This anthology stems from the Getty’s three-pronged publications program which, in addition to the museum, includes the Conservation and the Research Institutes. Going far beyond the catalogues of permanent collections or special exhibitions that are the more customary publishing outlets for museums, an extensive and variegated scholarly literature has been the result. The current volume focuses on the origins and early development of the major Continental and English art museums during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. With thirteen essays, mostly on individual examples, each by different specialists, the studies have in common their orientation toward the earliest phases or prehistory of given institutions, beginning with the first demonstrated impulses to grant public access to collections. Thus, for example, Andrew McClellan’s essay on the Musée du Louvre, Paris, opens with Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne’s call in 1747 for pictures from the royal holdings in Versailles to be brought before the Paris public; McClellan then traces the efforts of the Comte d’Angiviller on behalf of converting the Louvre into an art museum during the 1770s, events, in other words, dating well before the pronounced goals of the Revolution. In her long chapter on Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, Paula Findlen tracks the Medici family’s approaches to their own cultural patrimony, the evolution of what was essentially a cabinet of curiosities into a gallery of art, and the so-called “Family Pact” of 1737, by which the last Medici princess, Anna Maria Luisa, dedicated those collections to the Tuscan citizenry. In the lively and intricate account that ensues, contributions and conflicts among the Uffizi’s succeeding custodians, antiquarians, and directors are detailed; Luigi Lanzi, generally considered the defining voice for Uffizi’s institutional future, makes his appearance only at the end.

Finding precedents for those modern institutional structures is the path taken by the editor, Carole Paul. In an introductory chapter she outlines the phenomenon of the Grand Tour and the princely collections in Rome that were among its destination highlights. Paul explores the collecting and exhibiting of art on the part of such families as the Colonna, Doria-Pamphilj, Borghesi, or that of Cardinal Alessandro Albani in Rome in terms of a suggested impact on those first transformations from royal or courtly collections into public institutions, such as the Uffizi, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the Louvre. Given this backdrop, it is noteworthy that, in conceiving a public art institution in Madrid, efforts should go, in 1809, toward assembling a collection of Spanish painting, especially also considering the expansive patronage and collecting by Spain’s Habsburg and Bourbon rulers of artists like Titian, Tiepolo, Rubens, and Bosch. Accordingly, Andrew Schulz’s chapter on the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, is a welcome addition particularly because the Prado has played a relatively minor role in the burgeoning (non-Spanish) literature on museums of the last twenty-five years, referred to in Paul’s preface.

At the same time, in contrast to those tourist magnets punctuating the Grand Tour, it is important to realize (however much the outstanding holdings of the Prado have long been admired) that Madrid was not heavily frequented by travelers up through the first years of the nineteenth century. All the more does one wonder about early audiences at the Nationalmuseum/Royal Museum in Stockholm, treated by Magnus Olausson and Solfrid Söderlind, especially compared to the inevitable mix of local and foreign visitors factored into the planning of museums like the Louvre and the Uffizi. As if taking their cue from Paul, Olausson and Söderlind follow the travels to Rome in 1783 of the Swedish monarch, Gustav III, whose encounter with ancient statuary in the Museo Pio-Clementino led to his resolve in the founding of a national collection. This is a point of departure also for Jeffrey Collins in his illuminating chapter on the Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican City. With another chapter by Paul devoted to the Capitoline Museum, the present volume places more emphasis than is often the case on Rome as museological model and its classical antiquities as desideratum for the new institutional contexts. Readers also learn that the seeming rights to ownership of classical statuary was a vexed issue from the beginning, only more so with the prevailing ethos of the later eighteenth century that held antiquity to be a universal, aesthetic, and humanistic ideal.

From the modern perspective, such tensions are familiar when it comes to the holdings of the British Museum; but Robert G. W. Anderson reminds the reader that, founded by the Authority of Parliament already in 1753, its core collection was heavily weighted toward naturalia: plants, fossils, minerals, and anatomical specimens. Nor were the contents of its three departments—Printed Books; Natural and Artificial Productions; Manuscripts, Coins and Medals—treated as artistic phenomena. Indeed, Anderson’s careful and even-handed coverage of all the steps in this institution’s development can leave the untutored reader wondering why the British Museum is considered a museum of art. To this end, whatever the politics surrounding their arrival, it is the Elgin Marbles that mark the turning point. For only through the deliberations concerning their acquisition in 1816, and in the sustained responses to their display, from 1817, did questions of artistic quality, aesthetic standards, and art-educational values come to the fore there.

