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Images of the Art Museum
Contact Zones
Editors
Lars Blunck, Bénédicte Savoy, Avinoam Shalem
Volume 3
Images of the
Art Museum
Connecting Gaze and Discourse

in the History of Museology
Editors
Eva-Maria Troelenberg and Melania Savino
Publication was financed by
ISBN 978-3-11-033887-4
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-034136-2
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-038434-5
ISSN 2196-3746
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Cover photograph: film still from Alfred Hitchcock: Blackmail (1929), picture number
bfi-00n-egt, CANAL + IMAGE UK.
Typesetting: LVD GmbH, Berlin
Printing and Binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany
www.degruyter.com
Contents
Eva-Maria Troelenberg
Images of the Art Museum. Connecting Gaze and Discourse
in the History of Museology: An Introduction 1
Museum Icons, Iconic Museums: (De-)Constructing the Body of Art
Martin Gaier
The Art of Civilization: Museum Enemies in the Nineteenth Century 31
Lynn Catterson
Stefano Bardini and the Taxonomic Branding of Marketplace Style:
From the Gallery of a Dealer to the Institutional Canon 41
Kathryn M. Floyd
The Museum Exhibited: documenta and the Museum Fridericianum 65
Word and Image, Institution and Audience
Andrea Meyer
Museums in Print: The Interplay of Texts and Images
in the Journal Museumskunde 93
Melania Savino
Creating the Idea of the Museum through the Pages of the Journal Mouseion 111
Alison Boyd
The Visible and Invisible: Circulating Images of the
Barnes Foundation Collection 133
Julia Kleinbeck
Double Reflections: Art Museums and the Image of the Beholder 155
Politics of the “Museal Complex”
Irina Koshoridze
From a Colonial Approach to National Branding: The Evolution of the Concept
of the Art Museum in Georgia 173
VI Contents
Qanita Lilla
Classical Impressions, Modernist Aspirations: Shaping a Field of Contention
at the South African National Gallery (1895–1947) 191
Deepti Mulgund
Imaginaries of the Art Museum: Banaras and Aundh in Colonial India 215
Iro Katsaridou, Anastasia Kontogiorgi

When El Greco (Re)Became Theotocopoulos: Policies and Political Discourse
of the National Gallery of Athens 239
Naomi Stead, Deborah van der Plaat, John Macarthur

Building Flagships: Regionalism, Place Branding, and Architecture as Image
in the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 261
Intermedialities, Shifting Images
Norbert M. Schmitz
Scottie Sees Beauty: Representations of the Museum in Classic Cinema 289
Walter Grasskamp
The Museum in Print: André Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire and André Vigneau’s
Photographic Encyclopaedia of Art 301
Hubertus Kohle
The Museum Goes Collaborative: On the Digital Escapades
of an Analogue Medium 317
Zehra Tonbul, Koen Van Synghel

Museum as Textum: Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence 333
Authors 353
Picture Credits 359
Plates 363
Eva-Maria Troelenberg
Images of the Art Museum. Connecting Gaze
and Discourse in the History of Museology:
An Introduction1
Speaking about Museums, Speaking in Images

The language we use when speaking about museums is in itself full of images. The
most ubiquitous ones might be the notions of the museum as a temple or as a forum.
These images are used so often that they almost go unnoticed in many contexts, or
risk losing their significance. However, upon closer examination, they reveal an inter‑
esting basic constellation of museum discourse, potentially slicing through different
historical layers. Both designations bear a literally classicist notion, yet they conjure
up fundamentally different concepts and also very different images of the actual
space, inner structure, and architectural iconography of the institution.2
At the time of writing, one of the most debated museum projects in Germany is,
for instance, the so‑called Humboldtforum, which is to take shape in Berlin-Mitte, on
the site of the reconstructed Prussian castle. The Humboldtforum deliberately seeks
to work with the notion of the “forum” in the sense of an open space of cross-cultural
and social exchange and public engagement, a move that might also be considered
1 This collection of essays grew out of a conference entitled “Images of the Art Museum – Connect‑
ing Gaze and Discourse in the History of Museology,” held at Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz –
Max-Planck-Institut in September 2013. It was the first international conference organized by the Max-
Planck-Research Group “Objects in the Contact Zone – The Cross-Cultural Lives of Things.” We thank
the KHI Florence and its directors as well as all conference participants who provided valuable input.
Important aspects have also been discussed before and after the conference especially with Irene
Campolmi, Alison Boyd, and Felicity Bodenstein, who were or are fellows focusing on museum stud‑
ies within the research group. Emily Neumeier and Theodore van Loan have assisted in the last and
most crucial stages of proofreading and editing. Melania Savino and I also wish to thank Katja Richter
and Verena Bestle from De Gruyter as well as the series editors of the “Contact Zone – Studies in Global
Art” series for accepting our conference proceedings – they could not have been placed more aptly.
This introductory text has been discussed with current members of the research group. Janna Vert‑
hein has helped with editorial tasks and image research.
2 See e.g. Carol Duncan, Civilizing rituals. Inside public art museums, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 178;
Carol Duncan, Alan Wallach, The Universal Survey Museum, Art history 3 (1980), pp. 448–469; David
Carrier, Museum skepticism. A history of the display of art in public galleries, Durham, NC: Duke Uni‑
versity Press, 2006.
2 Eva-Maria Troelenberg
a political strategy that seeks to counterbalance the historically charged site of the
Hohenzollern residence.3
At the same time, and often in sharp opposition, the “temple” image of the
museum as a closed space deliberately detached from everyday life is equally present
in current museum debates. One of many possible examples of this is the wording
used as a headline for an interview with the State Hermitage director, Mikhail Boriso‑
vich Piotrovsky, in 2015. A press interview that was translated into English and posted
on the museum’s blog spells out what he calls the predicament between preservation
and accessibility, embodying these opposing qualities in the very provocative meta‑
phorical headline “A Temple or a Disneyland.”4
Apparently such a practice of speaking in images works in all directions as it
shapes perceptions and self-conceptions alike.5 Of course these and uncounted other
similar uses of such staple figures of museum speech are set against the background
of a grand narrative rooted in the fundamental terms of cultural history. The classicist
implication of both the temple and the forum metaphors already hints at the strong
heritage of enlightenment humanism, and thus at the significance of the museum as
an idealistically charged institution of modern Western civilization.6
This is to no small extent connected to the rising specialization and taxonomic
rigor that lead to highly elaborated concepts of ideal and at the same time universally
embracing museums – and entire museum “landscapes,” such as the Berlin Museum
Island.7 As the museum’s institutional formation went on throughout the nineteenth
century, it also consolidated its function as an instrument of national image-building.
3 Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (ed.), Das Humboldt-Forum im Berliner Schloss. Planungen, Pro
zesse, Perspektiven, Munich: Hirmer, 2013.
4 Mikhail Piotrovsky, A Temple or a Disneyland? Piotrovsky on the museum, the rights of culture
and the dictate of the street, https://www.hermitagemuseum.org/wps/portal/hermitage/what‑s‑on/
director-blog/blog-post/4march15/?lng=(accessed 30 January 2016).
5 From an academic perspective, Duncan Cameron has already discussed the dialectical relation be‑
tween the museum as a “temple” vs. “forum” in the early 1970s: Duncan F. Cameron, The Museum.
A Temple or the Forum, in: The Museum Journal 14 (1971), pp. 11–24. For an interesting recent assess‑
ment including a collection of further references see also Linda Norris, The Museum as Forum – Does
It Exist?, http://museumspoliticsandpower.org/2014/05/14/the-museum‑as-forum-does‑it-exist/(ac‑
cessed 30 January 2016).
6 For exemplary studies on the conceptual and concrete use of the “temple” metaphor in historical
perspective see: Ingeborg Cleve, Der Louvre als Tempel des Geschmacks. Französische Museumspoli‑
tik um 1800 zwischen kultureller und ökonomischer Hegemonie, in: Gottfried Fliedl (ed.), Die Erfin
dung des Museums. Anfänge der bürgerlichen Museumsidee in der Französischen Revolution, Vienna:
Turia + Kant, 1996, pp. 26–64; Theodore Ziolkowski, Das Amt der Poeten. Die deutsche Romantik und
ihre Institutionen, Munich: dtv, 1994. For the perspective of feminist and Marxist critique, see Carol
Duncan, Alan Wallach, The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual. An Iconographic Anal‑
ysis, in: Marxist Perspectives 1 (1978), pp. 28–51; Duncan, Wallach, 1980 (as in note 2), pp. 448–469.
7 Ellinoor Bergvelt, Debory J. Meijers, Lieske Tibbe, Elsa van Wezel (eds.), Napoleon’s Legacy. The Rise
of National Museums in Europe. 1794–1830, Berlin: G & H Verlag, 2009; Nikolaus Bernau, Hans-Dieter
Images of the Art Museum 3
This development is often considered as originating in Europe, yet it is paralleled in

other parts of the world, from the United States to the Ottoman Empire and beyond8 –
and one might even argue that some recent or ongoing “iconic” museum projects, for
instance in China or the Gulf Emirates, are a late or post-imperial echo to this history
as well.9
It comes hardly as a surprise then that postmodern and postcolonial institutional
critique have often approached established monolithic museum images with an atti‑
tude of discursive iconoclasm – a position that to a certain extent was borrowed from
or developed in relation to the approaches of contemporary writers or artists who
by themselves often resorted to figural language when staging their works in muse‑
ums.10 Jean Cocteau’s famous aphorism describing the Louvre as a “morgue, where
one goes to identify one’s friends,”11 moves just slightly away from the idea of the
Nägelke, Bénédicte Savoy (eds.), Museumsvisionen. Der Wettbewerb zur Erweiterung der Berliner Mu-
seumsinsel 1883/84, Kiel: Ludwig, 2015.
8 Particularly Ottoman museum history has received growing attention in recent years. See for in‑
stance Wendy M. K. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed. Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of
History in the Late Ottoman Empire, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003; Edhem Eldem,
From Blissful Indifference to Anguished Concern. Ottoman Perceptions of Antiquities, 1799–1869, in:
Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, Edhem Eldem (eds.), Scramble for the Past. A Story of Archaeology in
the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914, Istanbul: SALT, 2011, pp. 281–330. Comprehensive and critical his‑
toriographic literature on the foundation of American art museums remains, in comparison, rela‑
tively scarce. See for example Charles J. Robertson (ed.), Temple of Invention. History of a National
Landmark, Washington, DC: Scala Publishers, 2006; Katharine Baetjer, Buying Pictures for New York.
The Founding Purchase of 1871, in: Metropolitan Museum Journal 39 (2004), pp. 161–195; Alan Wal‑
lach, The Birth of the American Art Museum, in: Sven Beckert, Julia Rosenbaum (eds.), The American
Bourgeoisie. Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010,
pp. 247–256.
9 This recent turn in “global” museum history largely still awaits its assessment by critical schol‑
arship. For an overview see Simon J. Knell, Peter Aronsson, Arne Bugge Amundsen (eds.), National
museums. New studies from around the world, New York: Routledge, 2011, p. 484. For the so far char‑
acteristic rather celebratory approach to such museums, see for example Laurence Des Cars, Louvre
Abu Dhabi. Naissance d’un Musée, Paris: Skira Flammarion et. al., 2013; Di’an Fan, Cultural Identity of
the National Museum of China, Beijing, in: Francesco Buranelli (ed.), L’Idea del Museo. Identità, Ruoli,
Prospettive. Atti del Convegno Internazionale in Occasione del Quinto Centenario dei Musei Vaticani
(1506–2006), Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2013, pp. 81–83.
10 An interesting collection of such positions was gathered by Walter Grasskamp: Walter Grass‑
kamp, Sonderbare Museumsbesuche. Von Goethe bis Gernhardt, Munich: Beck, 2006. Important case
studies of museum images particularly in the German literary mindset have been collected by Peter
M. McIsaac, Museums of the Mind. German Modernity and the Dynamics of Collecting, University Park,
PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.
11 Jean Cocteau, Poésie Critique I, Paris: Gallimard, 1959, p. 22. For an academic version of this notion
see also Édouard Pommier, Der Louvre als Ruhestätte der Kunst der Welt, in: Gottfried Fliedl (ed.),
Die Erfindung des Museums. Anfänge der bürgerlichen Museumsidee in der Französischen Revolution,
Vienna: Turia + Kant, 1996, pp. 7–25.
“temple” towards a more sinister sphere, while the double sense of the French term
“morgue,” designating a mortuary but potentially also alluding to an attitude of arro‑
gance, hauteur, and self-containment, seems to open an ironic and at the same time
nightmarish play with the image of the museum as well as with the attitude of its
existentialist beholder.
Several discourse-laden decades later and in another part of the world, artist Fred
Wilson looks at the museum as a “mine.” This image interestingly begins with the
notion of a place where things are buried, hidden in the ground, and static like prehis‑
torical sediment – but only to discover them, bring them to light, make use of them,
literally “work” them in unforeseen and critical ways: Wilson’s exhibition concept
of Mining the Museum (fig. 1) started in 1992/93 as an intervention at the Maryland
Historical Society, coinciding with an annual meeting of the American Association of
Museums, which certainly amplified its striking impact. Wilson radically subverted
traditional museum categories through new juxtapositions of objects that revealed
narratives on African and Native Americans that were already present in the historical
collections but that had been largely neglected and made invisible by the institution’s
traditional narratives and modes of presentation. Thus this intervention introduced
new voices and agencies, and rather than opening a new gaze onto only this one par‑
ticular museum, it aimed to contest and deconstruct the self-image of the institution
as such.12
It seems almost redundant at this point to hint at the congruence of this artistic
position with the functional model of the so‑called New Museology, a many-voiced
branch of scholarship and practical museology emerging around the same time.
Deeply informed by structuralist and postcolonial philosophy, the scope of “New
Museology” has been a critical reassessment of individual institutions but also of the
phenomenon of the museum as such, particularly by highlighting hitherto hidden
or neglected agencies and social implications. Accordingly, the multifaceted litera‑
ture of and on “New Museology” is by far too vast to be revisited here in detail.13
However, some of its main perspectives become very tangible even if we take just
a random selection of “New Museology’s” own figures of speech. Daniel Sherman
12 Fred Wilson, Howard Halle, Mining the Museum, in: Grand Street 44 (1993), pp. 151–172; Anne
Ring Petersen, Mining the Museum in an Age of Migration, in: Iain Chambers, Alessandra De Angelis,
et al. (eds.), The Postcolonial Museum. The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History, Farnham:
Ashgate, 2014, pp. 125–137. See also the short documentary , Fred Wilson: Mining the Museum, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=csFP2YldIoQ (accessed 1 February 2016) and a comparative perspective
on museum interventions by Ken Yellis, http://www.artesmagazine.com/2011/11/examining-the-so‑
cial-responsibility‑of-museums‑in‑a-changing-world/(accessed 22 February 2016).
13 An important early collection of essays is the eponymous volume edited by Peter Vergo, The New
Museology, London: Reaktion Books, 1989. A recent perspective looking back on over two decades
of “New Museology” is to be found in: May Ross, Interpreting the New Museology, in: Museum and
Society 2 (2004), pp. 84–103.
Fig. 1: Mining the Museum, exhibition at Maryland Historical Society, Fred Wilson, installation view:
pedestals, globe, and busts, 1992–1993.
and Irit Rogoff coin a neutral yet inherently analytic position by calling the museum
an “intricate amalgam of historical structures and narratives” in the introduction to
their volume on Museum Culture.14 A similar notion of density, yet expressed in a
much more overtly critical metaphor, can be found in Moira G. Simpson’s Making
Representations. Dealing particularly with museum discourse in the postcolonial
world, she draws the militaristic image of the museum as a “bastion (of western mil‑
itary and imperial sovereignty).”15 This nexus between knowledge, representation,
and power, which has often been diagnosed, is in fact an immediate prerequisite to
the ensuing claim for the museum to be a “differencing machine,” as Tony Bennett
opens it for discussion: “… [D]oes the conception of the museum as a ‘machine’ aspire
14 Daniel J. Sherman, Irit Rogoff (eds.), Museum Culture. Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, New York:
Routledge, 1994, p. ix.
15 Moira G. Simpson, Making Representations. Museums in the Post-Colonial Era, New York: Rout‑
ledge, 1996, p. 1.
to new forms of dialogism that place earlier notions of exhibition into question?”16
The recent popularity of the seemingly all-embracing “forum” image for the nomen‑
clature of art museums and cultural venues is certainly related to just this claim, as
it appears to offer a more open, engaged, and process-oriented institutional image –
even though it ultimately remains carefully inside the demarcation lines of classical
narratives.17
In spite of all the groundbreaking more recent critical work on museums in the
so‑called global art world from both historical and contemporary perspectives,18
many questions are yet to be raised. We only need think about very basic questions
of nomenclature and compare the images that are evoked in our minds, or even that
are subconsciously implied when speaking about museums not even in a metaphor‑
ical but in the plain etymological sense: the Latin term museum, originating in the
Greek mouseion as a designation for the seat of the muses and then first reappropri‑
ated in fifteenth-century Florence for Lorenzo de’ Medici’s collections,19 has become
a seemingly universal label for institutions worldwide. Yet, it is deeply rooted in a
particular Western history of humanistic thinking and its idealistic implications for
late modernity. This becomes most obvious when we look at how it is translated into
other languages, and thus cultural idioms. For instance, the Arabic-speaking world
has been using the term mathaf approximately since the nineteenth century for differ‑
ent types of collections. In Beirut, the entire city district where the National Museum
is located is called “Mathaf,” thus linking modern urbanism and institutional histo‑
ry.20 Today the term’s most prominent bearer is a museum of contemporary art with
16 Tony Bennett, Exhibition, Difference, and the Logic of Culture, in: Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz,
Lynn Szwaja, Tomas Ybarra-Frausto (eds.), Museum Frictions. Public Cultures/Global Transformations,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, p. 46.
17 Also beyond the above-quoted “Humboldtforum,” many examples can be found for the use of this
term, interestingly particularly often in the German-speaking world.
18 To name only a few perspectives on a vast field: Kavita Singh, The Museum is National, in: India
International Centre Quarterly 29 (2002), pp. 176–196; Hans Belting, Contemporary Art and the Mu‑
seum in the Global Age, in: Peter Weibel, Andrea Buddensieg (eds.), Contemporary Art and the Mu-
seum. A Global Perspective, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007, pp. 16–38; Isabelle Hölscher, Musealization.
Global Tendencies, Munich: Lehrstuhl für Städtebau und Regionalplanung, Technische Universität
München, 2009; Bärbel Küster, French Art for All! Museum Projects in Africa 1912–1931 between Avant-
garde and Colonialism, in: Andrea Meyer, Bénédicte Savoy (eds.), The Museum Is Open. Towards a
Transnational History of Museums 1750–1940, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014; or the various contributions
in Jennifer W. Dickey, Samir El Azhar, Catherine Lewis (eds.): Museums in a Global Context. National
Identity, International Understanding, Washington, DC: AAM Press, 2013.
19 Donatella Pegazzano, Giorgio Vasari, Rome and Early Forms of Display of the Medici Collections
in Florence. Models and Afterlife, in: Maia Wellington Gahtan (ed.), Giorgio Vasari and the Birth of the
Museum, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, pp. 131–150, esp. p. 140.
20 Lamia Joreige, Under-Writing Beirut. Mathaf, Beirut: Sharjah Art Foundation, 2013.
worldwide outreach situated in Doha, the capital of the emirate of Qatar.21 In all these
instances of its modern use, the word mathaf is largely translated as synonymous
with “museum.” However, looking at its etymology, it becomes clear that the word
derives from terms such as “gift” or “treasure”; it is thus aptly connected to this kind
of institution, but it certainly conjures up rather different images than the classi‑
cal “seat of the muses.” In the end what is lost in translation does reflect different
institutional histories, as the genesis of institutions for the display of art in the Arab
world was certainly related to but not parallel to or purely imitative of the history of
museums in the Western world. This is just one example of the heteroglossia and
polysemy of our museum world, which in fact already represents a status after the
“global turn.”22 It only highlights the inevitable need for a continuous differentiation
in museum discourse, particularly considering its increasingly polycentric perspec‑
tive – yet, without losing common ground for conversation.
Looking at the Museum – Connecting Gaze

