The Display of Religious Objects. The Enlightenment Gallery in the British Museum and Sir Hans Sloane's Miscellanies
Vortrag
Dr Kim Sloan Official position: Curator of British Drawings and Watercolours before 1880 and the Francis Finlay Curator of the Enlightenment Gallery Principal Investigator - 'Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane's Catalogues of his Collections' (a Leverhulme Trust funded Research Project) Department of Prints and Drawings The British Museum
Short biography:
Kim Sloan, PhD (London), F.S.A., has been the curator of British Drawings and Watercolours at the British Museum since 1992 and has written several books on landscape drawing including monographs on Alexander and John Robert Cozens (Yale 1986) and J.M.W. Turner (BM 1998) as well as studies of Victorian painting in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery (1989) and A Noble Art: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters1600-1800 (BM 2000). In 2003 she was also appointed the Francis Finlay Curator of the Enlightenment Gallery and her books and exhibitions at the BM have included Vases and Volcanoes and In Search of Classical Greece (1996 and 2013, both with Ian Jenkins), Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the 18th century (2003), A New World: England's first view of America (2006) and The Intimate Portrait (2013; with the Scottish NPG). She teaches a joint MA on 18th century studies with King's College London and is Principle Investigator on a Leverhulme Research Project on Sir Hans Sloane's manuscript catalogues of his collection. The exhibition to accompany Places of the Mind: British landscape watercolours and drawings 1850-1950 (Thames & Hudson) in the Prints and Drawings gallery in the British Museum (Feb- Aug. 2017) attracted over 400,000 visitors.
"The display of religious objects: The Enlightenment Gallery in the British Museum and Sir Hans Sloane's Miscellanies"
In order to introduce the place of religious objects in the British Museum and Enlightenment Gallery, the paper will begin with an examination of the religious objects in the collection of Sir Hans Sloane, whose catalogue of 'Miscellanies' is currently the subject of a Leverhulme research project. His collection of natural and artificial curiosities was to become the foundation of the great encyclopaedic British Museum that opened to the public in 1753. The catalogue helps us to understand how he acquired, described, understood and displayed these objects. This will provide a context for a discussion of the Enlightenment Gallery that opened 250 years later as a place in the British Museum where we might explore 18th century ways of thinking about, understanding and seeing the world and its cultures through the eyes of Sloane and the other men and women who collected the objects that came into the Museum during the long 18th century. The display is organized around seven sections devoted to the birth of modern disciplines, one of which is titled 'Religion and Ritual', reflecting the importance of religious thought through the century. But objects are used not only in that section but throughout the Gallery to explore various aspects of the study of religion in the 18th century, such as the history of religions in Britain's own ancient past, the role that religion played in hindering the discovery of the age of the earth, the study and publication of comparative religions, ancient and modern, and of pantheons of gods. This paper will ask where the objects came from, where and how they are displayed and how their context in the gallery enables them to speak and interact in a different way than their identities would at first suggest.
06. Juni 2019, 19:00 Uhr
IZEA, Bibliothek
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