Books on museums certainly keep coming. The historian Randolph Starn rightly noted in 2005 that the phenomenon of museology had burgeoned in little more than a decade, and the problem was now “how to navigate a flood of literature” (“A Historian’s Brief Guide to New Museum Studies,” The American Historical Review 110, no. 1 [February 2005]: 68). Andrew McClellan, whose Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994) immediately became a bulwark of the new, historically robust study of museums as institutions, remarked in 2007 that museum studies had recently “come of age” with a batch of three “hefty anthologies” of texts dealing with the subject (“Museum Studies Now,” Art History 30, no. 4 [September 2007]: 566). But there is still room left for the single author. These three original and distinctive books, not least the new study by McClellan himself, clearly establish the point.

In his wonderfully comprehensive and illuminating Curiosity and Enlightenment, Arthur MacGregor also uses the metaphor of coming of age to define his own subject matter. Yet in his case it is not a matter of museum studies achieving adulthood, but of the developmental history of the museum itself. His last chapter, “The Museum Comes of Age,” must admittedly be the most schematic in its aim of surveying the many different ways in which collecting practice and museum display diversified in the nineteenth century. It still presents one of the most subtle and convincing analyses of the establishment of museums types over the period. His earlier sections, moreover, break new ground in combining an exceptional amount of detailed information about collectors and collections with a broad general thesis that can hardly be disputed. The front and back covers of the book encapsulate his message concisely. On the back cover, the peerless Uppsala Cabinet, fabricated for Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the 1620s, stands in splendid isolation. On the front cover, the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons is portrayed at the point when it had been splendidly installed in the college buildings in the early nineteenth century. The costly bag of tricks devised for the entertainment of a northern court in Hainhofer’s Augsburg workshops has been superseded by an overwhelming array of classified scientific specimens. The presentation of the mythic Kingdom of Neptune has given way to the confabulation of earnest professional gentlemen in top hats and gowns.

Yet, having signaled this simple message both in his title and in his cover images, MacGregor actually carries out a very much more nuanced reading of the intervening historical development. He quotes with disapproval from an article of 1942 in which the virtuoso collector of the early modern period was characterized as “stopping in wonder at the point where the scientist begins” (213). In effect, the strong emphasis placed on epistemological breaks by Michel Foucault, and even the pioneering work on “curiosity” by Krzysztof Pomian, may have contributed to encouraging this view of an absolute discontinuity between two discursive regimes. But MacGregor is well aware that it does not convey the whole picture. Admittedly, he concedes, “the virtuoso went the way of the alchemist and the astrologer,” in so far as earlier concepts of scholarship were “consigned to dusty irrelevance by Enlightenment values” (12). But this does not obviate the point that the collections of the early modern period were already polyvalent in their terms of use: “the princely cabinet combined something of the functions of laboratory and workshop with those of repository” (213). “Scholarship and technical virtuosity” were already combining to initiate “new ideas,” and forging “new machines and instruments capable of putting new ideas into practice” (213).

Given this open attitude to the issues of historical development, the lasting value of MacGegor’s study will still reside in the sheer variety and richness of the individual examples that he chooses to discuss. It is, of course, easy to quibble about the degree of coverage that he gives to particular items. He discusses Bryan Faussett’s archaeological feats without saluting the antiquarian triumph of the now destroyed Faussett Pavilion; he traces the technical development of taxidermy without seeking to identify the distinctive contribution of the eccentric Yorkshire squire, Charles Waterton, whose fine specimens can still be viewed at the Wakefield City Museum; he discusses the ivory models of the eye circulating in the eighteenth century without mentioning the example bought by John Bargrave in Venice half a century before from a “High Dutch Turner,” and preserved in the Canterbury Cathedral Archive. But these few cases are vastly outnumbered by the occasions when he sketches out a satisfyingly full context for a cherished collection. Having myself been seduced by the spectacle of the exquisite Shell Cabinet of Clément Lafaille, presently installed in the Muséum of La Rochelle, I specially appreciate the way in which MacGregor weaves it into his wonderful chapter on “Museums and the Natural World.”

McClellan’s The Art Museum takes a very different tack. In fact his subtitle, From Boullée to Bilbao, reiterated in a collage of striking architectural features on the cover, seems to presage yet another act of homage to the inflated egos of museum architects. But this impressive study is nothing of the kind. In effect, it could be described as “museology” in its purest and most rigorous form. Thucydides thought that contemporary conflict was “worthy of a logos,” and so wrote his History of the Peloponnesian War. McClellan has rightly discerned that the contemporary study of museums revolves around a certain number of specific cultural and political issues, on which conflicting views are regularly aired. His self-appointed task has been to act as referee while staging and supervising the antithetical positions in these debates. It goes without saying that his own indispensable contribution is his deep knowledge of the history of the development of museums and collections, which invariably serves to place the polemics of the present day in a broader context. In respect of this approach, there is virtually no overlap between his book and that of MacGregor. A rare occasion when they do tackle the same material demonstrates their difference in orientation. MacGregor tells the fascinating story of the accumulation of great works of art in the Louvre as a result of the Napoleonic conquests, and then follows it up with an invaluable section on the accompanying development of the French provincial museums. McClellan situates his equally compelling account in a chapter dealing with “Restitution and Repatriation.” He is well aware (as indeed is MacGregor) that the acquisition strategies of the Napoleonic Louvre were hotly debated in the first place. But he uses that dispute to animate and enrich a burning issue of the present day. This approach implies that his study will prove specially useful for students of museology. No one could be more evenhanded in setting the agenda for ongoing debates on topics like the “commercialism” of museums, their duty to the “public,” and indeed their Faustian pact with modern architecture.

