Autumn 2015


An Education


ers John Trasdescant the Elder and Younger that had been on display in their house in Lambeth, known as the Ark to reflect the idea that the whole world was contained under its roof. Ashmole’s acquisition of the collection by possibly dubious if certainly legal means remains controversial, but what is indisputable is that his decision to found his new public Museum within the University of Oxford not only allowed the preser- vation of much of the Tradescants’ collection but also signalled a change in its ambition and purpose. Ash- mole’s foundation embodied Baconian empiricist ide- als of the advancement of knowledge and understand- ing focussed on the Natural Sciences and these were made manifest in the arrangement of the new building he made to house it. The pioneering institution com- bined the public display of natural and manmade rari- ties on its top floor with the School of Natural History on the first floor and a chemistry laboratory (the ‘Ela- batory’) in the basement. The whole was presided over by Oxford’s first Professor of Chemistry. This com- bination of collection, teaching, experiment and re- search demonstrated a faith in the ability of the study of the material objects to reveal the secrets of nature, leading to an understanding of the world and our place within it. It is a combination that can still be claimed to define the role and purpose of the University Museum. The evolution of the Ashmolean from its origins to its current incarnation has owed as much to accident as to design. The intervening years have, among other enormous changes, seen the intellectual, academic, and physical separation of the Natural Sciences and the Humanities, which in Oxford saw the Ashmolean’s collections of naturalia become the core of the Mu- seum of Natural History, in 1861. One would also cer-


tainly be hard pressed to argue that the Museum’s col- lections as they exist today have been assembled with any coherent intellectual purpose. Certain areas of the collection were unquestionably acquired with spe- cific didactic aims – the collection of casts of classical sculpture and the comprehensive Marshall collection of Worcester porcelain being two examples with very different if similarly instructive ambitions. Others, such as the coin and archaeological collections, were assembled as the result of, and have remained a focus of sustained research. But much of the rest of collec- tion was acquired with altogether vaguer, if no less strongly held notions of cultivation and improvement. Our matchless collection of Michelangelo and Raphael drawings, for example, was given to the Museum with the explicit intention of improving the morals of Ox- ford’s students — the jury is still out on how well they have succeeded.


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Lantern, early 1600s, reputedly held by Guy Fawkes when he was apprehended in the cellars of Parliament on 5 Nov 1605


Studies of two Apostles for the Transfiguration by Raphael (1483–1520), a preparatory study for the Transfiguration altarpiece in the Vatican, his drawing shows Raphael’s powers of expression at their height


The Alfred Jewel, dated from the late 9th-century, is probably the single most famous archaeological object in England. The Old English inscription reads ‘Alfred ordered me to be made’


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