its next cyberspace incarnation, is still going, I shall let you know.