and Discourse
Bearing this in mind, it cannot be the purpose of this volume to tell any kind of linear,
empirical history of visual representations of art museums. Rather, we are taking into
account various agencies between institutions, objects, cultural entities, or individ‑
uals that reveal themselves through images of the art museum. As Margaret Olin has
shown in her definition of gaze and vision as art historical agency, “[t]he term ‘gaze’
[…] leaves no room to comprehend the visual without reference to someone whose
vision is under discussion.”23 While Olin refers generally to the gaze of all possible
kinds of beholders, viewers, or spectators, she also stresses: “While most discourse
about the gaze concerns pleasure and knowledge, however, it generally places both of
21 For a contextualized perspective on museums within evolving processes of cultural identity build‑
ing in the Arabian Gulf, see Karen Exell, Trinidad Rico (eds.), Cultural Heritage in the Arabian Penin-
sula. Debates, Discourses and Practices, Farnham: Ashgate 2014. For the Mathaf’s self-representation
on Google art project see: Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art, https://www.google.com/culturalin‑
stitute/collection/mathaf-arab-museum‑of-modern-art?projectId= art-project (accessed 22 February
2016).
22 Questions of art historical or historiographic discourse that may take us beyond the somewhat
used notion of the “global turn” have been discussed in a symposium organized by Sria Chatterjee and
Eva-Maria Troelenberg at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut in June 2014:
“After the Global. Constructions of Historiography in Visual and Material Spaces”.
23 Margaret Olin, Gaze, in: Robert S. Nelson, Richard Shiff (eds.), Critical Terms for Art History, Sec‑
ond Edition, Chicago University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 318.
these in the service of issues of power, manipulation, and desire.”24 Connecting both
of these aspects to our questions of representation, we consider the gaze towards the
museum as a productive instrument of knowledge production, but also as a mode of
institutional critique.
Norman Bryson has argued that the relation between vision and the gaze also
spells out a relation between a centralized viewpoint and a larger “expanded” field.
Interestingly, he develops this argument by interrelating Western and Japanese phi‑
losophy. Even the thinking of seminal critical theorists of vision such as Sartre or
Lacan, he claims, “remains held within a conceptual enclosure, where vision is still
theorized from the standpoint of a subject placed at the center of a world.”25 In con‑
trast to this, the work of Japanese philosophers like Nishida and Nishitani open up a
different notion of the gaze, which “cuts across the field of vision, and invades it from
the outside,” so as to address “the otherness of the rest of the universe, a surround‑
ing field that decenters the subject and the subject’s vision completely.”26 Taking up
such a notion of visuality and gaze offers a conceptual fulcrum for a more systematic
critical reading of museum history in cross-cultural, polycentric, and relational per‑
spective.27
However, it also remains unavoidably tangible in this volume how powerful and
long-lived a tradition of the directed, centered gaze is in museum history – and how
entangled it is with the story of actual image-making: the museum as an object to be
literally regarded, pictured, and visually represented is an omnipresent topos par‑
ticularly in the Western history of art and in media history as well. This concerns
pictures created from within, which shape not only the institution’s own identity but
also images created by “outsiders” that can be understood as statements, comments,
reactions, sometimes even collateral documents. And it is a phenomenon particularly
virulent during the modern age, which not only became the age of the museum but
also brought visual representation in general to a new dimension, both technically
and in terms of the impact of images on intellectual discourse.
The formation of the first modern art museums (or their immediate predecessors)
already went hand in hand with their systematic visual representation: the variegated
24 Ibid., p. 319.
25 Norman Bryson, The Gaze in the Expanded Field, in: Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality, Seattle:
Bay Press, 1988, pp. 87–108, p. 87.
26 Ibid., p. 104.
27 Another possible source for an “alternative gaze” could be feminist interventions on museum vi‑
sion such as: Griselda Pollock, The Missing Future. MoMA and Modern Women, in: Cornelia Butler
(ed.), Modern Women. Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 2010, pp. 38–39; Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum. Time, Space and
the Archive, London: Routledge, 2007; Helen Molesworth, How to Install Art as a Feminist, in: Butler,
2010, pp. 498–510.
Fig. 2: Joseph Arnold, Die Kunstkammer der Regensburger Großeisenhändler- und Gewerkenfamilie
Dimpfel, 1668, 14.9 × 19.1 cm, Ulmer Museum, Inv.Nr: 1952.2611.
genre of the interior view of a princely or amateur art collection arose with the Early
Modern Kunstkammerbild (fig. 2) and reached its climax with the spread and profes‑
sionalization of print culture in the eighteenth century.28 Some of these images can
28 One of the most famous examples is the Roman painter Giovanni Paolo Pannini, who combines
very tangible object-portraits with an idealizing and imaginary concept: David Ryley Marshall, The
Ideal and Theatrical Gallery. Paolo Pannini’s Paintings of Imaginary Galleries, in: Christina Strunck,
Elisabeth Kieven (eds.), Europäische Galeriebauten, Munich: Hirmer, 2010, pp. 401–415. On the value
of interior views of art collections as historical source, see, for instance, Alden Gordon’s plea and pre‑
liminary work for what he calls a “census” of engraved images of collections in the enlightenment era:
Alden R. Gordon, Depictions of Display. Towards a Census of Engraved Images of Interiors, in: Susan
Bracken, Andrea Gáldy, Adriana Turpin (eds.), Collecting and the Princely Apartment, Newcastle upon
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011, pp. 97–114. Similar aspects have already been raised by Elisa‑
beth Oy‑Marra, Der Sammlungsraum als Wissensraum und seine Repräsentation im Bild, in: Katha‑
rina Bahlmann, Elisabeth Oy‑Marra, Cornelia Schneider (eds.), Gewusst wo. Wissen schafft Räume.
Die Verortung des Denkens im Spiegel der Druckgraphik, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2008, pp. 75–90.
More detailed case studies which link the picturing of galleries explicitly to the birth of the modern
museum are to be found in Tristan Weddigen’s considerations of three princely collections in eigh‑
be considered means of documentation and thus are a prime source for art historical
research today, but in many cases they function also as historical instruments of ide‑
alization, declaring a normative, often central perspectival direction for the gaze of
the beholder. They embody the fundamental nexus between the order of space and
things – the very issue that was to become a quintessential bone of contention for
modern poststructuralist critical discourse.
While these early observations are thus an important prehistory for our queries,
our main interest is in the period since the rise of modern image technology starting
with the advent of photography – a medium that was very quickly perceived, used,
and circulated throughout the world, and that had a crucial impact on museum
practice and museum history from the outset.29 As early as 1853, the trustees of the
British Museum came up with the idea of installing a photographic studio directly
in the museum, which had just been moving to its new building in Bloomsbury. The
photographer to be assigned with this task was Roger Fenton. Parallel to his docu‑
mentary expedition to the site of the Crimean War, Fenton thus prepared for a first
photographic campaign in the museum to produce images that were to be sold to the
audience.30 Among the results of his work is a series of stereoscopic images of the new
classicist museum building and its galleries – prominently among them the Assyrian
and Egyptian sculpture galleries (fig. 3). Fenton quite paradigmatically translated the
universalist imperial gaze immanent to the collection into an image medium, seizing
the “creative affinities between sculpture and stereoscopy, vision and touch.”31 The
stereoscopic effect with its suggestion of three-dimensionality highlights even more
clearly how the notion of “indexical realism”32 ascribed to photography corresponds
to the representational claim of the museum.
Not all, but many of the essays in this volume indeed speak explicitly about the use
of photographs or consider them as sources, sometimes both. Parts of this book thus
certainly also can be read as a parallel thread to the history of photography – but its
teenth-century Germany: Tristan Weddigen, The Picture Galleries of Dresden, Düsseldorf and Kassel.
Princely Collections in Eighteenth-Century Germany, in: Carole Paul, The First Modern Museums of
Art. The Birth of an Institution in 18th- and early-19th-Century Europe, Los Angeles: Getty Publications,
2012, pp. 145–166.
29 Elizabeth Edwards (ed.), Photographs, Museums, Collections. Between Art and Information, Lon‑
don: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
30 However, this photo studio only existed for a few years, as in the end it was considered not eco‑
nomically successful enough. Valerie Lloyd, Introduction, in: Lynne Green, Muriel Walker (eds.),
Roger Fenton. Photographer of the 1850s, London: South Bank Board, 1988, pp. 10–13.
31 John Plunkett, “Feeling Seeing”: Touch, Vision, and the Stereoscope, History of Photography 37
(2013), pp. 389–396, p. 389.
32 Ibid., p. 389.
Fig. 3: Roger Fenton, stereoscopic view of the Egyptian Gallery at the British Museum, ca 1857, UK.
prime purpose is to speak about the museum’s position within the visual and scopic
regimes of multiple interrelated modernities up to the present day.33
The acceleration, spread, and popularization of visual media since the mid-nine‑
teenth century brought about a large array of representational modes that not only
enhance but also comment on or question the political message of the museum –
and, to an increasing extent, also its contaminated or interrupted heritage. After all,
museums are resilient sites of longue durée, but at the same time they are anything
but detached from the consequences of local and global history. If we stay with the
medium of photography for a moment to look only at some of the numerous pictures
that the photographer Max Ittenbach34 took on Berlin’s Museum Island between the
1930s and 1950s (figs. 4–6), we can see how in formal terms the universal image of
33 This idea was developed against the background of a number of classical theories that have be‑
come too prominent to be spelled out here in detail again: see Martin Jay, The Scopic Regimes of Mo‑
dernity, in: Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality, Seattle: Bay Press, 1988, pp. 3–23; Timothy Mitchell,
The World as Exhibition, in: Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1989), pp. 217–236; Tony
Bennett, The Exhibitionary Complex, in: New Formation. 4 (1988), pp. 73–102. For the concept of mul‑
tiple modernities, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Modernity at Large. Cul-
tural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
34 Max Ittenbach seems a largely forgotten figure in the history of photography, though a large num‑
ber of his photographs are available in digitized form through the database of bpk images, and a
corpus of his work is archived in the Berlinische Galerie: http://www.berlinischegalerie.de/en/collec‑
tion/photography/the-collection/complexes‑of-work/(accessed 1 March 2016).
Fig. 4: Max Ittenbach, Neues Fig. 5: Max Ittenbach, Fig. 6: Max Ittenbach, students in
Museum: war damage in the restoration work on the front of two lions from Sam’al
Egyptian Courtyard, 1950, Ishtar processional gateway, (Sendschirli) in the Vorderasiati
Berlin. Pergamonmuseum, ca 1950, sches Museum, 1951, Berlin.
Berlin.
the museum becomes a subject of a new, modern gaze – and how this analytical and
at the same time aestheticizing gaze is used several years later to capture the most
dramatic rupture in the material history of these museums when they were severely
damaged during the Second World War. Shortly thereafter, the image of the museum
as a postwar ruin became a topos in its own right, illustrating the final consequences
of the downfall of civilization in Germany. And finally, the same photographer docu‑
mented – and apparently actively staged – the restoration work and the beginning of
a new age of museum work as part of the cultural image-building of East Germany.35
Examples like these picture the dynamics of an institution’s life between the grand
narrative and its processual deconstruction or reappropriation in particular moments
of history.
While this example still belongs more to the realm of the documentary, we
also see many images in which the aesthetic or visual dimension of the museum as
such is utilized or negotiated through an artistic meta-discourse and becomes part
of a semiotic system of references within a larger narrative. Interestingly, in the last
decades it seems like photography inscribed the image of the art museum into the
history of canonical fine arts again – if one likes to think along these categorical
lines of demarcation. Probably the most famous cases are photographers Candida
Höfer and Thomas Struth. Both of them created iconic images of art museums that
35 On this aspect, for the example of the Pergamon Museum and particularly its Islamic Department,
see also: Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Mschatta in Berlin. Grundsteine Islamischer Kunst, Dortmund: Kett
ler, 2014, pp. 175–209.
Fig. 7: Thomas Struth, Audience 07, Florence 2004, Cat. 8781, Chromogenic print,
179.5 × 289.5 cm, EXHIBITED: KHZ, MSP, © Thomas Struth.
became prominent pieces of contemporary art in themselves. In Höfer’s work, reflect‑