There is at the same time a more personal accent that occasionally emerges in McClellan’s balanced treatment. If MacGregor’s approach is consonant with his distinguished curatorial career at the Ashmolean Museum, McClellan has obviously been an acute observer, for many years, of the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston, and a diligent student of its history. Benjamin Ives Gilman, secretary of the museum in the interwar period and described here as an “aestheticist” through and through, makes frequent appearances in the text. John Walker, director of the National Gallery in Washington, DC, is quoted at length for his transgressive statement about what happens in museums when the doors close, and the employee “is transformed into a prince strolling alone through his own palace” (177). In the context of these debates, such an avowal offers a piquant contrast to the stern admonitions of some current museological critics. It also alerts us to a historical thread that is still waiting to be teased out. Sir Eric Maclagan (alas, consistently misspelled in the text, and described no doubt justifiably as an “aloof British aristocrat”) was an interwar Director of the Victoria and Albert once described to me as the “arbiter elegantium” of 1920s London. My informant was Michael Jaffé, himself a formidable art historian and Director of the Fitzwilliam at Cambridge, who had been granted an audience with this fearsome arbiter as a small boy. The mysterious Matthew Prichard, here discussed as the close colleague of Gilman at Boston but also a friend of Maclagan, happens to have been the mentor of Georges Duthuit, who consequently introduced his father-in-law Matisse to the qualities of Byzantine art. We might leave McClellan’s study with the conviction that investigating such connections could prove more rewarding, in the long run, than uniting to deplore the formula proposed by “The CEO of The Museum Co.”: “Anything Monet sells—anything” (219).

The fact that museums and collections have wormed their way into our consciousness, for good or ill, is certainly the message of Peter McIsaac’s Museums of the Mind. One would not expect from this study by a modern literary scholar a historical depth comparable to the two foregoing achievements. The “German Modernity” of his subtitle does in fact reach back as far as Goethe, and Schinkel’s Altes Museum is featured on the book’s cover. Yet, apart from the occasional reference to Napoleon’s “looting,” there is scant reference to the early nineteenth century. Susan Crane’s fine study, Collecting and Historical Consciousness in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), is cited. But the modes of German historical consciousness that she revealingly evoked are largely taken for granted. This is not a thesis that revolves (as did hers) around the fascinating antiquarian nobleman whom MacGregor all-too-cursorily introduces as “the tortuously titled Hans, Freiherr von und zu Aufsess” (285). Rather, it revolves around the legacy of the antiquarian-cum-modernist who has set his seal upon the historical consciousness of our own times: Walter Benjamin.

Nonetheless, in the juxtaposition of texts and examples from the German-speaking world that McIsaac has produced, an important truth does emerge. Museums are not just fodder for museology. Nor are they simply the end product of a long and intricate history of the collections and the institutions that have been constructed to give them permanence. Just as the passion for collecting develops from a special relationship between consciousness and the world of objects and representations, so the institutional form of the museum has looped back into our consciousness, and thus succeeded in creating representations anew. McIsaac credits to museum specialists Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach the invention of the concept of a “museum function” that travels from one institutional expression to another. But he is right to claim that they left this idea relatively undeveloped. He is fully justified in looking to German-speaking literary culture for the evidence of what he calls “inventorial consciousness,” as it has begun to feature in the imaginative creations of a group of contemporary writers.

A useful prelude to this theme, however, is his opening discussion of the museum’s contribution to the German educational philosophy (Bildung). This leads in turn to a close analysis of Goethe’s views on collecting and exhibiting, which find vivid expression in the fictional world of his Elective Affinities. A further main text for commentary is Wilhelm Raabe’s Celtic Bones (1863), which provokes a section on the mid-century archaeological discoveries at Hallstadt, and their significance for the early development of nationalism and tourism in Austria. Closest to Benjamin’s philosophy of collecting among the recent group of writers are W.G. Sebald, who writes about images rescued from junk shops and old photographic albums, and Durs Grünbein, whose vision of the past was evidently shaped by his childhood experience of the diorama. But the list extends to Austrian writers like Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard: the former in Malina (1971) making the Viennese Army Museum reveal the disavowed violence of Austria’s past, and the latter exclaiming through the persona of one of his characters: “All of Austria is in fact nothing but a Kunsthistorisches Museum” (214). For Siefried Lenz, in the final chapter, the aptly named novel Heimatmuseum (1978) displays ideology quite literally taking its protocols from the institution of the guided tour. Most of this is intended to come across, no doubt, as a warning. But the message might also encourage us to cultivate our own notional museums.