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 of 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 this 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 the last episode we looked at how the carvings on the museum's façade
illustrate natural history and taught the lesson that nature was the work of
God. In this episode I want to take you into
the museum itself, to show you how Oxford's Victorian
scientists worked with some of the most gifted artists of their day
to create a unique physical model of the natural world.
The central court of Oxford University Museum of Natural History is not just
one of the most visually striking pieces of Victorian architecture,
with its colorful marble columns and beautiful sculpture and ironwork, and its
magnificent Gothic iron vaulting supporting its tiled glass roof; every
one of these details is part of a decorative schema designed
to turn the building itself into an object lesson in natural science.
Henry Acland, at the time Lee's Reader in Anatomy at Christ Church,
explained the logic of this schema to the Oxford Architectural Society in June
1855, a few days before the foundation stone
was laid. "Oxford", he said, "was about to perform an
experiment. It was about to try how Gothic art could deal with those railway
materials iron and glass; and he was convinced, when
the interior court of this museum was seen –
with its roof of glass supported by shafts of iron,
while the pillars and columns around were composed of variously coloured
marbles illustrating different geological strata and ages of the world,
and the capitals represented the several descriptions of floras –
that it would be felt that problems had been solved of the greatest importance
to architecture." So the roof would show what engineering
could achieve by combining the structural ingenuity of the Gothic arch
with modern materials. The columns would teach geology through
their materials and botany through their carving, and the
whole exercise was to be an experiment designed to solve problems
in imitation of the scientific method itself.
The roof of the museum was subcontracted by the architect Benjamin Woodward
to Francis Skidmore, an ironworker from Coventry
who worked with many of the leading architects of the Gothic revival.
Skidmore was deeply influenced by the writings of John Ruskin,
who as we saw in the last episode also worked on the design of the museum.
Ruskin hated mechanization, championing instead the craftsmanship of the
individual worker. For this reason he embraced wrought iron,
which was worked by hand, but rejected cast iron, which was
manufactured without any creative input from the labourers in the foundry.
Woodward initially proposed a roof structure combining wrought and cast
iron but Skidmore produced a cheaper quotation
for a roof made entirely of wrought iron and glass. The University snapped up the
bargain and work began on Skidmore's preferred
design. Though his ideological commitment to wrought iron held firm, the material
itself was not strong enough to support the
glass roof, which collapsed partway through construction in February 1858.
Skidmore had to fall back on Woodward's
original proposals. The finished roof retains the original
wrought iron spandrels for decoration and extra support,
but with curved cast iron girders taking the weight.
Acland noted ruefully that the museum's first experiment in engineering had not
been a complete success, but to me the cast iron arches are the
perfect combination of gothic architecture with "those railway
materials iron and glass". The effect is
inspirational, as the iron girders carry your eyes
upward to the light shining through the glass roof.
Acland explained to the Oxford Architectural Society how the museum's
columns would teach geology and botany, but it was his colleague John Phillips
who put this into practice. Phillips was a career geologist who had
cut his teeth working with his uncle William Smith,
the creator of the first geological map of England and Wales.
Philips had been director of the Yorkshire Museum, taught at universities
in London and Dublin, and worked for the Geological Survey.
In 1853, he joined Oxford University as the Deputy Reader in Geology,
before being appointed as the first Keeper of the new Oxford University Museum.
Phillips mapped out which types of rock
and plant were to be shown where on the colonnade which runs around the central
court. The columns themselves were made of
polished limestone marbles, each a sample of a different rock.
Together they form an encyclopaedia of the geology of the British Isles.
They're still used to this day by lecturers at Oxford to teach their
students about the composition and formation of rocks from different
geological epochs, while the variations in the colours,
patterns, textures, even the temperatures of the columns,
create a unique and beautiful aesthetic experience.
To accompany his geological encyclopaedia Phillips planned out a botanical
equivalent, this time covering not just Britain and
Ireland but the whole world. Oxford University's Botanic Gardens are
on a different site from the museum, so to complement the museum's zoological
collections the capitals of the columns were carved with plants showing their
characteristic forms, the stages of their growth and even the
animals that might live among them. The capitals surrounding the ground
floor were carved by the brothers James and John O'Shea and their nephew Edward Whelan.
They worked from living specimens taken
from the Botanic Gardens themselves. The carvings they produced are some of
the loveliest pieces of decorative sculpture from the whole Victorian age.
Their precision and vitality is extraordinary. The plants are cut from
stone yet they seem alive, their fronds unfurling before our eyes.
Birds tread carefully through them, picking up the forms of the leaves themselves.
There are even snakes hunting the birds, as the birds
themselves are hunting insects. And all this with meticulous scientific
accuracy of observation. Acland said that the O'Sheas' brief for
their carvings at the museum was inspired by the precise observation of
nature in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
The Pre-Raphaelites themselves were given the job of completing the museum's
scientific decorative schema by carving the first statues for a
pantheon of pioneering scientists to stand around the central court.
On the recommendation of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Thomas Woolner,
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's resident sculptor, and their friend and
mentor John Lucas Tupper received the contracts for the statues
of the founders of empirical philosophy, Sir Francis Bacon,
and modern biology, Linnaeus. Another associate of Rossetti's, Alexander Munro,
was asked to carve no fewer than seven more statues, including Galileo,
Newton, and Hippocrates. The Pre-Raphaelite statues at Oxford
University Museum are remarkable partly for their fine detail –
Bacon's ruff for example, or Linnaeus's fur suit –
but even more for their animation. These are scientists
in the act of doing science. Bacon's hand gesture shows that he's making a point,
teaching us how to study the world around us; Linnaeus is gathering
specimens; Galileo is shown not holding a telescope,
but inventing the telescope by working out how to use two different
lenses together. What these statues show us is that the
scientists' greatest tool is their imagination.
These are scientists as artists, repaying Acland's compliment that Pre-Raphaelite
art matches up to the standard of science.
Charles Daubeny, professor of Chemistry and Botany at Oxford,
imagined the central court of the museum as the sanctuary of the temple of
science. With its Gothic vaulting and glass
ceiling, its celebration of natural forms and materials,
and its pantheon of scientists doing science, it is exactly that.
It is also simply the best place in the world to appreciate the brilliance of
Pre-Raphaelite sculpture. In the next episode we will move beyond
the central court to look at how art and architecture were used to shape
distinctive spaces for the new scientific disciplines of
the 19th century at the museum.