ing the intellectual gaze of the “spatial turn” debates emerging since the 1990s,
images of museums appear alongside libraries or theaters. Her contemporary gaze
into deserted, seemingly timeless galleries or storage rooms seems most interested in
the institution’s image as such, typically applying a strict linear perspective almost in
the sense of a formal revenant that coolly points at the historically informed rigor of
the museum’s order of things.36 In Thomas Struth’s oeuvre, the characteristic setting
of canonical and famous museums is equally important – but his emphasis is on the
relation between the setting and its contemporary visitors – to the point where the
visitor’s perception as a message about the artwork takes center stage (fig. 7/pl. I).37
Museums for their part embrace the attention that comes along with this kind of
artistic representation and with the underlying intellectual meta-discourse – a reac‑
tion that creates its own images in turn: we might for instance see the increasing pop‑
36 See Henri Loyrette, Marie-Laure Bernadac, Candida Höfer. Louvre, Munich: Schirmer + Mosel,
2006; on the spatial turn, see, for instance, Julia Burbulla, Eine Kunstgeschichte nach dem Spatial Turn.
Eine Wiederentdeckung mit Kant, Panofsky und Dorner, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015. For some positions
on the museum in light of the spatial turn see for example Kali Tzortzi, Museum Space. Where Archi-
tecture Meets Museology, Farnham: Ashgate, 2015; Friedrich von Bose et al. (eds.), Museum X. Zur
Neuvermessung eines mehrdimensionalen Raumes, Berlin: Panama Verlag, 2012.
37 Thomas Struth, Museum Photographs, Munich: Schirmer + Mosel, 2005; Federico Luisetti, Ritratti
nel Museo. Le Museum Photographs di Thomas Struth, in: Federico Luisetti, Giorgio Maragliano
(eds.), Dopo il Museo, Turin: Trauben, 2006, pp. 163–185.
ularity of visible storage as another repercussion of the museum’s own growing sen‑
sitivity to issues of transparency and visual engagement reaching beyond the mere
classical display of artworks.38
In a similar spirit, in the last years a number of (semi‑)documentaries have revealed
behind-the-scenes insight and increased the awareness of the “biographies,” social
lives, and inner mechanics of museums – ranging from Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours
(2012), a poetic, fictional, and yet veristic portrait of the Kunsthistorisches Museum
in Vienna, to Frederick Wiseman’s feature-film documentary National Gallery: Inside
the Museum (2014), which, quite tellingly, he made after filming movies about other
institutions such as hospitals and universities.39
But also fictional cinema has been particularly prone to work with images of art
museums throughout its history. The examples one could quote are legion, starting
with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 murder mystery, Blackmail, which provided the cover
image for this book. Shot for both silent and sound film theatres, this film’s dramatic
climax is introduced by a chase that begins in front of the British Museum’s monu‑
mental classicist portico, then takes the protagonists through the Egyptian Galleries,
through the reading room, and eventually ends fatally for the villain as he falls to
his death through the glass roof in the center of the museum’s famous rotunda. This
scene, in fact created with the help of a small-scale model of the actual building,40
became a predecessor to a number of museum scenes in different genres of cinema
history: from the famous run through the Grande Galerie in Godard’s Bande à part in
1964 (which presents an image of the Louvre quite opposed to Cocteau’s “morgue”)
to the ferocious shooting set in the Guggenheim Museum in New York (or rather a
high-end replica of it) for the showdown of Tom Tykwer’s political thriller The Inter-
national in 2009.41 Just these three examples place the museum in very different types
of films – yet what they seem to have in common is the disruption of the museum’s
static state, the contestation or even violent transgression of decorum and order, and
38 The (visible) storage in general remains an understudied subject but has begun to raise academic
attention lately, see Michael Fehr et al. (eds.), Das Schaudepot. Zwischen offenem Magazin und Insze-
nierung, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010.
39 Jem Cohen, Museum Hours, Austria, USA 2012: http://www.museumhoursfilm.com/castco‑
hen_E.‌htm (accessed 1 March 2016); on Frederick Wiseman, see http://www.zipporah.com/wiseman
(accessed 1 March 2016).
40 Steven Jacobs, Dial A for Architecture. Fünf Gründe, die Gebäude in Hitchcock-Filmen zu unter‑
suchen, in: Henry Keazor (ed.), Hitchcock und die Künste, Marburg: Schüren-Verlag, 2013, pp. 104–116;
on the Schüfftan-Effect used in this case to create the image of the museum, p. 105. See also Matthew
Cock, Hitchcock’s Blackmail and the British Museum: film, technology and magic, http://blog.brit‑
ishmuseum.org/2011/08/25/hitchcock%E2%80%99s-blackmail-and-the-british-museum-film-tech‑
nology-and-magic/(accessed 2 March 2016).
41 Alain Bielik, Re‑Constructing the Guggenheim for ‘The International’, http://www.awn.com/vfx‑
world/re-constructing-guggenheim-international (accessed 2 March 2016).
Fig. 8: Google Art Project: screenshot from the page of Azerbaijan Carpet Museum. Google Cultural
Institute – Screenshot. Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used
with permission.
the notion of the museum as a kind of maze or trap, a place to be drawn into and to
run from at the same time. Maybe this dialectical relationship to the museum is rooted
in cinema’s own origins between the lines of popular and high art.42
If, after photography, cinema may have been a second paradigmatic “spar‑
ring partner” of the museum in visual culture since the age of late modernity, then
new media possibly is the logical continuation of both. From bottom‑up activities
growing out of rapidly multiplying individualistic audiences such as the “museum
selfie day” promoted through the online social networking service Twitter43 to the
large and centrally orchestrated – though interactive – Google Art Project (fig. 8/
pl. II), the instruments and users of new media are now mining the big data of a
42 Peter Jelavich: “Am I Allowed to Amuse Myself Here?”. The German Bourgeoisie Confronts Early
Film, in: Suzanne L. Marchand, David Lindenfeld (eds.), Germany at the Fin de Siècle. Culture, Politics,
and Ideas, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004, pp. 227–249.
43 Twitter, https://twitter.com/MuseumSelfieDay (accessed 2 March 2016).
post-global museum world – a process producing its own interface with artistic and
curatorial practices. This again changes roles of agency and perception from within
and without institutions, and the digital sphere increases the universal availability
of artworks but maybe also mainstreams the experience of art in new and unfore‑
seen ways.44
In any case, the picture has become increasingly multilayered and contested; in
fact, we are certainly looking at much more than just one picture when looking at
the museum. The rising awareness of socially and culturally diverse agencies plays a
crucial role – if not the decisive role – in the reassessment of the museum world from
an early twenty-first-century perspective. It will and must open new lines of research
in the future that go further beyond established terms and images, yet without losing
sight of the museum’s potential and mission to represent and enhance both historical
awareness and aesthetic continuity.
Taking its cue from this position our collection of essays seeks to contribute to
the ongoing debate about museums, embracing the fulcrum between figurative and
actual visual images of art and archaeology museums as an access point: How has
the image of the art museum been rhetorically framed, used, created, and circulated
since the mid-nineteenth century? How do figures of speech and actual images affect
museums in terms of identity and on an operational level? How is the notion of the
museum applied or related to other strategies of visual representation in the arts?
Which criteria are applied or aimed at in these processes of image-making? We thus
look at a range of representational regimes, understanding them as epistemological
statements that can reveal how the museum works – or sometimes, in the course of
history, how it fails, struggles, and changes – and how it is shaped and perceived
across institutional, national, social, or cultural boundaries.
The papers collected in this volume will be broadly thematically organized into
four sections, but there will be many relationships that cut across the groups and
chapters. All of the essays will look closely and critically at selected examples, pri‑
marily exploring how museums or their objects have been subjects of debate and/or
how they have been represented through different rhetorics and instruments of visual
culture such as photographs, journals, and catalogues, as well as images from art
installations, temporary exhibitions, cultural events, art works, and movies.
44 Two collections of recent positions on the impact of new media on museum work and on art and
curating are Ross Parry (ed.), Museums in a Digital Age, London: Routledge, 2010; and Beryl Graham
(ed.), New Collecting. Exhibiting and Audiences after New Media Art, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.
Museum Icons, Iconic Museums:

(De‑)Constructing Institutional Bodies
The first chapter unites three historically diverse positions, yet there is a recurring
theme concerning the notion of an ideal body of art and its relation to institutional
representation.
Martin Gaier’s essay departs from the very classical premise of the temple of
masterpieces only to unfold this notion’s negotiation through the philosophy of art
particularly in Germany and France – a debate that was triggered not least by the
musealization campaigns of the Napoleonic age and that took its course further into
the nineteenth century. Gaier shows how this discourse questioned the museum’s
role in defining a viable relation between art, culture, and life, and how it ultimately
paved the way for “taming the body of art”45 by rearranging artworks in a decontextu‑
alized aesthetics within the framework of the museum, responding to classical values
of civilization. Yet, at the same time it also incited institutional critique that could
even be read as a prehistory to the museum reform movements of the 1890s.
Chronologically, Lynn Catterson’s study takes off around the same period in
which Gaier’s considerations end. At first glance, she looks at canon building from
a radically different angle. Mining the archives of the Florentine art dealer Stefano
Bardini, she critically describes his crucial role for the transatlantic “branding” of
the canon of Italian Renaissance art and its display between the art market and the
museum from the 1860s on. Particularly focusing on the importance of photography,
reproduction, and publication strategies for the creation of a veritably iconic object
body, this contribution shows how the displacement and circulation of artifacts and
the strategic use of modern media together feed into the consolidation of a cardi‑
nal theme within the grand narrative of Western museums and highbrow consumer
culture.
Kathryn M. Floyd adapts the body metaphor as an analytical tool for her inves‑
tigation into the history of the documenta exhibitions that have evolved around the
ruin of the former Museum Fridericianum in Kassel since 1955. Taking as historical
benchmarks the fragmentation of the Museum Fridericianum – Germany’s first pur‑
pose-built museum – during the eighteenth-century, during World War II, and the
latest, thirteenth edition of the documenta, she describes the development of a con‑
temporary biennial exhibition format against the background of the Fridericianum’s
physical and intellectual heritage. Floyd reads this heritage as a “reproducible, trans‑
portable image” that lies at the very heart of documenta history. This essay thus crit‑
45 Quotes in this synopsis are, unless stated otherwise, taken from the respective contributions in
this book and thus not referenced in detail.
ically links one of the most prominent institutions of the West German postwar art
scene back to the grand narrative of museums and its enlightenment origin, but also
to the literal disruption of this narrative as a result of National Socialism.
Word and Image, Institution and Audience

The essays in the second chapter look at systematic image-politics in the age of glo‑
balization and democratization that play out their impact between institutional inter‑
ests, specialized audiences, or increasingly diversifying and multiplying communi‑
ties of art beholders.
Andrea Meyer investigates the “interplay of texts and images” in the professional
journal Museumskunde, which was published in Germany – though with a transna‑
tional and even global scope – between 1905 and 1924 and in a new edition between
1929 and 1939. This publication, targeting mostly an audience of museum profession‑
als, informed and mirrored a significant period of professionalization and interna‑
tionalization of museum work and museology. At the same time, this was of course
a period that saw significant tensions and shifts in German political history, particu‑
larly considering its relation to cultural pluralism and world politics. Considering the
sophisticated image-politics of Museumskunde, which may even have established the
genre of the installation shot, Meyer looks particularly at the use of illustrations in
the journal in order to ask how they shape the image of European and non-European
museums. Through this relational approach, she detects an “underlying value system
infused by imperialism or colonialism” inherent to the publication series from the
outset. Throughout the first run of the journal, this went hand in hand with a muse‑
ology debate that even seems to resonate with some of the aesthetic discourses of
the preceding century, now complicated by a large range of transcultural perception
problems that were often dealt with from a Eurocentric perspective. In the second run,
soon coinciding with the National Socialist rise to power, the journal increasingly
turned into an even more restricted medium.
Closely related to this is Melania Savino’s essay, which investigates the historical
development of notions of “globalism,” as for instance claimed by current definitions
for museum work provided by the International Council of Museums (ICOM). Again
harking back to the crucial period of the early twentieth century, she applies a similar
relational approach, comparing images of Western and non-Western museums within
one particular medium. The subject of her study is the journal Mouseion, which ran
between 1927 and 1946. This periodical was founded as the bulletin of the “Office
International des Musées,” the first international organization that studied museums
globally. This contribution provides insight into an important moment in the transna‑
tional formation of meta-institutions that were to have increasing impact on museum
history and on the shaping of cultural heritage concepts worldwide. Taking her cue
from an analysis of the overtly classicist title of the journal, Savino looks into the
representation of museums particularly in South America and Palestine to reveal
how an increasingly “global” claim continued to “privilege European vision” and also
cemented a hegemonic salvage paradigm.
Alison Boyd’s essay also addresses a question of image-politics, but it takes us
to the realm of private collecting, particularly the case of the American millionaire
and philanthropist Albert Barnes. Established from the 1920s on, his collection was
not primarily a museum in the classical sense, but rather a programmatic part of an
educational foundation addressing all strata of society – in Barnes’s own words a
“democratic” institution, which Boyd however identifies as a classical contact zone
of entangled narratives and power relations. The essay focuses on the use (or non-
use) of photographic reproductions of the collection’s objects – an interesting case in
point, as Barnes and the heads of the foundation that were to follow him throughout
the twentieth century were generally against reproduction, particularly color repro‑
duction, as they deemed it an insufficient and deceptive medium for the representa‑
tion of artworks. Boyd analyzes this position in relation to fundamental discourses on
photography and reproduction ranging from Walter Benjamin to Susan Sontag. Yet,
her main interest is the one and decisive exception to this rule: only African sculp‑
ture was explicitly designated by Barnes to circulate among a larger public by means
of photographic reproduction. This particular angle sheds significant light on how
“hierarchies of power that were eschewed in the galleries emerged differently in the
realm of photographic reproduction.”
Julia Kleinbeck looks at how the interrelation or even tension between institution
and visitor is spelled out through images in the modern art museum. Though Klein‑
beck identifies this as a question originating as early as with the democratization pro‑
cesses of the early twentieth century, her interest lies in its contemporary dimension.
Answers to this question might be found in a kind of visual data mining, considering
the numerous images of visitors and art beholders that are produced and circulated
today not only by museums and art institutions, but in increasing numbers also by
audiences themselves, who share them through social media platforms – a process that
is beyond institutional control and that creates new interrelations between artworks
and recipients as well as new, globally accessible contexts for art reception. Kleinbeck
goes one step further as she analyzes two artistic positions by Michelangelo Pistoletto
and Olafur Eliasson that work deliberately with the phenomenon of the omnipresent
visitor image – to a certain extent they even instrumentalize the interactive visitor –
for two site specific installations that were on view at the Louvre and at Tate Modern,
and which counted on the visitor’s own engagement in image production. Participa‑
tory artworks like these can be understood as signs of a “post-medial era”, which, as
Kleinbeck argues, provides new platforms and directions of communication and goes
far beyond established, more static strategies of picturing the beholder. Some of the
latter still provide standard templates for institutional image-making by art museums
today. The new interactive practices make the typical “installation shot” as an alleged
“icon of the twentieth century” obsolete. As Kleinbeck seeks to show, the resulting
new generation of visitor images conforms in its own right with Kantian notions of
communication as a condition of civilization. Altogether, it thus may bear witness to
a reinvention of an art of civilization through the means and media of the twenty-first
century.
Politics and Geographies of the “Museal Complex”