In discussing the drive toward collecting sculpture among the princely families, Paul, in the first chapter, touches on some of the problems of integrating those examples into their palace settings and of insuring the clarity of their meaning within these displays. Evidence from the earliest history of public museums, moreover, indicates that sculpture was sometimes deemed a recalcitrant medium for inclusion, a factor Lanzi had grappled with in his discussion of the styles of ancient statuary while formulating his plans for the Uffizi in 1782. Indeed, granting a separation and hierarchy of the mediums that both art academy and public art museum fostered over time, those very problems of integration may have partly been responsible for the advent of the separate museum for sculpture. Furthermore, insofar as this medium, especially in the early phase of German museology, meant Classical statuary—in particular, Greek examples—aesthetic veneration could have similar results, with Munich’s Glyptothek providing distinct quarters for its prized acquisitions. Here one cannot help but invoke Germany’s own rich, indigenous sculptural tradition, whose carved examples were not classical but mainly devotional in purpose, and whose primary material was not marble but wood. Accordingly, civic, historical, or applied arts museums tended to become the first institutional homes for works such as those by Tilman Riemenschneider, Veit Stoss, et al. Spain was surely less obsessed than Germany, both archaeologically and philosophically, with classical models, but its parallel background of woodcarving in the service of religious altarpieces might be brought to bear on Schulz’s comment about sculpture playing a “relatively minor role” in the founding and subsequent history of the Prado (254). Madrid did not have a Glyptothek, but, in spite of giving priority to Spanish painting, emerging academic values could have kept the carved, wooden, retable altarpiece from being allowed to exemplify the sculptural medium for its museum of art.

Further chapters attest to Germany’s importance as museological capital of the nineteenth century, for which Tristan Weddigen studies the well-documented, eighteenth-century precursors in the princely collections at Dresden, Düsseldorf, and Kassel. The origins of the Altes Museum in Berlin are presented by Thomas W. Gaehtgens, while Munich’s Alte Pinakothek and the abovementioned Glyptothek are treated within one chapter by Adrian von Buttlar and Bénédicte Savoy. For these nineteenth-century cases, in contrast to the Louvre or the Uffizi, a new architecture was created expressly to house their art collections. Indeed, architectural considerations dominate the discussion, especially in Gaehtgens’s essay. In justly considering how architectural design and structure related to the way art and its history were made visible, the actual contents of these collections are barely addressed. Following King Friedrich Wilhelm’s decree to bring together works from the royal collections, Gaehtgens cites the 1821 purchase of the vast group of paintings belonging to Edward Solly as determinant for the building of the new museum structure in Berlin, but there is scant indication of the artists represented in this extraordinary collection. This is surprising mainly because its many trecento and quattrocento paintings by the likes of Taddeo and Agnolo Gaddi, Pietro Lorenzetti, Filippo Lippi, and Botticelli had already become prized as a category: stepping stones for the narrative sequence being charted within the walls of other public art institutions as, most conspicuously, in the assembly of paintings brought back from conquered territories and exhibited in 1814 (under the heading Les Écoles primitives) by Dominique-Vivant Denon at the Musée Napoléon (rededicated Louvre). That Gustav Waagen, the first director of Berlin’s Altes Museum, was thinking about such works in terms of their programmatic role within the museum’s historical display is evident from his responses as consultant to the parliamentary hearings during the contemporaneous founding and shaping of England’s National Gallery. There, affirming the canonical, Italian, High Renaissance art that should be the core of a serious collection, Waagen also advocated for a selection from those “early schools” of painting in order that the underpinnings of such a stylistic highpoint also be made evident.

The role of the fine arts in British society and the effects of the new museum building on the urban fabric around Trafalgar Square are among the social issues with which Brandon Taylor’s chapter on the National Gallery, London, is primarily concerned. For readers of The First Modern Museums of Art there are other basic features that could also use reiteration. With the aesthetic debates over the Elgin Marbles resolved and their drawing power at the British Museum secure, for the new, national art museum, painting was now the medium of choice; thus, too, the specialized precinct of the Pinakothek. If, as I have suggested, the difficulty of integrating sculpture may partly account for the emergence of the separate sculpture museum, the Pinakothek seems rather to have resulted from the growing priority of painting as a medium within the context of the early public museum. Even that universal survey museum, par excellence, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, discussed in Michael Yonan’s comprehensive chapter where, as he describes, energies first went into consolidating the many-faceted royal holdings—painting, sculpture, scientific objects, jewels, coins, etc.—once the next phase of distillation into separate arenas occurred, the surviving documentation is richest and most deliberate when it came to the paintings collections and how these works could best be presented to the public. It was through his groupings of paintings that Christian von Mechel, the Basel-born printmaker and art dealer called in to oversee the reinstallation in Vienna’s Belvedere, aimed to create a “visible history of art.”

Apart from many still-relevant museological issues that soon came into play at these institutions (configuring of gallery space, its interior decoration, lighting, the care and conservation of works of art, the nature and regulation of public access), one would do well to further explore the more conceptual outcomes of those substantially documented directives for what and how to exhibit, the values conveyed by different modes of grouping works, and what kind of historical structures emerged from the prescribed displays. For, more than merely in the granting of access, it is this organizational imperative that also defines the modern museum of art as public institution.