An Education
The Hunt in the Forest, painted about 1470 by Paolo di Dono, called Ucello (1397–1475), who was famous in his lifetime as a painter of perspective and nature
Autumn 2015
But if today’s Ashmolean is unrecognisable from Ashmole’s original institution it is I believe important, as a world-class museum within a world-class univer- sity, that we retain our founder’s ambition in asserting and demonstrating our role in enabling us all to un- derstand the world and our place within it. In today’s political and educational climate with its emphasis on the utilitarian and the instrumental and its privileg- ing of the sciences over the humanities, we must shout loudly about the vital importance of alter- native ways of looking at the world. The humanities are after all the study of what makes us human. It is not grand- standing to suggest that only through studying, imagining, and engaging with temporally, geographically, or socially remote ways of living, thinking, and acting can we ever hope to under- stand who we are and how we relate to the complicated world in which we live; it is simply true. Museums and universities are the two most important spaces in which these arguments can be made and demonstrated and perhaps nowhere more powerfully than in university museums. This is partly because people like museums. The last few de- cades have seen an extraordinary growth in museum visitors, thanks in large part to our efforts, prompted and aided by Lottery funding, to make museums more approachable, engaging and enjoyable. Today more people go to museums than ever before with the Ash- molean alone seeing its visitor numbers triple since its 2009 redevelopment. There is an unquestioned public appetite for engaging with the past and the stories of human thought, action and experience that can emerge so powerfully through the unique pull and immediacy of physical objects. You do not need to persuade those of us who love museums of the revela- tions made possible, the thoughts engendered and the understanding encouraged through the experience of confronting museum objects and artworks; and lots of us love museums.
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The position of the Ashmolean between this broad and engaged public and Oxford’s academic community places us in a uniquely strong position to demonstrate the value not only of our collections but also of the re- search, teaching and thinking that allows museum collections to continue to speak. It is only through our own continuously evolving understanding, founded on research, that our collections, exhibitions and pro- grammes can engage as wide a public as pos- sible with big questions and ideas around human history and exchange; around cultural difference and continuity; around our urge to create and com- municate; around “what it means to be human.”
If the Ashmolean is to match our claim to be the world’s greatest uni- versity museum we need to meet a number of obligations, all of which are challenging. We must be ambi- tious. We must champion and en- courage our own research and en-
gage with academic communities to enable them to use our collections, archives and people. We must make our collections and what we know about them truly accessible, both physically and virtually — and one can-
not overstress the importance of open digi- tal access — to researchers and public alike. We must seek to engage our public through displays, interpre- tation, exhibitions and programmes with ambitious ideas and encourage our curators and academics out of silos in order to do so. Above all we must retain the confidence of the Ashmolean’s founders and progeni- tors in recognising the unique strength of a collection within a university as a vehicle for understanding the world and ourselves.
An Elegant Society: Adam Buck, artist in the age of Jane Austen runs until 4 October Titian to Canaletto: Drawing in Venice runs from 15 October to 10 January
www.ashmolean.org
Left Powhatan’s Mantle, wall-hanging associated with Chief Powhatan (died 1618) best known as the father of Pocahontas. All images © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
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