In this chapter, we turn away from the practices or politics of literal image-making
to the realm of politically entangled institution building itself, and the ensuing gaze
towards museums or matters of artistic canon within national self-images. These
studies, looking at very different parts of the world between the mid-nineteenth
century and today, are in many aspects revealingly complimentary to the mechanisms
of power and representation detected throughout the previous chapter: they spell out
relations between alleged centers and peripheries, between “civilization” and “the
primitive,” or they detect and question privileges of representation or interpretation
of art and territory alike.
Irina Koshoridze’s essay draws a picture of the Georgian National Gallery as a
museum’s journey from an instrument of colonial politics to national self-affirmation.
Its first nucleus lies in the foundation of the Caucasian Museum in Tbilisi, established
as a kind of universal collection related to the colonizing mission of Russian politics
in the Caucasus region after 1852. The 1870s saw the first initiatives to establish specif‑
ically Georgian museum politics in reaction to this, but it was not until the first short-
lived period of Georgian Republic independence after 1918 that new, more nationally
informed museum narratives became functional. As part of an entire wave of founda‑
tions of national cultural institutions, the Georgian National Gallery was founded in
1920. As this museum was founded during a period when photography as a documen‑
tary medium became more and more established, Koshoridze can build upon a gen‑
erous corpus of contemporary photographs that allow a reconstruction of the instal‑
lation of its galleries as conceived in 1920. The canon of paintings presented there
included European and Russian works as well as Georgian and also Qajar painting,
thus reflecting the position of local artistic practice at a crucial geo-cultural intersec‑
tion – a progressive position the museum and its director would maintain throughout
a number of political and practical changes in the years to come. After the Bolshevik
occupation drove the Georgian government into exile in 1921, the museum’s history
became a story of political resilience. It maintained its identity-shaping mission even
into the Great Purge of 1936/37. The museum’s legacy was only rediscovered in the late
1990s, and it now contributes to the image of the Georgian National Museum.
Qanita Lilla takes us to the example of a national gallery as well, its perception
and its processes of canon building: her essay approaches the South African National
Gallery in Cape Town and its prehistory and formation across shifting political tides
between 1895 and 1947. Looking behind the image of an institution which presents
itself with a coherent and stable identity today, Lilla detects “various contingent
factors [that] intersected to construct this image” in historical perspective. These
factors derive from the particular constellation of a museum that was affected by two
subsequent, yet very different colonial interventions. The first concept of the museum
is to be understood in the context of British colonialism, harking back to grand narra‑
tives of civilizational history, including the importation of a collection of plaster casts
of Greek and Roman antiquities – this in itself a three-dimensional image of an ideal
museum canon, and in this particular context an idealizing pedagogical instrument.
Later on, Afrikaner nationalism, as a movement growing out of Calvinist Dutch settle‑
ments originally strongly opposed to the British rule, gained ground. And, again from
a completely different angle, dissident voices from the South African art scene began
to work towards less conservative and classical concepts of art. At the same time,
South African indigenous artworks were kept at the natural history museum and clas‑
sified as ethnographic specimens, thus reflecting common Western taxonomies and
hierarchies. In the South African context, this contributed directly to the distinction
between colonizer and colonized – this apparently remained the great divide uncon‑
tested through all changes in political and cultural history. The underlying dichotomy
between the “civilized” and the “primitive” resonated even in debates about modern
art that flared up during the late 1940s, including conceptual and terminological
parallels to the Entartete Kunst debate that had devastated modernism in Germany
during the National Socialist years.
British colonial rule – and its contestation – is also the point of departure for
Deepti Mulgund: based on original fieldwork, she compares two museum foundations
growing out of local initiatives in India, namely the Bharat Kala Bhavan of Banaras,
which was founded in 1920 by Rai Krishnadas, and the Shri Bhavani Chitrasangraha‑
laya in the princely state of Aundh, established in 1938 by its ruler Balasaheb Pant Pra‑
tinidhi. Both of these museums were quite explicitly conceived as fine art museums as
opposed to more universalist collection types – a constellation that sparks the central
question of this essay: “How is the art museum envisioned and deployed by colo‑
nial subjects, and how does it relate to their claims for self-rule?” She shows how for
both museum founders an intellectual association with Gandhi as well as with other
eminent figures of modern Indian thinking such as Ananda K. Coomaraswamy con‑
tributed to a quest for self-affirmation and individual action aiming towards national
independence and based on what could be called an affirmative aesthetics of differ‑
ence:46 “An enduring legacy of this period […] was its insistence on the difference
46 For this concept as a driving force of multiple modernities, see Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Äs-
thetik der Differenz. Postkoloniale Perspektiven vom 16. bis 21. Jahrhundert, 15 Fallstudien, Marburg:
Jonas, 2010.
from the western canon of art, thus turning difference into an aspiration of value.”
However, Rai Krishnadas and Balasheb Pant Pratinidhi chose rather different ways
to visualize this through their collections. We thus see two very different approaches
in dialogue with the Western canon and its civilizational claims – yet both provide
telling examples for museum collections anticipating independence against the back‑
ground of a colonial setting.
Iro Katsaridou and Anastasia Kontogiorgi show us yet another variety of the inter‑
play between museum, canon, and nation-state, this time in a European-Mediterra‑
nean setting. Taking its cue from Benedict Anderson’s notion of the “imagined com‑
munity,” their essay seeks to critically deconstruct the appropriation of the “iconic
painter” Domenicos Theotocopoulos/El Greco for a national Greek identity – as a test
case, the authors look particularly at the image-building politics of three exhibitions
held at the National Gallery in Athens since the early 1990s. These exhibitions took
place in cooperation with major art institutions such as the National Gallery in Wash‑
ington, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in Madrid,
and thus they were embedded into transnational cultural politics on a large scale. In
fact, the figure of El Greco, a kind of Mediterranean migrant figure of the early modern
period, escaping categorical national and, considering his unique style, also stylistic
classification, may be particularly suited as a subject of such endeavors. Despite this,
as the authors argue with a quite acute skepticism against the political instrumental‑
ization of art, the National Gallery in Athens confirmed (and possibly overstated) a
narrative of El Greco as a “quintessential Greek painter.”47 It thus performed a polit‑
ical act of “repatriation” whose arguments actually reach back into the nineteenth
century when Hellenism was promoted for identity building within the Greek nation’s
quest for independence from the Ottoman Empire – a process deeply entangled with
the agenda of Western nations at the time. As far as the interpretation of El Greco’s
work is concerned, this national viewpoint included an emphasis on the painter’s
Byzantism, or his origin from the island of Crete, whose particular landscape could
be used as an explanation for his specific style. In this vein, the painter’s identity
became literally rooted on Greek grounds, while his popularity within a global art
canon allowed for contemporary Greek cultural politics and institutions to build a
bridge to the aesthetic and ethical values of the larger Western world.
Naomi Stead and her co‑authors take us to a very recent case of a modern art insti‑
tution’s function for geo-rhetoric image building. The subject of their essay is not the
collection, but the architectural shell of the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) located in
Brisbane, the capital of the Australian state of Queensland. This museum was com‑
pleted in 2006 with the deliberate claim of being a cultural “flagship.” The genesis and
operation of this institution as an instrument of “place branding” and “social engi‑
47 Quote from a New York Times article by Michael Kimmelman, adapted by the authors for their
essay.
neering” is described as an entanglement between aesthetic, ethical, and ultimately

political-economic questions. On the surface, this seems a very contemporary issue:
this museum seeks to reshape the present and future image of Queensland, as this
part of Australia has until recently largely been understood as a peripheral subtropical
region “not sufficiently intellectual, too conservative, too philistine.” The construction
of the GoMA as an “iconic museum” intends to contribute to a presentable and progres‑
sive cultural profile and thus could be understood as an instrument of local self-affir‑
mation. The building’s architecture is designed as an open space, in fact a forum in
correspondence with the surrounding urban structure and ecosystem – a civilizing
place between nature and culture. Even more so, it is largely marketed and perceived as
a climate-responsive architecture, deriving from principles and materials of vernacular
local architecture. Yet, as the authors argue, this progressive and eco-oriented mission
has its problematic flipside both from historical and contemporary perspectives: it
overstates and reappropriates a notion of traditional climate-responsive Queensland
architecture – a narrative whose origin can be traced back to colonial Victorian claims
about the qualities of an architecture that would allow for the maintenance of cultural
and civilizational standards against the demanding conditions of the North Australian
climate. It thus resonates with a debate deeply entrenched in racist notions of civili‑
zational superiority over indigenous practices. Moreover, as Stead and her co‑authors
argue further, this “subtropical” profile quite ostensibly orients the museum towards
Asia – a move that provides a cultural backdrop for global economic aspirations. The
debate around GoMA altogether offers a characteristic case study for the very contem‑
porary complexity of the museum as an institution between the local and the global.
Intermedialities, Shifting Images

Most of the examples we have seen particularly in the last chapter could be described
as empirical and/or institutional practices of art representation, yet always lined with
or informed by political image-making. In this final chapter we seek to apply the aes‑
thetic eloquence of images to larger discourses through strategies of intermedial ref‑
erence. Chronologically, the case studies of this chapter are all roughly placed in the
period since the second half of the twentieth century, which has not only seen major
shifts and accelerations in visual techniques but also the contestation of the insti‑
tution of the museum in the most fundamental way. Looking at processes of visual
translation between fine arts, photography, cinema, literature, and the virtual sphere,
the following essays exemplify modern and contemporary images of art representa‑
tion between a sense of place and free floating pictorial data or between the increas‑
ingly indistinguishable realms of “high” culture and the means and media of its com‑
munication and popularization. Altogether, they finally confront us with the essential
question of what actually constitutes a museum in and after the twentieth century.
Norbert Schmitz takes the museum in its classical sense as a “temple of the
muses” and puts it into relation with the medium of film. This constellation provides
a blueprint for questioning the very idea of the museum as a medium – a method‑
ologically challenging task, which, as Schmitz argues, requires contrasting “two
dispositifs, each describing the conventions of society and the attitudes of expecta‑
tion that occur in the communicative process in both media.” These dispositifs are
to no small extent characterized by notions of social space and decorum – this ques‑
tion thus again resonates with observations about civilizing rituals in the museum.
Based on this premise, Schmitz is interested in how particularly classical entertain‑
ment cinema of the mid-twentieth century negotiates or responds to the image of the
museum between a socially codified and a highly symbolic space. His prime example
is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo. A key scene of this film sets a wordless encoun‑
ter between the male and female protagonists at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Fran‑
cisco’s Marina District, a museum built in the early twentieth century in a monumen‑
tally imposing neo-classicist style. The film shows the museum – both outside and
interior – as an auratic and sinister place, where the two protagonists are only con‑
nected through a carefully directed, unilateral gaze that expresses his passive desire.
In this aestheticized setting, the ‘object’ on display seems rather the woman than the
surrounding paintings – it thus revealingly hints at the idealizing, potentially alien‑
ating or even violent power of the museum as a distinct and difference-producing
social space. The film clearly sets up a contrasting confrontation between everyday
life and the realm of the museum, which thus becomes a space of alterity, maybe
almost a non-lieu, but at the same time a clear-cut reference frame whose symbolism
is even more evident when presented through modern mass media. In asking what
the relevance of such a cinema studies observation might be for museology, Schmitz
comes to the conclusion that “it is exactly the difference between high and popular
art which remains not only irreversible, but also sensible and fruitful.” Harking back
among others to Norbert Elias’s theories of civilization and the functions of habitus,
Schmitz provocatively suggests that the notion of the “traditional museum as ideal‑
istic aesthetics turned to stone” remains not only unavoidable. Maybe it is even more
productive as a dispositif than the increasing formal illegibility of seemingly self-crit‑
ical postmodern and contemporary museal image-making – which after all may only
be another stage of elitist habitus formation.
Walter Grasskamp speaks about some largely unknown aspects in the prehistory
of a truly iconic position of modern art perception – one that is distinctly independent
from the museum in its spatial sense, yet takes it explicitly as a conceptual reference
system: The Musée Imaginaire by André Malraux. The essay looks at a particular part
of the complex corpus of publications referred to under this title, namely a volume
of Malraux’s trilogy Le Musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale, published in Paris
in the early 1950s. Compared to the larger corpus of Malraux’s work, this book most
consequently privileges the visual over the textual, combining a short text with five
hundred image plates. This centrality of the visual is even more interesting if regarded
against the background of Malraux’s profile as an art theorist: Grasskamp shows us

how, in dialogue with Paul Valéry and Walter Benjamin, it was Malraux who took the
discourse on images and reproducibility beyond the topos of the loss of aura, as for
him “photography might have taken the art work’s aura, but in return it received a
medial ubiquity and therefore a universal importance never known before.” As such, a
comparative use of photography corresponds to but also supersedes the canon-build‑
ing function of older media such as plaster casts. However, a central revelation of this
essay is the crucial impact of two other, largely forgotten figures for the development
of Malraux’s ideas. One of them is the German curator Alfred Salmony, with whom
Malraux had been in touch as early as 1923, when Salmony explained the concept
of a “comparative exhibition of art” to him by combining photographs of artworks,
making him aware of “the possibilities photography provided for a strictly visual dis‑
course on art.” Furthermore, a direct source for photographs used by Malraux can be
identified in André Vigneau’s progressive Encyclopédie Photographique de l’Art, with
its first volume published in Paris in 1935. Grasskamp’s close reading of the Musée
imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale reveals how Malraux systematically adapted, but
also altered a sizeable number of Vigneau’s images and also his typographic concepts
for his own project, which – seizing the attractive visual metaphor of the “museum”
rather than the papery notion of the “encyclopedia” – proved to be more successful
and catchy in the long run.
With Hubertus Kohle’s contribution we fast-forward to the age of the digital
image. Interestingly, even this very contemporary issue takes its vantage point from
the notion of the museum as a temple detached from the background noise of everyday
life, which at first sight may be considered fundamentally opposed to the steady flow
of digital information and communication. However, Kohle argues that holding onto
this idealistic image of the museum today may run the risk of inducing institutional
fatigue, and we should consider the possibilities of new media rather as a remedy
than a threat, as they can be seized productively without automatically abolishing the
museum’s fundamental function as a civilizational counterweight. The focus of his
essay is on the Internet presence of museums and its impact on visitors. Two exam‑
ples from the – in this respect often avant-gardist – Anglosphere, the Cooper Hewitt
Museum and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, illustrate how the museum as such
is, so to speak, already a database, and the systematic mining of this data by means of
standardized digitalization offers multiple possibilities for the combination of objects
and information. A prime example in Germany is the Städel Museum in Frankfurt,
which embraces possibilities of digital media, yet without moving away from the tra‑
ditional educative purpose of the museum. Such initiatives bring practical benefits for
internal processes in the museum, but they also have crucial impact on the outreach
of the institution. Experiments with interactive practices such as social tagging or
virtual ‘cloud curating’ reveal possibilities for creating individualized virtual ‘musées
imaginaires’, based on but independent from the material and spatial restrictions of
actual collections, created by or in dialogue with museum audiences. If applied on
a more consequent, large scale in the future, these kinds of practices subsequently
will change the roles of museum professionals and visitors and/or users. Ultimately,
the use of new media also carries museum practice and art perception through and
beyond the so‑called iconic turn as it contributes to an evolving relation to the visual
and its communicative potential.
The last essay by Zehra Tonbul and Koen Van Synghel actually takes us a bit
beyond the realm of the art museum in its strict sense: to Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of
Innocence. This title was chosen by the Turkish novelist both for one of his novels,
published in 2008, and for an actual house museum in Istanbul. This museum corre‑
sponds on the one hand to the house of one of the novel’s fictional characters, while
the collection – largely a carefully choreographed arrangement of everyday objects
and commodities – relates to the collector personality of another protagonist, who
is also Pamuk’s alter ego. The museum in turn is accompanied by another publica‑
tion in the form of a catalogue. The Museum of Innocence shows how the concept of
the museum can serve as a representational umbrella that unites practices of literary
narrative building, collecting, and material bricolage for an intellectual poetics. Alto‑
gether, it represents an intertextual fabric or – in a Benjaminian sense – a “textum” of
interwoven references where word, object, and image are closely entangled. Tonbul
and Van Synghel focus on the spatial order of the house museum. Its presentation
mode merges a domestic interior space with display cabinets in a way that alludes
to the presentation mode of the cabinet of curiosities. This contemporary resonance
of the Wunderkammer links to the early modern origin of museum history. Yet, at the
same time the arrangement of objects and ideas contests any teleological course of
linear time and undermines taxonomic categories. Instead, “the museum develops
as an extension of Pamuk’s subjectivity.” It thus becomes, as the authors of this essay
argue, an “oneiric house” in the constructivist sense of Gaston Bachelard, tailored as
a container for the “pride” and – on a Nietzschean note – the “innocence of becom‑
ing” of the individual. It is just this individualist standpoint that allows Pamuk to
develop a universalist claim for a world society after the age of colonial and geopo‑
litical inequality, as a manifesto placed at the end of the catalogue shows: “The aim
of present and future museums must not be to represent the state, but to recreate the
world of single human beings – the same human beings who have laboured under
ruthless oppressions for hundreds of years.”48 Privileging expression and recreation
over static representation, Pamuk thus offers a piece of museum critique – and at the
same time apparently trusts in the museum’s potential for renewal by placing it at the
very core of his almost utopic poetics for an age of the individual.
48 Orhan Pamuk as quoted by Tonbul and Van Synghel: Orhan Pamuk, The Innocence of Objects,
trans. Ekin Oklap, New York: Abrams, 2012, p. 141.
At this point, we have covered much ground between images of the “temple” and the
“oneiric house”, between discursive cornerstones associated with museums ranging
from “civilization” to “innocence.” While this collection of essays is of course far from
offering a complete picture or linear history on its own part, all of these case studies
together open a spectrum of methodological approaches to deal with the image of
the art museum in its literal and figurative dimension. Our aim to include a variety
of voices from different academic and institutional backgrounds helped to raise
transnational and cross-cultural questions – both within many of the essays as well
as through their combination. This book thus will contribute to a historiography of
the art museum’s relation to its own image-making, representation, and perception,
which takes us a decisive step further through and beyond postcolonial discourses:
with a critical eye on the past, but at the same time looking towards the further devel‑
opment of images of the art museum beyond the “global turn.”
Museum Icons, Iconic Museums: (De-)Constructing
the Body of Art
Martin Gaier
The Art of Civilization: Museum Enemies
in the Nineteenth Century
Obviously, by visiting an art museum and contemplating a heap of amazing altar
pieces, none of us will deplore the painful odyssey of these paintings entering the
museum, the loss of their wings or at least their eternal standstill, their alienation
from any liturgical sense, or even the dispersion of single panels all over the art-lov‑
ing world. Museums are the temples where we hold our breath.1
If we had in mind all these things while passing a row of such splendid pieces of
art, or if we were exposed to a nearly original situation which puts the beholder into
an unfavorable position of dim light and poor visibility, wouldn’t we feel immediately
an ebbing of pleasure?
The art historian Carol Duncan called what happens inside public art museums
“civilizing rituals.”2 Of course, she did not mean the civilization of the artworks
standing here at the same level, in uniform and neutral good lighting, reduced in
their statement to ‘art’. She meant the people who would have undergone a civilizing
process in the art museum. But if we look at the barbaric act by which the museums in
the nineteenth century got their things, we will not see these spaces as the best places
for a strategy of civilization.3
However, the fact that few voices criticizing the genesis of museums remained
in the twentieth century is a sufficient demonstration of their successful ‘civilizing
strategy’: they offered to the works, wherever they came from, a new and sheltered
home. Only sensitive natures like Paul Valéry perceived the amassment of artworks as
a torture to their eyes.4 Maurice Blanchot, in his essay Le mal du musée of 1957, talked
1 Cf. Peter Bürger, Säle, bei deren Betreten man den Atem anhält, in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung (June 29,
2012), p. 59. The author referred to a decision of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz to move the Old
Master paintings from the Berlin Gemäldegalerie. Only after the protest of more than 20,000 petition‑
ers on August 21, 2013 did the Stiftung announce that it had abandoned its plans.
2 Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals. Inside Public Art Museums, London: Routledge, 1995.
3 Cf. Martin Warnke, Geburt des Museums aus dem Bildersturm – Distanz und Nähe historischer
Kunst, in: Bazon Brock, Christian Bauer (eds.), Musealisierung als Zivilisationsstrategie. Arbeitsheft
zum Symposium am 24. 11. 2009 in der Temporären Kunsthalle auf dem Schlossplatz in Berlin, Wei‑
mar: VDG, 2009, pp. 86–89.
4 Paul Valéry, The Problem of Museums [1923], in: Jackson Mathews (ed.), The Collected Works of Paul
Valéry, vol. 12: Degas, Monet, Morisot, New York: Pantheon Books, 1960, pp. 202–207.
32 Martin Gaier
about his shocking psychophysical reactions – a sickness and dizziness face‑to-face

