THE TREASURES OF THE 18th CENTURY AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM.

 

When Lord Elgin was sent as ambassador extraordinary to Constantinople in the early 19th century, Lady Elgin wrote home about the splendors of the Topkapi Serai: "In a window there were two turbans covered with diamonds. You can conceive nothing in the Arabian Nights equal to that room." The objects that came from other places unsettled prejudices, although not perhaps those of Samuel Johnson. When the great lexicographer called East Indians "barbarians", his biographer Boswell objected. "'You will except the Chinese, sir?' Johnson: 'No, sir.' Boswell: 'Have they not arts?' Johnson: 'They have pottery.'" But it is Boswell who speaks for mainstream 18th-century opinion: he tolerates Johnson's philistinism as he tolerates (as a Scot) Johnson's asinine remarks. Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson epitomizes the Enlightenment belief in sociability, in give and take. This ability to take pleasure in difference is a long way from the wars, tortures and martyrdoms that had previously settled theological disputes. Voltaire was psychosomatically ill every year on August 24, the anniversary of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of Protestants by Catholics in Paris in 1572. Gibbon wrote scathingly about the intolerance of early Christianity: "The primitive church ... delivered over, without hesitation, to eternal torture the far greater part of the human species." This was in a country just starting to overcome the bigotry that had turned its (and Ireland's) fields red in the 17th century. How can you contain the wild and dangerous ideas and imaginings of the Enlightenment in an exhibition - or, for that matter, a museum? Rather well, it turns out. Brilliantly, even. The British Museum has done something almost unprecedented. For years, artists, curators and historians have been imagining the museum as a work of art. But no museum of this stature has thought to make such an exhibition of itself on this permanent and serious scale - to make its own history its inquiry. You enter the King's Library from the white contemporary space of the Great Court and are immediately in another time. Ahead of you is a giant ancient Roman vase - or rather, a fake, put together from fragments by the architect and fantastic illustrator Giovanni Battista Piranesi. The extravagant invention of Piranesi is a reminder that not even the cult of ancient Greece and Rome in the 18th century can easily be understood as European triumphalism. Piranesi portrayed ancient Rome, in his prints of colossal ruins and prisons, as a place of diabolical sublime power very similar to the realm of William Beckford's fictional Caliph, Vathek.

 

The 18th century was interested in modeling knowledge, in encyclopedias and dictionaries

It turns out that beneath its modern collections, the British Museum has long hidden a ghost collection, an embarrassing trove of oddities dating back to its origins. Now these have been brought out of basement cupboards to once more delight and instruct. There is a "mermaid" made from a monkey and a fish; there are numerous classical fakes; and, contrary to every expectation you might have of the British Museum, there are animals. The original 18th-century museum encompassed natural history as well as every other knowledge, and so the King's Library has items from the foundation collections of today's Natural History Museum, including species novel and confounding in the 18th century, such as the platypus. Fossils, minerals, mummies (including the "mummy's finger" used in the early 18th century by Hans Sloane, the doctor whose collections were the foundation of the museum) and objects brought back from Cook's Pacific voyages: curiosities without end, representing an age whose curiosity was insatiable. The 18th century was interested in modeling knowledge, in encyclopedias and dictionaries. Collecting was another encyclopedic enterprise. At this stage it did not yet sustain the ordered, and ordering, classifications of Victorian science. The world for a moment was held in suspension, in a vacuum flask, and everything - from the age of the earth to the meaning of hieroglyphs - was still to be asked. Islam, too, was to be considered, to be studied. Sloane's cabinet of curiosities contained amulets inscribed with texts from the Koran that were carefully translated for him into Latin; the entire Koran was translated into English in 1734.

Among all the tales of exploration and interpretation, a cynic might say, this wonderful display conveniently distracts attention from the most notorious skeleton in the cupboard of the museum's early history: Lord Elgin's removal of the frieze of the Parthenon from Ottoman-ruled Athens in 1799. But who was the man of the Enlightenment - Elgin, or his critic Lord Byron? Elgin and his party were magnificently entertained in Istanbul, and their relationship with the rulers of the Ottoman Empire was good enough to procure a license from the Sultan to remove "any pieces of marble with inscriptions or figures thereon" from the Acropolis. Ever since, critics have attacked the value of this license and the propriety of Elgin making a deal with the despotic rulers of Greece. But Elgin was making the assumptions of the 18th century. Christian deionization of Turkey was specious, argued Gibbon. The Marbles were a legitimate trade in the emporium of the Enlightenment, thought Elgin. In the Romantic age that followed the Enlightenment, even as Napoleon read and admired the Koran, modern, ethnocentric nationalism was born. The Greek war of independence became a rallying call for Christian Europe against Islamic Turkey. And among all the other thoughts provoked by this new display, one is that maybe the campaign to return the Elgin Marbles to Athens can never be entirely free of the new Romantic faiths that ended the Enlightenment and initiated a far less attractive version of modernity.

 MORE NEXT