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Oxford University Museum of Natural History is home to an internationally significant natural history collection,

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including the first dinosaur fossils to be scientifically described. And the only surviving soft tissue from a dodo anywhere in the world.

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But it is also one of the most remarkable buildings of the Gothic revival.

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A treasure house, a Victorian sculpture and design. My name is John Holmes.

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I'm professor of Victorian Literature and culture at the University of Birmingham and an honorary associate of the museum over a series of podcasts.

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I want to introduce you to the art and architecture of Oxford University Museum of Natural

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History and to give you a virtual tour of this extraordinary and beautiful building.

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In this first episode, we're going to look at how the museum came to be built involving a unique collaboration

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between the scientists at Oxford University and the most radical art movement of the day.

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The pre Rafeal like brotherhood. In the early 19th century, an Oxford education was notoriously narrow.

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All the students studied Latin and went on to read either classics or mathematics.

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There were a small number of established professorships in disciplines like medicine, astronomy and chemistry.

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But there were no degrees in science, only informal lecture courses for members of the university who happened to be interested.

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Such as the one shown in this early print given by the geologist, William Buckland.

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In 1847, Oxford scientists finally decided that the university was seriously at risk of falling behind the Times.

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They launched a sustained campaign for a new science faculty with its own degree programme.

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They proposed the building of a new university museum to bring together the diverse science collections,

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complete with lecture rooms, laboratories and a library.

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But the university took some persuading Oxford in the 19th century, was still a church foundation with most of the students en route for the clergy.

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Indeed, many of the scientists themselves were priests, including Buckland.

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Moreover, in the eighteen forties, it was in the grip of the track Tarion or Oxford movement led by John Henry Newman and Edward Pewsey,

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which had fired up the religious devotion of many Oxford students and academics with its call for a return to ancient ritual in the Church of England.

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Pewsey and his party were deeply suspicious of what they saw as the latent or not so latent materialism of science.

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The Oxford scientists had a job on their hands to reassure them in order to win the consent of the university as a whole.

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To the building of the new museum, Charles D'orbigny, who is professor of both chemistry and botany, presented the museum as a temple of science,

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showcasing all those wonderful contrivances by which the author of the universe manifests himself to his creatures.

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Henry Ecklund, who is the reader in Anatomy at Christchurch,

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wrote a public letter to the Regis professor of Divinity reassuring him and his colleagues that the science is comprised,

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facts connected, illuminated, interpreted so as to become the intelligible, embodied expression to his creatures of the will of God.

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For D'orbigny and darkland who led the campaign for the museum, science was not materialism,

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but natural theology, a means to understand God by understanding his creation.

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Even so, it took several years for them to convince the university that it ought to start taking and teaching science seriously.

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It was not until December 1853 that the university finally committed to buying

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a plot of land for the museum at the southern end of the university parks.

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The following April, the architectural competition for the building was launched.

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Once the university had decided to build its new museum, a key question alongside practicalities was what should it look like?

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The 1848 1950s were the height of the so-called battle of the styles with advocates of

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classical and Gothic at each other's throats over which was the nobler form of architecture.

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The orthodox view was that a classical style would be most suitable for a science museum.

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In keeping with the Enlightenment ideal of order and the history of science itself,

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with its origins in ancient Greece and its revival in the 17th century.

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But Oxford was a mediaeval city, and Ireland in particular was a keen supporter of the Gothic revival.

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John Ruskin, the leading art critic of his day, was a close friend of Oaklands.

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They had met as students at Christchurch.

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They worked together on the museum, was commemorated 40 years later in this photograph taken by Acton's daughter,

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Sarah Ruskin, lend his considerable support, their campaign to build the museum in a Gothic style.

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So did the diocese and architect George Edmonds Street, who pointed out that Gothic was not only a Christian style,

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but uniquely well suited to including decorations representing the natural world, which was, after all, what science was all about.

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In the end, the clinching argument was that Gothic, unlike classical architecture, was not dependent on symmetry.

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So the different departments could have rooms built to their own requirements with extensions added as necessary.

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In December, 1854, over seven years after Åkerlund and D'orbigny had launched their campaign for the new museum,

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the contract to build it was at last awarded to the Irish firm of architects Dean and Woodward, who had submitted a Gothic design for the competition.

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The museum building was not only going to house Oxford University science collections and departments,

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it was going to teach science in its very fabric. The columns around the central core would be geological samples.

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The roof made of iron and glass would be an object lesson in engineering. Above all, it would use art to teach science through Ruskin.

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Åkerlund had got to know the most audacious young artists of his time.

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The programme Feel Like Brotherhood was founded in 1848 by a group of seven young artists

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who are dissatisfied with the education they were receiving at the Royal Academy. London's most prestigious art school.

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They rejected the idea that the way to create great art was to imitate the old masters.

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In particular, Rafaelle. Instead, they believed that an artist should look at the world afresh as one of the brotherhood.

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William Michael Rossetti explained they were determined to use their art to pursue investigation

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for themselves and to make unflinching avowal of the result of such investigation.

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In making their case for independent investigative art, they look to two main models,

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the painters from before Rafaelle Contemporary with the Gothic architects who inspired Ecklund and Ruskin.

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And modern Victorian science. Another member of the Prieur, I feel like brotherhood.

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Frederick George Stevens, praised science for being precise in the search after truth.

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If he asked this adherents to fact, to experiment and not theory has added so much to the knowledge of man in science.

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Why may it not greatly assist the moral purposes of the arts?

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So the programme highlights modelled their art on science, and the Oxford scientists led by Åkerlund repaid the compliment,

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adopting pre RAFEAL autism as their model for how art could reveal the science of the natural world.

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Ecklund had experience of the scientific precision of Prieur feel like art literally firsthand on a holiday in Scotland in 1853.

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He had held the easel as the most gifted pre Rafeal light painter John ever at M.A.,

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applied the first touches to the background to his portrait of Ruskin.

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Now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The detail of Malays, observations of the rocks, the plants,

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the movement of water all painted directly onto the canvas in the open air is astonishing.

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When he came to commission the decorative art for his new museum,

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Åkerlund insisted that its transcript of nature be painstaking, sagacious and honest,

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declaring that for this high standard of artistic precision,

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we owe a just debt of gratitude to the young school of artists called half in jest pre RAFEAL lights.

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The art at the museum was not only modelled on pre roughie elitism, the programme violates themselves, were closely involved.

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti advised on the project. Ruskin and others contributed designs.

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The sculptors Thomas Wilner and Alexander Monroe carved the first of the statues of scientists which surround the central court.

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Over the rest of this series, we will look in detail at the art that resulted from this extraordinary collaboration.

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Beginning next time with the carving of the museum's facade before we move into the sanctuary of the temple of science itself.