Volume 43, Number 8 · May 9, 1996
The Scandal of the Classics
By Charles Rosen
Oeuvres Complètes, Volume 5: Ecrits sur la musique, la langue et le théâtre
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2,004 pp., 495 FF
The Anatomy of Melancholy, Volumes I–III
by Robert Burton
Oxford University Press/Clarendon Press, 2,034 pp., $160.00 (Volume I), $125.00 (Volume II), $125.00 (Volume III)
Oeuvres, Volume 2
by Marquis de Sade
Gallimard/Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1,447 pp., 360 FF
Sämtliche Werke, Band 7/I and 7/II
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1,976 pp., 240 DM (cloth); 292 DM (leather)
Werke, Band 3: Politische Schriften
by Bettina von Arnim
Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1,034 pp., 148 DM (cloth); 273 DM (leather)
A museum, it is now generally realized, deforms and disfigures the works of art it contains. It wrenches the pictures and statues out of the churches, palaces, and homes from which they drew their life and much of their significance, and exhibits them in an apparently neutral space, an intellectual void. Some of their functions have been wiped out, a good part of their meaning is lost. The walls have a color and texture different from the ones that originally set off the works of art, so that the harmony of the paint and the marble has been denatured, the space in which the art presents itself to the spectator has been altered. Although we may celebrate the uncanny aptitude of the objects in a museum to adapt to their new home, to present new aspects and even to convey some of the old meanings, historians deplore the inevitable loss that the institution entails. Nevertheless, we cannot do without museums: if they alter the meaning of the past beyond repair, they allow some of it to survive.
Review, 5830 words
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