with a large number of master works. And he concluded: “Surely there is something
insuperably barbarous in the custom of museums. How did things come to this?”5
Between “aesthetic churches” and “castles of art” –

Karl Hillebrand
That question – How did things come to this? – was confronted already by Karl Hille
brand, a German writer of cosmopolitan essays and correspondent to several inter‑
national newspapers, who settled in Florence in the 1870s. His pamphlet Zwölf Briefe
eines ästhetischen Ketzer’s (Twelve letters of an aesthetic heretic), published anony‑
mously in 1874, was well received by all those conservatives who longed for a social
and artistic renewal.6 What was ‘heretical’ in his twelve fictive letters was, firstly, his
damnation of the aestheticism of art and, secondly, of the scientific revolution in the
field of the arts over the last hundred years. He added to this, mainly, his condemna‑
tion of “the theories of Winckelmann and his followers, the French Revolution and its
aftermath, museomania and the democratization of art.”7 In the end, this democra‑
tization was nothing other than what Blanchot called the “insuperably barbarous in
the custom of museums.”
The term heretic, however, had a specific meaning in the context of aesthetics: In
1797, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck had published a very influential
book, Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Effusions from the Heart
of an Art-Loving Monk). They compared “the enjoyment of the nobler artworks to prayer,”
suggesting that reception of art should be isolated from external, profane factors:
Works of Art fit into the common stream of life as little as the thought of god. […] Picture galle‑
ries […] should be temples where we admire, in calm and silent humility and heartfelt, exalting
solitude, the great artist […] and where we remain in long, uninterrupted contemplation of their
works, warming ourselves in the sun of the most enchanting thoughts and emotions.8
5 Maurice Blanchot, Museum Sickness, in: Id., Friendship, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stan‑
ford: Stanford University Press, 1997, pp. 41–49, p. 45 (Maurice Blanchot, Le mal du musée, in: Nou-
velle Revue Francaise 5.52 (1957), pp. 687–696, p. 692). All translations, if not otherwise indicated, are
my own.
6 [Karl Hillebrand,] Zwölf Briefe eines ästhetischen Ketzer’s, Berlin: Robert Oppenheim, 1874 (repr. in:
Id., Völker und Menschen, Strassburg: Trübner, 1914, pp. 323–397); Cf. Martin Gaier, Heinrich Ludwig
und die ‘ästhetischen Ketzer’. Kulturpolitik, Kulturkritik und Wissenschaftsverständnis bei den Deutsch-
Römern, Cologne: Böhlau, 2013, pp. 165–240.
7 Hillebrand 1874 (as in note 6), p. 8.
8 Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Ludwig Tieck, Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Kloster-
bruders [1797], ed. by Martin Bollacher, Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005, p. 67; Cf. Bernd Auerochs, Die Ent-
The Art of Civilization 33
It was against this romantic vision of an ‘aesthetic church’ with the artist as divine
priest that the ‘aesthetic heretics’ antagonized. They shared the opinion that a work
of art remained alive only in the ‘common stream of life’, and that images remained
silent and lonely in an atmosphere of humility and solitude.
The other function of the art museum, however, as the new educational institu‑
tion, also raised Hillebrand’s objections. The Humboldtian concept of a guided edu‑
cation in taste had been marginalized by the burgeoning field of art history. Now it
was about the acquisition of a teleological evolution of art. In an essay in 1865, the art
historian Herman Grimm, for instance, described elbowing his way through a large
crowd in the halls of the Berlin Old and New Museum: “Both buildings together, with
the originals here and the copies over there, virtually form a castle of art (eine Kunst
burg). If you are able to conquer it spiritually you will receive immense treasures.”9
What was now important was to mark a distinction in the face of the crowd of Bil-
dungsbürger and he could reveal it on the location with his expert’s eye – the knowl‑
edge that he already had conquered his ‘castle of art’: “In an hour the expert will slide
with his eyes over the development of the entire visual arts.”10
Hillebrand had such a bad experience with these gliding eyes at the Vienna
World Exhibition in 1873 that he made them the reason for his booklet. Some artists
called his attention to the problem, especially the young sculptor Adolf Hildebrand
whose works were displayed not at the exhibition hall but far away from the hustle,
in the Austrian Museum for Arts and Crafts. Hillebrand, who demonized the cele‑
brated Tribuna of the Uffizi as the origin of this decadence, distinguished the most
important issue in the contexts of creation and destination of an artwork. He wrote
that the “barbaric act” of the so‑called “temples of art” was revealed fully in the
new context in which the images were brought here, either in a jumble of genres
or – worse – according to art-historical methodology: “The gallery is like a chrono‑
logical table, a map, a systematic hand book – you almost would prefer the alphabet‑
ical order of a dictionary.”11
What Hillebrand looked for in a gallery, that is “atmosphere”12 (Stimmung), he
couldn’t find anywhere:
stehung der Kunstreligion, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006; Annette Gilbert, ‘Die ästhe‑
tische Kirche’. Zur Entstehung des Museums am Schnittpunkt von Kunstautonomie und ‑religion, in:
Athenäum. Jahrbuch der Friedrich Schlegel-Gesellschaft 19 (2009), pp. 45–85.
9 Herman Grimm, Peter von Cornelius, in: Id., Neue Essays über Kunst und Literatur, Berlin: Dümmler,
1865, pp. 70–104, p. 70.
10 Ibid.
11 Hillebrand 1874 (as in note 6), pp. 29–30.
12 Ibid., p. 30.
34 Martin Gaier
Hang a picture of second or third rate, which we pass in the museum with indifferent and satura‑
ted eyes, in an isolated niche or in a study ‑ we will enjoy it better than a Rafael, surrounded by
hundreds of satellites, each vying for our attention, and what’s more, each of which has a right
to vie for our attention.13
Hillebrand sharpened his skepticism of museums in dealing with like-minded

members of his ‘sect’, among them artists who, like him, lived in Italian exile, for
example Heinrich Ludwig, Hans von Marées, or Adolf Hildebrand but also private
scholars like Theodor Heyse, Conrad Fiedler, or Adolph Bayersdorfer.
Some of them pursued nothing less than an idealistic art and social reform fol‑
lowing Schiller and Humboldt. According to Ludwig, the order of the day was not the
best enjoyment of a work of art through its optimal presentation but “that the visual
arts and their care would have a high impact on the health of the mind and on the
civilization of man.”14 He was convinced that the idea of the original function of an
artwork declined as a result of the “art-philological disease” called by him “scientific
museomania” (wissenschaftliche Museomanie). Only works displayed in public space
could really have a civilizing impact.15 Hillebrand also wrote in one of his ‘heretical
letters’ against the removal of artworks from the flow of daily life:
But if you want to do something for the ‘people’: put your artworks out into public space, such as
Giovanni Bologna’s Sabine Woman or Michelangelo’s David – today they carry him away as well,
to bury him under the pretext that he had become too delicate! It may be that the daily glance
of the passing popolano will linger on the beautiful shapes, sucking their contours and making
them his own, without having noticed it really. But don’t put them in art prisons that look more
similar to railway stations than to palaces and that the ‘people’ never will enjoy.16
The extent of the effect of these discussions on the German museum reform of the
1890’s cannot be discussed here. But Wilhelm Bode’s well-studied concept of style
and period rooms, with which he sought a painterly, recontextualizing arrangement
of art, was a direct result of these attacks on Museomania and the so‑called democ‑
ratization of art.17
13 Ibid., p. 31.
14 Heinrich Ludwig, Über Erziehung zur Kunstübung und zum Kunstgenuss [1874], (Studien zur
deutschen Kunstgeschichte, vol. 78), Strasbourg: Heitz, 1907, p. 49.
15 Ibid., p. 69.
16 Hillebrand 1874 (as in note 6), p. 33.
17 For further discussion see Gaier 2013 (as in note 6), pp. 223–231. On the reform: Alexis Joachimides,
Die Museumsreformbewegung in Deutschland und die Entstehung des modernen Museums, 1880–1940,
Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 2001.
Roots of Museum Enmity – Quatremère de Quincy

In the expanding history of museums, only a few studies are concerned with con‑
temporary voices that criticize the museum.18 Their opinions are too strange to our
thought: It is not the museum where the artwork accomplishes its autonomy and
freedom; here the artwork loses its autonomy by being placed with other works that
are largely irrelevant to it. Instead of an eternal and timeless life of the work of art as
we see it today, the museum heretics wanted to look at the artwork as a part of their
own lives. To our knowledge an artifact in the museum represents – pars pro toto – the
significance of a whole culture. In the opinion of the ‘aesthetic heretics’ separating it
from the body of culture the artwork is losing his power and significance.
There is strong evidence that Hillebrand’s letters are the direct offshoot of Antoine
Quatremère de Quincy’s Letters to Miranda.19 Quatremère was one of the first who
accused the widespread looting of art during the French Revolution and the following
assemblage of thousands of objects in an universal museum of being a cultural disas‑
ter, and he could be called the founder of museum enmity. His seven fictive letters
to General Miranda on the removal of art monuments from Italy were published in
summer 1796 in Paris and appeared, still in the same year and slightly shortened, in
German in the widely read Hamburg journal Minerva.20
These letters were a highlight in the published attacks on the lootings of the
French troops in Italy following the spring of 1796.21 Carl Ludwig Fernow corre‑
sponded from Rome beginning in May. In the August issue, inspired by Quatremère,
the editor of the Minerva Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz wrote seven sorrowful
18 Cf. Francis Haskell, Museums and Their Enemies, in: Journal of Aesthetic Education 19/2 (1985),
pp. 13–22; David Carrier, Museum Skepticism. A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2006, pp. 51–73; James J. Sheehan, Museums in the German Art
World. From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism, New York: Oxford University Press,
2000, pp. 140–145; Joachimides 2001 (as in note 17), pp. 62–64. For further bibliography, see: Gaier
2013 (as in note 6), p. 222, note 332.
19 Cf. Gaier 2013 (as in note 6), p. 170, p. 223, p. 231.
20 Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, Lettres à Miranda sur le déplacement des monuments de l’Art de
l’Italie [1796]. Introduction et notes par Édouard Pommier, Paris: Macula, 1989. See now the English
edition in: Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, Letters to Miranda and Canova on the Abduction of Antiqui-
ties from Rome and Athens, introduction by Dominique Poulet, trans. by Chris Miller and David Gilks,
Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012, pp. 93–123. For a German edition of letter 1–6 (Minerva.
Ein Journal historischen und politischen Inhalts, ed. By Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, 20/4 (1796),
pp. 87–120, p. 271–309) see: Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, Ueber den nachtheiligen Einfluss der Ver-
setzung der Monumente aus Italien auf Künste und Wissenschaften. Mit einer Einführung von Édouard
Pommier, Stendal: Winckelmann-Gesellschaft, 1998, pp. 7–33.
21 Bénédicte Savoy, Kunstraub: Napoleons Konfiszierungen in Deutschland und die europäischen Fol-
gen, Vienna: Böhlau, 2011, pp. 205–206.
36 Martin Gaier
pages titled Ueber die Verpflanzung großer Kunstwerke aus Italien nach Frankreich.22
The sixty-nine pages by the Frenchman, however, full of invective against art looters
and general considerations on the question of ‘Who owned the art?’, raised the dis‑
cussion to a new level and had an impact on it over a year.
Quatremère opposed, like Hillebrand later on, the democratization of art, when
he warned about the “ignorant friends” for whom “the models of art are often nothing
but objects of curiosity.”23 And he also argues against the extradition of the artworks
to “large stockpiles of models of art.”24 But he is less concerned with the original
purpose of the artworks, the problematic competition between them, or the satura‑
tion or even indifference of the eye than with the so‑called ‘visible history of art’,
arranged in the Louvre by Vivant Denon in a very comprehensive manner which fas‑
cinated so many visitors although they condemned the Napoleonic art theft.25 This
‘visible history of art’ is, according to Quatremère, anemic and powerless, because
the transplanted works of art are downgraded to historical objects and deprived of
their original power.
For the German classicists, however, it was no obstacle to accept a resurrection of
art at a different location. The same Carl Ludwig Fernow who condemned harshly the
looting of Italy wrote to a friend in August 1796:
Would the more prudential, who discovers life even in death, not be hopeful that art one day will
rise again to life on the Seine and there will flourish even more than in Rome, one would have
to fall into despair about this desecration of Rome. […] However, we hear extraordinarily good
things about the facilities that are made in France for the housing of the Arts.26
Quatremère, in contrast, developed in his letters a theory of cultural heritage, writing

