Oxford University Museum of Natural History is home to an internationally significant natural history collection,
including the first dinosaur fossils to be scientifically described. And the only surviving soft tissue from a dodo anywhere in the world.
But it is also one of the most remarkable buildings of the Gothic revival.
A treasure house, a Victorian sculpture and design. My name is John Holmes.
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.
I want to introduce you to the art and architecture of Oxford University Museum of Natural
History and to give you a virtual tour of this extraordinary and beautiful building.
In this first episode, we're going to look at how the museum came to be built involving a unique collaboration
between the scientists at Oxford University and the most radical art movement of the day.
The pre Rafeal like brotherhood. In the early 19th century, an Oxford education was notoriously narrow.
All the students studied Latin and went on to read either classics or mathematics.
There were a small number of established professorships in disciplines like medicine, astronomy and chemistry.
But there were no degrees in science, only informal lecture courses for members of the university who happened to be interested.
Such as the one shown in this early print given by the geologist, William Buckland.
In 1847, Oxford scientists finally decided that the university was seriously at risk of falling behind the Times.
They launched a sustained campaign for a new science faculty with its own degree programme.
They proposed the building of a new university museum to bring together the diverse science collections,
complete with lecture rooms, laboratories and a library.
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.
Indeed, many of the scientists themselves were priests, including Buckland.
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,
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.
Pewsey and his party were deeply suspicious of what they saw as the latent or not so latent materialism of science.
The Oxford scientists had a job on their hands to reassure them in order to win the consent of the university as a whole.
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,
showcasing all those wonderful contrivances by which the author of the universe manifests himself to his creatures.
Henry Ecklund, who is the reader in Anatomy at Christchurch,
wrote a public letter to the Regis professor of Divinity reassuring him and his colleagues that the science is comprised,
facts connected, illuminated, interpreted so as to become the intelligible, embodied expression to his creatures of the will of God.
For D'orbigny and darkland who led the campaign for the museum, science was not materialism,
but natural theology, a means to understand God by understanding his creation.
Even so, it took several years for them to convince the university that it ought to start taking and teaching science seriously.
It was not until December 1853 that the university finally committed to buying
a plot of land for the museum at the southern end of the university parks.
The following April, the architectural competition for the building was launched.
Once the university had decided to build its new museum, a key question alongside practicalities was what should it look like?
The 1848 1950s were the height of the so-called battle of the styles with advocates of
classical and Gothic at each other's throats over which was the nobler form of architecture.
The orthodox view was that a classical style would be most suitable for a science museum.
In keeping with the Enlightenment ideal of order and the history of science itself,
with its origins in ancient Greece and its revival in the 17th century.
But Oxford was a mediaeval city, and Ireland in particular was a keen supporter of the Gothic revival.
John Ruskin, the leading art critic of his day, was a close friend of Oaklands.
They had met as students at Christchurch.
They worked together on the museum, was commemorated 40 years later in this photograph taken by Acton's daughter,
Sarah Ruskin, lend his considerable support, their campaign to build the museum in a Gothic style.
So did the diocese and architect George Edmonds Street, who pointed out that Gothic was not only a Christian style,
but uniquely well suited to including decorations representing the natural world, which was, after all, what science was all about.
In the end, the clinching argument was that Gothic, unlike classical architecture, was not dependent on symmetry.
So the different departments could have rooms built to their own requirements with extensions added as necessary.
In December, 1854, over seven years after Åkerlund and D'orbigny had launched their campaign for the new museum,
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.
The museum building was not only going to house Oxford University science collections and departments,
it was going to teach science in its very fabric. The columns around the central core would be geological samples.
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.
Åkerlund had got to know the most audacious young artists of his time.
The programme Feel Like Brotherhood was founded in 1848 by a group of seven young artists
who are dissatisfied with the education they were receiving at the Royal Academy. London's most prestigious art school.
They rejected the idea that the way to create great art was to imitate the old masters.
In particular, Rafaelle. Instead, they believed that an artist should look at the world afresh as one of the brotherhood.
William Michael Rossetti explained they were determined to use their art to pursue investigation
for themselves and to make unflinching avowal of the result of such investigation.
In making their case for independent investigative art, they look to two main models,
the painters from before Rafaelle Contemporary with the Gothic architects who inspired Ecklund and Ruskin.
And modern Victorian science. Another member of the Prieur, I feel like brotherhood.
Frederick George Stevens, praised science for being precise in the search after truth.
If he asked this adherents to fact, to experiment and not theory has added so much to the knowledge of man in science.
Why may it not greatly assist the moral purposes of the arts?
So the programme highlights modelled their art on science, and the Oxford scientists led by Åkerlund repaid the compliment,
adopting pre RAFEAL autism as their model for how art could reveal the science of the natural world.
Ecklund had experience of the scientific precision of Prieur feel like art literally firsthand on a holiday in Scotland in 1853.
He had held the easel as the most gifted pre Rafeal light painter John ever at M.A.,
applied the first touches to the background to his portrait of Ruskin.
Now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The detail of Malays, observations of the rocks, the plants,
the movement of water all painted directly onto the canvas in the open air is astonishing.
When he came to commission the decorative art for his new museum,
Åkerlund insisted that its transcript of nature be painstaking, sagacious and honest,
declaring that for this high standard of artistic precision,
we owe a just debt of gratitude to the young school of artists called half in jest pre RAFEAL lights.
The art at the museum was not only modelled on pre roughie elitism, the programme violates themselves, were closely involved.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti advised on the project. Ruskin and others contributed designs.
The sculptors Thomas Wilner and Alexander Monroe carved the first of the statues of scientists which surround the central court.
Over the rest of this series, we will look in detail at the art that resulted from this extraordinary collaboration.
Beginning next time with the carving of the museum's facade before we move into the sanctuary of the temple of science itself.