H. Szilasi Ágota - Várkonyi Péter - Bujdosné Pap Györgyi - Császi Irén (szerk.): Agria 50. (Az egri Dobó István Vármúzeum Évkönyve - Annales Musei Agriensis, 2017)

Lukács László : Pünkösdi zöldág-hordás

SándorBodó

MUSEUM FOUNDERS IN EUROPE UP UNTIL THE END

OF THE 19™ CENTURY

This study wishes to explore the founders of museums, these cultural institutions that are rooted in European culture. From the mid- 18th to the late 19th centuries royal collections were turned into museums (e.g. Louvre, Hermitage, Prado, Art History and Natural History Museum). In European nation states from the 16th century until the end of the 19th century, however, vast amounts of relics in natural sciences, history and arts were collected first by the secular and church aristocracy, then from the age of humanism by the bourgeoisie, thus paving the way for the foundation of museums. Museums were established by Italian bishops (Paolo Giovio, Como) in the mid-16th century, by a Bolognese patrician (Ferdinando Cospi) in the mid-17th century, by botanists and gardeners (John Tradescant the Elder and the Younger) in London, by a historian, solicitor and alchemist (Elias Ashmole) in Oxford and by a university professor, physicist and physician (Johann Daniel Major) in Kiel. The British Museum, the worlds first public national museum, grew from the collection bequeathed by the physician and botanist Hans Sloane "for the benefit of mankind”.

The study looks at most of the museums founded during the 18th and 19th centuries by the scientific, antiquary and archeological societies of the middle classes. It presents many examples from Britain, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Austria for the establishment and maintenance of institutions that expressed and reinforced national and local identities.

Although there was a national museum (Nagycenk, then Buda/Pest) in Hungary in the early 19th century and the Brukenthal Museum was also opened in Nagyszeben (Sibiu), the busiest period for museum founding was the second half of the 19th century. 9 museums were established and operated by the state, 8 by private persons (members of the nobility and the bourgeoisie), 6 by county authorities, 16 by town municipalities, 7 by churches and 38 by the societies of the urban middle classes.

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