that the preservation of the original context is crucial for the cultural and aesthetic
force of the works.27 It was shown that this theory, through Quatremère’s friendship
with Antonio Canova, had significant influence on the development of the Italian
Monument Protection Act of 1802.28 But we should read this theory especially against
22 Minerva (as in note 20), 20/3 (1796), pp. 201–208. Cf. Savoy 2011 (as in note 21), p. 205; on Fernow
ibid., pp. 202–205.
23 Quatremère de Quincy 2012 (as in note 20), p. 106 (Fourth Letter) and p. 115 (Sixth Letter).
24 Ibid., p. 110 (Fifth Letter).
25 Cf. Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre. Art, Politics and the Origins of the Modern Museum in
Eighteenth-Century Paris, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
26 Carl Ludwig Fernow, Römische Briefe an Johann Pohrt 1793–1798, ed. Herbert von Einem, Rudolf
Pohrt, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1944, pp. 133–134 (22 August 1796).
27 Cf. Édouard Pommier, Die Revolution in Frankreich und das Schicksal der antiken Kunstwerke,
in: Quatremère de Quincy 1998 (as in note 20), pp. 41–99; Dominique Poulot, The Cosmopolitanism of
Masterpieces, in: Quatremère de Quincy 2012 (as in note 20), pp. 1–91.
28 Antonio Pinelli, Storia dell’arte e cultura della tutela. Le “Lettres à Miranda” di Quatremère de
Quincy, in: Ricerche di storia dell’arte 8 (1979), pp. 43–62.
the backdrop of the Napoleonic justification for art theft. The main argument of the
looters was that the revolution freed the works of art of all bonds – religious and polit‑
ical bonds – and transferred them to a universally accessible temple of the liberal arts.
They would also be liberated from the danger of being scattered to the four winds.
This argument fell on particularly fertile ground abroad.
Fernow was among those who espoused the convenience of the modern museum.
Indeed, his report of November 1797 still bore the ambiguous title Italisches Aus-
leerungsgeschäfft (Italian depletion affair).29 But the art lover in him already exulted
“that the many large church paintings, which formerly in dark churches were nearly
invisible, now may be situated in France so that we can easily look at them.”30
Quatremère’s strongest argument, however, was his prophetic vision of the
museum as a shrine for relics on the one hand and for merchandise on the other.31 He
presages nations “treating these paradigms of beauty like so many bundles of goods”32
that are “seen as jewels or diamonds that we enjoy merely for their monetary value.”33
And he adds: “All collections want a Raphael, whether real or fake, just as every church
once sought a piece of the True Cross. Unfortunately, the power of the whole is not
transmitted – as it is with a relic – to each isolated fragment of a school of painting.”34
Instead, he is convinced that “the power of the whole” would be preserved only in
Rome or Italy, with the city or country serving as a kind of ‘universal museum’:
You are too well informed to doubt that the surest means of destroying and killing a science is
to disperse its elements and materials. If this is true, the decomposition of the museum of Rome
would mean the death of all the forms of knowledge whose source is that museum’s unity.35
Beside the metaphor of Italy as a “general museum,”36 Quatremère also writes in his
letters of the dismemberment or mutilation of the ‘body of art’. In his third letter he
writes:
It is a colossus from which limbs could be broken off and their fragments carried away, but its
mass is one with the soil like the great Sphinx of Memphis. Attempting a partial transfer of this
sort would be nothing short of a mutilation and as shaming as it would be fruitless to its perpet‑
rators.37
29 Carl Ludwig Fernow, Italisches Ausleerungsgeschäfft, in: Der neue Teutsche Merkur 1 (1798),
pp. 129–144.
30 Ibid., p. 131.
31 Cf. Pommier 1998 (as in note 27), pp. 65–66.
32 Quatremère de Quincy 2012 (as in note 20), p. 109 (Fifth Letter).
33 Ibid., p. 111 (Fifth Letter).
34 Ibid., p. 112 (Sixth Letter).
35 Ibid., p. 100 (Third Letter).
36 Ibid., p. 97 (Second Letter). See also p. 104 (Third Letter) and p. 108 (Fourth Letter).
37 Ibid., p. 101 (Third Letter).
38 Martin Gaier
Two years later, Johann Wolfgang Goethe – obviously aware of Quatremère’s view‑
point – wrote his famous Einleitung in die ‘Propyläen’. Here, he voted for a conve‑
nient inspection of the work of art instead of its close links to a certain location. Of
course, Goethe conceded that all these “Dislokationen” were deplorable. But now he
was not so much interested in the old “body of art” (Kunstkörper) than in the new one.
And he wrote that it pleased him even more “in these times of distraction and loss”
to concentrate on an “ideal body of art.”38 The removal of the artworks “from their
sacred places” meant to Goethe that art had to be found in a decidedly aesthetic and
imaginary place instead of a religious one, “um dem Geschmack zu erstatten, was
der Frömmigkeit entrissen war” (“to restitute to the taste what was taken from the
piety”).39
Taming the Body of Art

Thus the road to the modern museum as an ‘aesthetic church’ was founded. Friedrich
Schlegel, in his News from the paintings in Paris of 1803, didn’t hesitate to criticize the
Louvre as an “old, shapeless, and sad house” which was constructed “for despots
without genius and education” and “not as a temple for the finest of the visual arts.”40
But, like Goethe, he reversed Quatremère’s metaphors of dismemberment into a kind
of taming of the body of art:
All artworks of one genre belong together, and they best explain themselves to each other. But
how far dispersed are the members of this divine body? – Maybe not one person can vaunt that
he has even seen everything important. And if there were one who had really seen all of it here
and there, how could he put it together in clear and vivid presence in his mind?41
38 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Einleitung in die ‘Propyläen’, in: Id., Ästhetische Schriften 1771–1805, ed.
Friedmar Apel (Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, vol. 18), Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher
Klassiker Verlag, 1998, pp. 457–475, p. 475.
39 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Ueber Kunst und Alterthum in den Rhein und Mayn Gegenden. Erstes
Heft, 1816, in: Id., Ästhetische Schriften 1816–1820, ed. Hendrik Birus (Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tage-
bücher und Gespräche, vol. 20), Frankfurt/M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999, pp. 12–99, p. 19; Cf.
Helmut J. Schneider, Rom als klassischer Kunstkörper. Zu einer Figur der Antikewahrnehmung von
Winckelmann bis Goethe, in: Paolo Chiarini, Walter Hinderer (eds.), Rom – Europa. Treffpunkt der
Kulturen. 1780–1820, Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2006, pp. 15–28, pp. 27–28; Johannes
Grave, Der “ideale Kunstkörper”. Johann Wolfgang Goethe als Sammler von Druckgraphiken und Zeich-
nungen, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006, p. 405, interprets Goethe’s “ideal body of art” as
his collection of reproductions.
40 Friedrich Schlegel, Nachricht von den Gemählden in Paris, in: Europ. 1 (1803), pp. 108–157, p. 108.
41 Ibid., p. 112.
And he concludes: “Each new exhibition and compilation of old paintings creates a
body of its own where several things will appear to the art lover in a new light, which
he had not yet seen so clearly.”42
Quatremère, on the other hand, used the body metaphor to connote far more than
just the idea of the ideal, imaginary whole and its parts, and also far more than just
the pleasure of seeing the works in one place. It is, as he explains in his powerfully
eloquent seventh and last Letter to Miranda,43 especially the loss of the absorbing,
provocative, rousing but also civilizing power of artworks that accompanies their
decontextualization and dismemberment. With a visionary glance at the eclectic his‑
toricism, Quatremère here declares:
[…] that any study confined to these kinds of comparison also tends to neutralize taste, fuse cha‑
racter, and produce mixed genres, bastardized mannerisms, and styles without physiognomy;
[…] that the diverse schools are only different dialects of the same pictorial language, whose
spirit, accent, and nuance can only be acquired through habitual frequentation of that region.
[…] that to fragment teaching, mutilate collections, and split up the galleries of Rome and Italy
is to disperse rather than propagate enlightenment, to carve up education rather than broaden
and extend it; it is not to transplant but to exile instruction; it is to cut off the branches of the tree
rather than foster its groth; it is not, as some think, to disseminate the sources of life but, as in
Egypt, to bury the limbs of [Osiris] in as many tombs as there are towns.44
What Quatremère meant with the last suggestion was the necessity of maintaining the
integrity of the body of art in order to maintain its forces. Seth, after murdering Osiris,
dismembered and buried his limbs at various locations in order to destroy his power.
In 1815, when Quatremère again published a moral essay on these problems, it
seems that no one really listened to him anymore.45 This was the year of the Treaty of
Paris, which included the restitution of artworks that had been pillaged by France,
and in many places officials had already begun to establish public art museums
according to the model of the Louvre. But Quatremère again insists on the original
meaning of the word ‘museum’ – home of the Muses – and on his opinion that art‑
works couldn’t be removed from that home without the loss of their greatest qualities.
In this spirit, he reproached his fictive dialog partner:
42 Ibid., pp. 111–112. For Schlegel’s concept of Kunstkörper cf. Hubert Locher, “Construction des
Ganzen.” Friedrich Schlegels kritische Gänge durch das Museum, in: Johannes Grave, Hubert Locher,
Reinhard Wegner (eds.), Der Körper der Kunst. Konstruktionen der Totalität im Kunstdiskurs um 1800,
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007, pp. 99–131.
43 Interestingly, this letter was eliminated by Archenholz, the editor of Minerva, from his German
edition.
44 Quatremère de Quincy 2012 (as in note 20), p. 118 (Seventh Letter), with note 40 on p. 123.
45 Antoine Quatremère de Quincy, Considérations morales sur la destination des ouvrages de l’art […],
Paris: Crapelet, 1815.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Vaivalloisesti tuli Nikki alas. Hänen oli helpompi kömpiä ylös, kuin
tulla alas kiukaan jyrkkiä ja korkeita portaita.
— Tässä on sukat sinulle, pistä jalkaasi, virkkoi isäntä hiukan

röyhkeillen anteliaisuudellaan.
Nikki otti sukat käteensä ja katseli niitä totisena.
— Mitä varten se isäntä melkein uudet sukat minulle, kysyi hän

vihdoin ja loi ihmettelevän katseen antajaan.
— Saathan ne saada.
— Kost' Jumal' antajaa, kiitti Nikki istahtaen pankolle ja alkaen

vetää sukkia jalkaan.
— Kylläpä tuntuvat hyvältä, ääh, jutteli hän sitten raajojaan

ojennellen. Hyvältä tuntuvat, niin lahealta, että koko ruumista
hivelee, ääh. Ihan se antaa lämpöä koko raajalle.
Vanhus vilkastui, hän aivankuin nuortui lahjasta ja lämpösestä, ja

muuttui puheliaaksi.
— Olihan minullakin ennen sukkia. Freedrika vainaja niitä aina

minulle pisteli… Kerrankin, — olin silloin Freedrikan sulhaspoika, —
se minulle pisteli oikein huikean rannulliset pitkävartiset… siniset,
punaset… jaha, missä lienevät nyt nekin, — sukkia meinaan, — en
ota yhtään muistaakseni miten niiden kävi. Kuluneina en niitä muista,
enkä liioin muista niiden kadonneenkaan. Ohhoo, niin ne menivät,
kuin tuuli, ne sukat meinaten. — Mutta kuinka se isäntä melkein
ehjät sukat minulle? No kun antaa, niin antaa ja Jumala antajaa
siunatkoon…
Nikki ei ottanut sukkia pois jaloistaan illallakaan, maata
mennessään. Vaikka kiuas oli kuuma, piti hän ne jalassaan, ne
tekivät niin hyvää vanhalle ruumiille. Hän katsoi jalkojaan, oikoi niitä
ja ihmetteli vieläkin, että miten se isäntä hennoi…
Se tuntui kummallisen hyvältä. Hän, Nikki, on vanha, työkulu

ihminen, isäntä on nuorempi, paljoa nuorempi, ja mahtava. Heidän
välillään ovat nyt lämpöset sukat…
Ajatukset sekaantuivat, ne kiersivät sinne ja tänne, pysähtyivät

minne sattuivat, lähtivät jälleen kulkemaan.
Isäntä oli jo mennyt maata, väki oli käynyt levolle mikä minnekin,
— pirtissä ei tänä yönä maannut muita kuin Nikki. Palvelustyttökin,
joka tähän asti osittain omaa rohkeuttaan, osittain pakosta tilan
puutteen takia oli maannut pirtissä, oli vetäytynyt muualle. Tupa oli
hiljanen kuin hauta.
Vanhus nukkui tavallista ikälopun unta, puoleksi horroksissa,

puoleksi valveillaan. Sukat ovat muuttuneet huikean rannullisiksi ja
Freedrika kutoo niitä… Vikkelään kulkevat vartaat ja vartta syntyy.
Se on jo hyvin pitkä ja yhä vain kutoo Freedrika. Nikkiä
sanomattomasti huvittaa se kudoksen paljous. Huone alkaa jo tulla
täyteen siitä… hänen henkeänsä jo ahdistaa tavaran paljous.
Nikki nousee ylös… hei… parilla askeleella hän hyppää alas

kiukaalta. Tämähän on kummaa, hän on niin nuori ja voimakas.
Sukka katosi, mutta yhä vain Freedrika kutoi. Nikki katsoi ulos
ovesta: sukan varsi oli pihassa pitkin pituuttaan ja se lisääntyi
vaateaittaa kohden. Vaateaitan portailla seisoi emäntävainaja ja
syötti yhä kasvavaa sukkaa aittaan. Nikin jalkoja palelee, ne ovat
paljaat ja hän kovenee Freedrikalle…
Sitte hän muisti mitä isäntä oli sanonut, että hänen piti lähteä
ruotiin… Isäntä on pihassa ja tarjoo sukkia. Nikki ottaa ne ja yrittää
vetää jalkaansa, mutta sukat kutistuvat olemattomiin. Samassa ajaa
vyöryää pihaan komeat ajopelit.
Nikki ymmärtää, että hänen oli niissä lähdettävä ruotiin.

Voimakkain hypyin astui hän vaunuihin ja lähti ajamaan. Metsät,
niityt, kylät kulkivat siintävänä hänen ohitsensa. Hän muisti joskus
ennenkin näin ajaneensa näillä samoilla ajopeleillä, mutta milloin, se
ei selvene. Ahaa, kun tullaan vuoren luo, jossa on punanen kivi, niin
siinä muistan…
Vaunut katosivat, mutta yhä vain Nikki kulki tuhotonta vauhtia yli
vuorien ja järvien. Hänen päätänsä huimasi. Hän koetti voimansa
painolla päästä takaisin maan pinnalle, saada pohjaa jaloilleen.
Joskus hän pääsi likelle, sai varpaillaan kiinni maasta, mutta sitte
jälleen joku vastustamaton voima alkoi viedä ylöspäin. Menköön,
tuumi Nikki ja ponnahutti itsensä irti maasta…
Mielen valtasi rauhallinen tunne. — Näin minä ennenkin olin, vaan

milloin se taas olikaan…
Niin… ainahan näin on ollut.
Nikki unohti koskaan olleensakaan maan päällä.
*****
Sinä yönä ei emäntävainaja näyttäytynyt. Mellan noidan neuvo oli

ollut tehokas: isäntä oli saanet vaivasen kiitoksen. Ja Nikki oli ollut
oikea henkilö.
Aamulla isäntä heräsi siihen, että palvelustyttö kolkutti oveen ja

huusi:
— Isäntä, isäntä, nouskaa pian ylös. Nikki on kuollut kiukaalle. Sitä

se emäntävainaja täältä hakikin.
Tellu.
Tellu oli viime aikoina tuntenut vaistomaista rauhattomuutta. Mistä

se johtui, sitä eivät hänen ajatuksensa kyenneet selvittämään. Sitä
liikkui ympäristössä, kuohui ilmassa ja siitä se sieramien kautta
tunkeutui hänen olemukseensa. Tämän sisäisen levottomuuden
vaikutuksesta Tellu tuon tuostakin päästi pitkiä, valittavia ääniä, jotka
pahoina enteinä vuorostaan tunkeutuivat Peltosen ja hänen
perheensä viisaisiin sydämiin.
— Kunhan ei vain matkalla mitään onnettomuutta tapahtuisi, sanoi

Peltoska miehelleen, — tuo koirahan ulvoo kuin kuoleman edellä.
— Mitä vielä, muuten se vaan ulvoo omaa ulvomistaan, vastasi

mies.
Mutta rauhallinen hän ei itsekään ollut. Kaukana siitä. Koiran

ulvonta muistutti hänelle jotakin, jonka hän oli kadottamaisillaan,
jotakin kaukaista, ylen rakasta, ikuisesti erottamatonta; siinä oli
valittavien henkien tuskaa, pitkien talviöiden kylmää
liikkumattomuutta synkissä erämaissa.
Peltonen ei ollut taikauskonen. Kuitenkin sokaisi Tellun haikea
valitus sen kauniin kuvan, jonka hän oli itselleen luonut Amerikan
kultakentistä. Se toi jo edeltäkäsin mieleen kotimaan salot, talviset
viimat, — rakkaina mieleen juuri ne, joita pakoon Peltonen ensi
tilassa oli päättänyt lähteä.
Täytyi oikein karaista luontoansa.
Hän oli päättänyt tulevana keväänä muuttaa Ameriikkaan, oli

myynyt osan tavaroistaan, elukkansa, taloustarpeensa ja kaikki
tarpeettomat vaatteet, — koira ei saanut olla matkan esteenä.
Mutta Tellu ei saanut lepoa, ei rauhaa. Se kulki huoneiden ja

ulkorakennusten väliä, nuuski jälkiä, vainusi, etsi sitä olematonta,
näkymätöntä, jonka kolkko olemus oli rikkonut kodin rauhan. Tellu
nuuski isäntää, emäntää, pientä lasta; niissä oli entinen, tuttu haju ja
kuitenkin virtasi niistä jotakin… Hän töykkäsi tuvan oven auki, istui
selkä köyryssä portaille, nosti kuononsa ylös ja päästi pitkän,
haikean valituksen ylös taivaisiin.
Hän ei voinut olla sitä tekemätä, sillä muuten olisi henki

salpautunut rintaa täyttävän ahdistuksen painosta. Hän ulvoi yöt ja
päivät ja yhä painostavammaksi kävi tunne rinnassa, yhä
haikeammaksi valitus.
Talven selkä alkoi taittua, aurinko alkoi jo heikosti lämmittää Tellun

kylkeä hänen loikoessaan portaalla. Entisinä aikoina, menneinä
kevättalvina oli aurinko tullessaan tuonut ilosen mielialan. Tellu oli
auringon kohotessa alkanut elää, laajat hongikot olivat olleet ilosia
temmelkenttiä, joissa varjo oli kilvan kiitänyt hänen rinnallaan. Nyt ei
hän tuntenut auringon houkuttelevaa voimaa, hänen rintansa alta ei
päivänpaiste voinut poistaa selittämätöntä, kaihovaa tuskaa. Ja jota
korkeammalle päivä kohosi, sitä pimeämmäksi muuttui mieli.
Tuli kevät. Mökissä alkoi ennen kuulumaton elämä. Sen sijaan,

että isäntä olisi alkanut peltoja viljellä, hän nyt tavaroita — samoja,
joihin Tellun luvatta ei kukaan vieras ollut saanut kajota ja joista
ennen oli niin hyvää huolta pidetty, — näitä samoja tavaroita isäntä
nyt antoi vieraille ihmisille ja potkasi Tellua, kun se ikenet irvessä
koetti estää vieraan niitä ottamasta. Jotakin tavatonta, järjellisestä
elämästä poikkeavaa oli tekeillä, jota Tellu ei käsittänyt. Ennen oli
toisin. Ei ollut sitä tekoa, jota Tellu ei olisi ymmärtänyt, ei askelta,
jonka tarkotusta hän ei olisi tietänyt, hän oli ymmärtänyt isännän ja
emännän toiminnan täydellisesti. Nyt ei enää ollut niin…
Eräänä aamuna pukeutuivat isäntä, emäntä ja lapsi

matkavaatteisiin. Tellu oli niinikään lähtöhommissa. Se hyppeli,
liehakoi ja haukkui pelkästä innosta.
Mutta isäntä asetti hänen kaulaansa nauhan ja sitoi Tellun kiinni

pihakoivuun…
Käpristyneenä, vapisevana Tellu siinä makasi, kun vieras ihminen

hänet vihdoin irti päästi ja vieressä seisovalle naiselle virkkoi:
— Voi sitä raukkaa. Tuo sille voileipä.
Vieraat ihmiset kantoivat sisään vieraita esineitä ja vieras nainen

tarjosi voileipää.
Tellu oli aivan sekasin hämmästyksestä. Murahtaen sieppasi hän

voileivän, hotkasi sen yhdellä kerralla… mutta sitten toi tuuli tieltä
päin tutun tuoksun, isäntäväen! Hän oli kytkyestä vapaa ja kiihkeästi
hän lähti juoksemaan hajua kohden. Hän juoksi kuono tiehen
painuneena, juoksi yhä hurjemmin, yhä selvemmäksi muuttui haju.
Selvästi hän erotti tuoreet jäljet. Niitä myöten hän menee vaikka
maailman ääriin ja löytää omaisensa…
Hän saapui laivasillalle. Sen reunaan jäljet loppuivat. Koira kohotti

kuononsa, haisteli kaikkiin ilmansuuntiin, mutta haju oli kokonaan
kadonnut, kaukaisinta värähdystäkään ei tuntunut, ei ilmassa ei
maassa… vesi oli kaiken haudannut. Tellu istahti laivasillan
äärimmäiselle reunalle, katseli tuokion veden hiljaisia laineita, päästi
sitten äänen niin vihlovan, niin valittavan, että se vieri kauaksi yli
koko kylän. Se sai ihmiset kauhistumaan, kukin alkoi ajatella
kuolemaa, tulipaloa, nälkävuosia, ruttotauteja ja muita rangaistuksia,
joilla Herra ihmissukua kurittaa.
Tellu seisoi laiturilla ja veteen katsoen ulvoi. Hänen vaistomainen

surunsa oli saanut selvyyden. Vesi, jonka lävitse haju ei tunkeudu,
kätki hänen rakkaansa. Kadonnut oli kaikki, loppunut ilo ja elämä ja
hän oli yksin suruineen.
Poislähtöä Tellu ei ajatellut, hän oli unohtanut, että maailmaa

olikaan. Kun hän ei enää jaksanut ulvoa, vaipui hän hervottomana ja
vapisevana laiturille ja uikutti hiljaa.
Monta päivää hän jo oli maannut laivasillalla. Ihmisiä tuli ja meni.

Jotkut pysähtyivät katsomaan, toiset silittivät, — jolloin koira kohotti
silmäkulmaansa, katsoi verestävin silmin hyväilijää, — toiset taas
potkasivat. Silloin hän nousi seisomaan, köyristyi yhä enemmän ja
muutti paikkaa.
Ei Tellu mitään ajatellut, ei harkinnut, eikä suunnitellut. Ikävä ja

kaipaus olivat hänessä muodostuneet olemukseksi, joka oli yhtä
hänen olemuksensa kanssa. Eikä Tellu muistellut entisiä onnellisia
aikoja, — hajun kadotessa olivat kaikki muistotkin kadonneet. Hän
vain suri, sillä suru oli hänen elämänsä.
Hänen maineensa alkoi levitä ympäri pitäjää, ihmiset puhuivat

säälien siitä ihmeen viisaasta koirasta, joka laivasillalla isäntäänsä
suree. Tellua tultiin vartavasten katsomaan ja tullessaan ihmiset
toivat ruokaa, jota koira kaikkien suureksi ihmeeksi ahmien söi. Ettei
hän hylkinyt ruokaa ja ollut nälissään, se hiukan himmensi hänen
uskollisuutensa ja viisautensa mainetta, sillä ihmiset olisivat
säälineet vielä enemmän ja vuodattaneet vielä katkerampia
kyyneleitä, jos Tellu olisi lakannut syömästä ja kuollut nälkään. —
Laivasilta oli nyt hänen varsinainen kotinsa. Siihen oli haju hänet
kulettanut ja siihen oli hän jäänyt, hän ei voinut siitä irtautua. Ketään
ei hän siinä odottanut, mitään erinomaista ei hän kaivannutkaan.
Hän eli, kun hän ei kuollut, — kuolemaakaan hän ei kaivannut,
enempää kuin elämääkään rakasti. Aurinko paistoi kylkeä, silloin
ojensi hän jalkansa, läähätti kieli suusta ulkona ruumiillisesta
hyvinvoinnista. Kun taas satoi, silloin hän käpristyi kokoon ja pani
kuononsa vatsan alle lämmittämään. Tuo kaikki kävi koneellisesti, se
oli suuren luonnon itsetiedotonta työskentelyä ilman että Tellu
vähintäkään ajatteli itsensä suojelemista tai omaa hyvinvointiansa.
Mutta vihdoin ilmestyi uusi henkilö Tellun elämän näyttämölle. Se

ei ollut potkija eikä hyväilijä, vaan se oli mies, joka tuntui tutulta.
Tellu kohotti päätään ja katsoi odottavana mieheen, joka häntä

tarkasteli.
— Teelu, Teelu!
Kaukainen hämärä muisto, tai pikemmin vaisto ilmaisi, että tuolle
miehelle hän usein oli haukkunut.
— Teelu, seh!
Hämärinä kulki koiran mieleen aavistuksia, että tuon miehen ja

jonkin kaukaisen menneisyyden välillä oli jotakin yhteyttä. Hän nousi
ylös ja takkuinen häntä alkoi itsestään heilua. Mies taputti koiraa
päähän ja silitteli sen pörröistä karvaa. Samassa solahti miehen
selästä alas nahkanen reppu ja silloin Tellu tunsi hänet. Tellun oli
ollut tapana ankarasti haukkua reppuryssälle aina kun se oli tullut
Peltosen mökille.
Reppuri tuntui omaiselta, se oli ainoa tuttu entisiltä ajoilta ja sen

takia oli hän saanut kaikkein eniten murista…
— Teelu, Teelu, kutsui venäläinen murteellisesti ja kun hän lähti

kulkemaan kylää kohden, piti Tellu aivan luonnollisena seurata
häntä.
Taloon tultua levitti mies laukkunsa lattialle. Koira asettui laukun

viereen, seurasi katseillaan talonväkeä ja murisi jokaiselle, joka
epäilyttävällä tavalla läheni. Mies nauroi ja Tellu ymmärsi, että se oli
hyvillään.
Koiran varjelemisvaisto oli herännyt ja se kohdistui kaikella

voimallaan kulkukauppiaan tavaroihin. Kun venäläinen nosti laukun
hartioilleen, nousi Tellukin ylös ja lähti vaeltamaan hänen
mukanansa. Siitä syntyi heidän välilleen yhteiset pyrkimykset.
Uusi isäntä oli hellä ja hyvä, antoi maata vieressään ja syötti

omalla ruoallaan. Mutta aina kun matka sattuu tutulle sillalle,
katsahtaa Tellu veteen, aukasee kitansa ja päästää pitkän, valittavan
ulvonnan.
Kaupustelija.
Ovi aukeni ja pirttiin melkein hypähti vanha, pikkunen,

kurttunaamainen eukko.
Hän oli kaikkien kylänväkien suosima kaupustelija ja hän toi aina

tullessaan tietoja muualta maailmasta.
— Hyvää päivää, hyvä emäntä, ostetaanko mitään? …

Katsokaahan, mitä minulla on! Nähkääs näitä!
Eukko levitteli koristaan esiin kirkkaita, halpahintaisia

silkkinauhoja, pummulisia käsineitä, monivärisiä helmiä ja muuta
rihkamaa.
— Eihän sitä nyt, esteli emäntä.
— Ostakaa pois vaan, minä myyn halvalla. Tietäähän emäntä,

ettei
Loviisa suuria voittoja kisko.
Emäntä sen kyllä tietää, mutta hänellä ei satu olemaan rahaa.
— Niin, niin, huonot ovat raha-ajat nykyään, valitteli Loviisa. — Ei

tahdo kauppa enää kannattaa, niinkuin ennen. Mutta eihän emännän
tarvitse rahalla ostaa, ruokakin kelpaa… Ohhoo, toiseen toimeen
olisi ryhdyttävä, ei tahdo kauppa enää elättää, vaan mihinkäpä
ryhtyä kun terveys on mennyttä ja voimat huonot.
— Ketterähän se Loviisa vielä on, virkkoi emäntä, ketterä kuin

nuori ikään.
— Kyllähän se muuten menisi… enhän minä muuten… mutta kun

tuolla rajapitäjän kartanossa koira puri, niin siitä päivin en ole tervettä
päivää nähnyt.
Loviisan ympärille kertyi talonväkeä kuuntelemaan. Kun Loviisa

alkoi kertoa, silloin kannatti kuunnella. Ei se muija koskaan turhia
laverrellut, niinkuin muut kuleksijat, tosia asioita se aina puhui.
— Miten se kävi, tiedusteli emäntä, puriko pahastikin?
— Ei se luun vammaa tainnut aikaan saada, mutta sydämeni

vavahti pois sijoiltaan, eikä ota enää asettuakseen, nykyttää,
hytkyttää vaan aina ja väliin se lyö niin kovasti että siihen paikallaan
luulee kuolevansa. Huimoo ja kiertää alituiseen sydänalassa ja
vapistus on aina jäsenissä.
— Kenen se oli koira? kysyi isäntä.
— Kartanon koira se oli.
— Mitä te sille teitte, tiedusteli renkipoika, jonka tapana oli

ärsytellä koiria.
Kuulijain ihmeeksi alkoi Loviisa sydämellisesti nauraa.
Renkipoika nauroi mukana pelkästä myötätuntosuudesta, sillä hän

aavisti
Loviisan tehneen jotakin perin hullunkurista.
— Nähkääs, kertoi eukko nauraen, en minä tehnyt muuta kuin

yritin mennä siitä ovesta sisälle, josta paremmat ihmiset kulkevat…
enkä yhtään huomannut isoa koiranjuutikasta, joka makasi
kynnyksellä. Astuin kuin mikäkin rouva ylös paraatirappusia ja tartuin
oveen, mutta äläpäs niin vaan koske, tuumi koira ja karahutti minua
niskaan. Eiköstä ole koirakin viisas jumalanluoma, kun ottaa ja
erottaa, kuka köyhä on! Niinhän sen on järki kuin viisaan ihmisen! En
olisi uskonut elukalla olevan sellaista ymmärrystä… Piiat sitten
jälestäpäin kertoivat, ettei se koskaan karkaa parempain ihmisten
niskaan, huonompain vain ja kerjäläisten. Sanottakoon sitte, ettei
koiralla ole sielua…
— Tuliko ketään hätiin? kysyi emäntä.
— No veikkoset! Itse patruuna ja patrunessa juoksivat minkä

ennättivät… Vieläkin korvissani kaikuu kepin läiske, kun sitä koiraa
hakattiin, että saivat sen eroamaan niskastani.
Isäntä alkoi kävellä edes takaisin pirtin permannolla. Hänen

otsansa oli vetäytynyt kurttuun ja hän näytti miettivän ja harkitsevan,
jotakin. Vihdoin hän pysähtyi Loviisan eteen ja kysyi tärkeän
näkösenä:
— Oliko siinä ketään näkemässä?
— Oli. Koko kartanon väki siihen meluun tuli.
Isäntä alkoi jälleen miettiä. Toiset seurasivat tarkoin hänen

ilmeitään. He aavistivat, mitä hänen mielessään liikkui. Vihdoin hän
rykäsi, pisti kätensä housujen taskuun ja virkkoi ankaralla äänellä:
— Patruuna on vietävä oikeuteen ja häneltä on vaadittava
kipurahoja!
Teidän on paikalla lähdettävä lääkäriin, minä annan hevosen.
— Niin, yhtyi emäntä, patruunan on maksettava teille ikuinen eläke

menetetystä terveydestä.
— Ja sitte ei teidän tarvitse enää kaupustella, säesti renkipoika. —

Elätte vaan kuin herra rahoillanne!
Loviisa tuumi hetken aikaa asiata. Sitten hän virkkoi:
— Miten sen asian laita oikeastaan lie… Ei kait oikeus mitään

mahda elukalle… viisaimmallekaan?
— Ei elukalle, mutta sen omistajalle, selitti isäntä.
— Jaa, mutta eihän patruuna minua purrut.
— Elukka on patruunan omaisuutta ja hän on vastuunalainen siitä.
— Niinhän se taitaa olla, myönsi Loviisa, mutta olisihan se minulta

ikäänkuin oikeuden väärinkäyttämistä, jos patruuna joutuisi
viattoman elukan takia vastuuseen.
— Saisitte hyvät rahat, sanoi renkipoika.
— Jaa, jaa, tuumi eukko, jos niinkuin määrättäisiin, että patruunan

pitää minulle maksaa koiran puremasta, niin sehän se minusta
vääryydeltä juuri tuntuisikin, — ja minä kun en ole näihin päiviin asti
vääryydellä penniäkään ansainnut. Näin vanhana olisi sellainen
ansio peräti outoa.
— Ei se ole vääryyttä, ärjäsi isäntä, kyllä minä tunnen lain ja
oikeuden joka pienimmänkin pykälän, — kyllä minä siksi usein olen
sen kanssa tekemisissä ollut, enkä koskaan ole alakynteen jäänyt!
— Tietäähän isäntä, tietäähän isäntä, lepytteli Loviisa, mutta kun

minä en ole ikänäni lakia tarvinnut. Paljon minua on elämäni varrella
tuupittu ja usein on ihminenkin niskaani karannut ja aina sentään on
ilman lakia toimeen tultu… niin olisi näin vanhana hiukan ilkeätä
ruveta käräjöimään koiran kanssa…
Ystävän murha.
Eliina vietti kahdeksatta syntymäpäiväänsä, kun äiti hänelle lahjotti

pienen, hontelokoipisen vasikan.
— Saanko minä sen ihan omakseni? kysyi Eliina ylen onnellisena

moisesta arvokkaasta lahjasta.
— Aivan omaksesi, vastasi äiti. — Ruoki ja hoida sitä hyvin, niin

saat siitä suuren lehmän. Se, näes, kasvaa kuten sinäkin.
Eliina juoksi navettaan, meni vasikkansa luo ja sitä kaulalle

taputtaen pieni emäntä nyt esitteli itsensä pienelle lehmälleen.
— Sinä olet nyt minun oma lehmäni, äiti antoi sinut minulle
omaksi!
Ja siitä asti alkoi heidän ystävyytensä, joka oli niin lämmin ja syvä
kuin vain kahden viattoman ja hyvänsuovan olennon välillä voi olla.
Eliina antoi vasikalleen nimen Sunnikki, syystä että hän tahtoi
pitää sitä kunniassa ja Sunnikki-nimi kuulosti niin arvokkaalta ja aito
lehmämäiseltä.
Nimeen taisi liittyä jonkunlainen ennustus, sillä kauan ei Sunnikki

tahtonutkaan olla vasikkana. Se kasvoi, kehittyi ja paisui ylen
nopeasti. Se sai ennen pitkää arvonimen mullikka, kun Eliina yhä
vielä oli pieni tyttönen. Tämä ei kuitenkaan heidän ystävyyteensä
mitään vaikuttanut. Sunnikki kohteli emäntäänsä aivan kuin
vertaistaan, se tepasteli, ravisteli päätään, mylvi, möyrysi ja oli kuin
ennenkin.
Sunnikki oli Eliinan mielestä kyläkunnan kaunein lehmä. Sen pää

oli musta, mykyräinen ja sarveton, vatsan alus tumman-, selkä
vaaleanruskea, takaraajat valkoset. Ihmiset sanoivat sitä rumaksi ja
se teki kovin pahaa Eliinan sydämelle… sillä Jumalahan sen
Sunnikin oli sellaiseksi luonut.
Keväällä kun lehmät laskettiin laitumelle, huomasi äiti, että

Sunnikki oli lihavampi ja kiiltäväkarvasempi kuin toiset lehmät. Äiti
arveli, että Eliina oli anastellut toisten lehmien ruoka-annoksista
omalleen, vaikka siinä hän erehtyi. Eliina oli suoraan aitasta ottanut
leipää ja jauhoja, joita talon ei ollut vara lehmille syöttää.
Eliina oli vanhempiensa ainoa lapsi. Hänellä ei näin ollen ollut

muita uskotuita, eikä tovereita kuin Sunnikki. Sille hän kertoi kaikki
pienet surunsa ja huolensa, kuten ilonsakin. Sunnikki oli
hienotunteinen ja uskollinen, ei koskaan nauranut, ei ilveillyt, eikä
pilkannut, vaan käsitti että pienellä tyttösellä on tässä maailmassa
paljon kärsimyksiä, jos on ilojakin.
Sunnikki tiesi, ettei Eliina tahallaan astioita särkenyt, ne putoilivat
vahingossa käsistä, aivan samalla tavalla kuin valeetkin pikku
suusta.
Paljon sellaista, joka äidin mielestä oli ihan käsittämätöntä, oli
Sunnikista päivän selvää ja täysin luonnollista ja anteeksiannettavaa.
Toisaalta taas kun kylän lapset alkoivat Eliinaa kutsua »mullikka-

Eliinaksi», ei tyttönen ollenkaan loukkaantunut, sillä kutsuivathan ne
Sunnikkiakin Eliinan mullikaksi. Mutta kun naapurin poika sepitti
tällaisen laulun, että:
sarveton lehmä ja pennin raha löytyy vaikka kellä, ja jolla ei

muuta tavaraa ole sen ei passaa rehennellä,
niin siitä Eliina suuttui, — suuttui niin kovasti laulun sepittäjälle,

että päätti aina olla hänelle vihanen. Sillä paitsi sitä, että laulu
kovasti solvasi Sunnikin arvoa, joutui Eliina sen kautta jokaisen
ihmisen suuhun ympäri maailmaa. Aina kun kylän lapset näkivät
hänet, alkoivat he hoilata:
— Kuules, mullikka-Eliina, että sarveton lehmä ja pennin raha…
Ne olivat kuitenkin vain pieniä kiusoja verrattuina siihen iloon, mikä

Eliinalla ja Sunnikilla oli keskinäisestä ystävyydestä. —
Sinä kesänä, jolloin Sunnikki ensi kerran laskettiin toisten lehmien

kanssa laitumelle, tuli huono heinävuosi; kuivuus ensin keväällä
näivetytti ruohon oraan ja heinäkuulla taas alkoivat ylettömät sateet.
Heiniä ei tullut latoihin kuin nimeksi.
Isä jutteli äidille että elukkain lukua oli vähennettävä, jos tahdottiin
talven yli päästä, ja Eliina kuvitteli mielessään miten autio ja kolkko
navetta on, kun ei siellä ole muita lehmiä kuin Sunnikki yksin. Hänen
oli paha ja ikävä olla ystävänsä tähden, jonka täytyisi pitkät, talviset
yöt yksin viettää pimeässä navetassa. Mutta olihan sekin sentään
parempi kuin nälkä, jota Sunnikki-polosen täytyisi kärsiä, jos muita
lehmiä eloon jäisi. Muilla lehmillä ei Eliinan mielestä ollut mitään
arvoa, ne olivat tavallisia elukoita vain, nautoja, joita ruokittiin maidon
takia ja tapettiin aina tarpeen tullen. Toisin oli Sunnikki. Se oli olento,
jolla oli sydän, tunto, sielu ja ymmärrys.
Tuli syksy.
Eräänä syyspäivänä äiti houkutteli Eliinan korpisuolle karpaloita

poimimaan. Se oli aina ennen ollut hauskaa työtä. Oli niin mukavaa
kulkea routaisella suolla, jossa korret ratisten taittuivat jalan alla ja
jossa tuokkonen pian täyttyi kovista, ympyriäisistä marjoista.
Mutta tällä kertaa Eliinaa ei mikään huvittanut. Hän tunsi

painostusta sielussaan ja metsä niin sanomattomasti pelotti. Se
tuntui kuolleelta, susien asuinsijalta ja jos miltä. Hän lähti pian kotiin.
Kun hän saapui pirttiin, näki hän miten isä ja kaksi muuta miestä
kauheasti ärjyen tepastelivat Sunnikin kanssa. Heillä oli nähtävästi
aikomus kaataa Sunnikki liisterekeen, joka oli permannolla. Äiti istui
pankolla sanko kädessä ja odotti.
— Mitä, mitä te teette minun Sunnikilleni, kysyi tyttönen hätäisesti

ja pirtti alkoi samassa pyöriä hänen silmissään.
Sunnikki äänen kuultuaan riuhtasi itsensä irti ja meni ystävänsä

luo.
Eliina tarttui sen kaulaan ja alkoi itkien vakuuttaa:
— Oma, hyvä Sunnikkini, sinulle ei kukaan saa tehdä mitään
pahaa niinkauan kuin minä elän. Pieni Sunnikki-parka, elä pelkää,
minä olen tässä ja minä puolustan sinua, soo, soo…
Isä tarttui lasta olkapäähän ja talutti nurkkaan.
— Ei, ei, ei! Sunnikkia ei tapeta niin kauan kuin minä elän, kirkasi
tyttö kauhun ja tuskan valtaamana ja juoksi Sunnikin ja isän väliin.
Syntyi taistelu elämästä ja kuolemasta. Isä koetti saada tyttöä

nurkkaan, mutta tyttönen ponnisti kaikin voimin vastaan, kirkui, repi
ja polki jalkaa. Mutta mikään ei auttanut, isä ja äiti olivat
väkevämmät.
— Siinä sikiössä asustaa itse paha henki, sanoi isä ja heitti Eliinan
tukasta nurkkaan.
Miehet sitoivat Sunnikin jalat; se ei enää tehnyt vastarintaa, vaan

kaatoi itse itsensä rekeen. Isä otti pankolta käteensä suuren, terävän
veitsen ja oli juuri pistämäisillään sitä Sunnikin kurkkuun, kun Eliina
jälleen hyökkäsi esiin ja tarttui murhaajan käteen:
— Isä-kulta, isä-kulta, älkää tappako Sunnikkia, minä vien sen

muualle, ettei se syö heiniä… isä, minä olen niin hyvä, rakas, kulta
isä…
— Onko tuo kakara riivattu! oli isän vastaus.
— Isä, valitti tyttö kasvoillaan kuoleman tuska, jos ei se pääse

taivaaseen kun, kun…
— Hyvänen aika tuota tyttöä, nauroi äiti, eihän elukoilla ole sielua!
Sunnikin kaulasta virtasi veri. Viimesen kerran se loi katseensa
ystävään, rakkaan, surullisen, avuttoman silmäyksen. Sanomaton
kaiho, tuska ja kostonhimo täytti lapsen sydämen.
Isä piti verisankoa Sunnikin kaulan alla ja äiti hämmensi verta.

Isän kädet olivat veriset ja verinen oli puukko lattialla.
— Älä ole milläsikään, Eliina, lepytteli äiti, huomenna sinä saat

oikein makeita verilättyjä…
Rahaa.
Se tapahtui kolmekymmentä vuotta sitten. Koliseva oli silloin

metsämökki, josta lähimpään naapuriin oli pari penikulmaa.
Kolisevan Aatami palasi kirkolta kotia. Hän oli kovin harmistuneella

tuulella sen vuoksi, että oli unohtanut pyytää kauppamieheltä
lapsilleen rintasokeria. Ei ollut hauska tulla kotiin ilman tuomisia.
Aina silloin kun Aatami oli suutuksissaan, morkkasi hän

Maijaliisaa, eukkoaan. Niinpä hän nytkin kulkiessaan maantiellä riiteli
itsekseen:
— Senkin akka, kun opettaa ne lapsensa niin persoiksi… sekö

niiden kanssa tässä elämässä toimeen tulee, kun ne aina ovat suut
lerpallaan ottamassa! Toista oli minun äitini. Ei ollut pyytämistä, —
eikä sitä mitään osannut odottaakaan, kun ei ollut siihen tottunut.
Mutta nämä!… Hitto kun tuli unohdettua! Muuta siinä vaan höpisin
puodissa, enkä muistanut tenavia. Nyt ne nenät akkunalla odottavat
ja pieni Iida hyppii kimpussani… Senkään akka kun ei opeta
lapsiaan paremmille tavoille! Hampaatkin kuulema, mustuvat
rintasokerista ja vatsa pilaantuu… Voi minua höperöä, kun
unohdin… Toinen komento siitä tulla pitää, ei se kelpaa, että ne aina
kimpussa, jos jostakin tulee!… Mikä hitto pani minut unohtamaan
rintasokerin… Mutta mikä tuo on?
Maantiellä oli nahkanen laukku. Aatami jäi hetkeksi sen ääreen

seisomaan, ennenkuin otti sen ylös. Hänellä oli lapsuudesta asti
periytynyt vaistomainen epäluulo keskellä maanteitä olevia
kukkaroita, nyyttejä ja ruutteja vastaan. Hän oli itse niitä poikasena
usein asetellut tielle, täyttänyt kivillä ja lialla ja piiloutunut sitte
pensaan taakse odottamaan, kuka korjaa, ja näkemään löytäjän
hämmästystä.
Aatami vilkasi ympärilleen. Paikka oli kaukana kylästä, — lasten

tekoa tuo ei ollut. Ehkä joku miehen veitikka…
Hän tarkasti välinpitämättömän näkösenä laukkua. Sitä iloa hän

vekkulille ei suo, että se näkisi hänen ihastuvan. Ei!… Mutta laukku
oli lähemmin katsoen jokseenkin hyvä. Eihän kukaan leikin vuoksi
sellaista tielle heitä. Varoen otti hän sen ylös, teki muotonsa
entistäkin tyynemmäksi ja kuletti laukkua hetkisen aikaa sormissaan
ikäänkuin poisheittämisen aikeissa.
Vihdoin, kun ketään ei piilopaikasta ilmestynyt, alkoi hän lähemmin

tarkastella löytöänsä. Se oli hyvässä kunnossa oleva, syrjistään
hiukan kulunut, paljon käytetyn näkönen nahkalaukku. Hän aukasi
sen. Sisällä oli aivan irrallaan kolme markkaa hopeata, sekä kaksi
viiden ja yksi kymmenen markan seteli. Lisäksi suuri tukku koreita
papereita.

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Intermedialities, Shifting Images

Zehra Tonbul, Koen Van Synghel

Picture Credits 359

Speaking about Museums, Speaking in Images

This development is often considered as originating in Europe, yet it is paralleled in

Looking at the Museum – Connecting Gaze

became prominent pieces of contemporary art in themselves. In Höfer’s work, reflect‑

Museum Icons, Iconic Museums:

Word and Image, Institution and Audience

Politics and Geographies of the “Museal Complex”

neering” is described as an entanglement between aesthetic, ethical, and ultimately

Intermedialities, Shifting Images

against the background of Malraux’s profile as an art theorist: Grasskamp shows us

about his shocking psychophysical reactions – a sickness and dizziness face‑to-face

Between “aesthetic churches” and “castles of art” –

Hillebrand sharpened his skepticism of museums in dealing with like-minded

Roots of Museum Enmity – Quatremère de Quincy

Quatremère, in contrast, developed in his letters a theory of cultural heritage, writing

Taming the Body of Art

— Tässä on sukat sinulle, pistä jalkaasi, virkkoi isäntä hiukan

Nikki otti sukat käteensä ja katseli niitä totisena.

— Mitä varten se isäntä melkein uudet sukat minulle, kysyi hän

— Kost' Jumal' antajaa, kiitti Nikki istahtaen pankolle ja alkaen

— Kylläpä tuntuvat hyvältä, ääh, jutteli hän sitten raajojaan

Vanhus vilkastui, hän aivankuin nuortui lahjasta ja lämpösestä, ja

— Olihan minullakin ennen sukkia. Freedrika vainaja niitä aina

Se tuntui kummallisen hyvältä. Hän, Nikki, on vanha, työkulu

Ajatukset sekaantuivat, ne kiersivät sinne ja tänne, pysähtyivät

Vanhus nukkui tavallista ikälopun unta, puoleksi horroksissa,

Nikki nousee ylös… hei… parilla askeleella hän hyppää alas

Nikki ymmärtää, että hänen oli niissä lähdettävä ruotiin.

Mielen valtasi rauhallinen tunne. — Näin minä ennenkin olin, vaan

Niin… ainahan näin on ollut.

Nikki unohti koskaan olleensakaan maan päällä.

Sinä yönä ei emäntävainaja näyttäytynyt. Mellan noidan neuvo oli

Aamulla isäntä heräsi siihen, että palvelustyttö kolkutti oveen ja

— Isäntä, isäntä, nouskaa pian ylös. Nikki on kuollut kiukaalle. Sitä

Tellu oli viime aikoina tuntenut vaistomaista rauhattomuutta. Mistä

— Kunhan ei vain matkalla mitään onnettomuutta tapahtuisi, sanoi