Incrustated Scull and Sword
Description:
"Fig. 1," the image on the right, depicts a petrified ("incrustated") skull. "Fig. 2" depicts a sword, also petrified.
Copyright:
Copyright 2009, Department of Special Collections, Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
Accession Number:
Thordarson T 4136
Associated Places
The British MuseumAmong the Numbers whom Curiosity prompted to get a Sight of this Collection, I was of Course one; but the Time allowed to view it was so short, and the Rooms so numerous, that it was impossible, without some Kind of Directory, to form a proper Idea / of the Particulars. (Dodsley xiv)Eric Gidal notes that the British Museum was unique in this unprecedented degree of access granted to the public: "As an institution founded ‘not only for the inspection and entertainment of the learned and curious, but for the general use and benefit of the public,’ the British Museum marked a union of legitimization and freedom both aesthetic and social" (21). With free admission came crowds, and with those crowds came anxiety regarding who ought to see the collections as well as how they ought to be seen. Over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the museum continued to gain popularity. By 1805, 12,000 people visited annually. By 1817 that number grew to 40,000, and by 1833 over 210,00 people came each year to see the collections (Goldgar 229-30). As many reviewers noted, large and often raucous crowds were now an inescapable part of the museum-going experience:
[T]he bustling crowds which thrice-a-week are to be seen in the British Museum, swarming with aimless curiosity from room to room, loudly expressing their wonder and disapprobation of the very things most worthy of admiration, or passing with a vacant gaze those precious relics of antiquity, of which it is impossible that they can understand the value as they are, for the most part, insensible to the hallowing associations, which render these objects the links of connexion between distant ages and our own. (“A Visit to the British Museum” 42)The behavior of these crowds generated considerable anxiety in the press, with one 1839 reviewer even going so far as to publish three “cautions” for visitors to the British Museum and other public exhibitions: “Touch nothing,” “Don’t talk loud,” and “Be not obtrusive” (“Synopsis” 302-3).
Associated Texts
The long title of the Museum Britannicum, a guidebook to the British Museum, is as follows:Subject
“Table III, Incrustated Scull and Sword. Both of these were found in the Tiber in Rome, and are featured on two separate drawings” (Thornton 69).Theme
Classification. Museum.
Significance
Among the vast collection of “Sloaniana” in the British Museum, 756 examples of “humana, as calculi, anatomical preparations, &c” were recorded in “An Account of the British Museum,” published in The New London Magazinein July 1788 (378). The “Incrustated Scull” would presumably fall under this category, while the accompanying sword may well have been counted among Sloane’s 1,125 man-made “Antiquities” (378). Apart from their shared provenance, what unites these two specimens is the characteristic of incrustation, or “petrification,” which Rymsdyk attributes to the mineral-rich waters of the Tiber. The sword and skull also caught the eye of R. Dodsley, who catalogs them in his 1762 guide to the British Museum: "Under this Title are deposited a human Skull and Sword, both of which are completely covered over and incrustated with the same stony Substance to a considerable Thickness, yet without losing their Form. They were found in the Tyber at Rome" (108). Dodsley seems similarly captivated by the process that forms—or alters—these objects:In the Cabinet between the Windows are a great Variety of Incrustations and Petrifications, as Shells, Corals, and other Things: In the Petrifications the original Substance is entirely changed to a Stone; in the others it is only completely covered with a stony Matter, the Substance still retaining its pristine Qualities. There are many Springs in England and elsewhere, which incrustate whatever is left in them, for any length of time, with a Stony Surface . . . In some Places the Earth effects the same Thing on whatever is buried in it. (101)The manner in which both the man-made sword and natural specimen of the skull have been altered by a remarkable natural process seems to govern both Rymsdyk’s interest in and association of these two otherwise disparate objects. Rymsdyk’s drawings, then, suggest a classification of these objects based upon an alteration rather than an inherent characteristic—or perhaps this alteration undermines the potential for any definitive rationale for classification. Sloane’s collections clearly emerged from the tradition of the early modern Wunderkammern, which, as Daston and Park have argued, prized objects that “challenged the metaphysical opposition of art and nature” (Daston and Park 253). It is no surprise, then, that the sword and skull present a similar dilemma: “Most wondrous of all were objects so ambiguous that spectators could not decide whether they were works of art or works of nature” (Daston and Park 287). Rymsdyk's attentiveness to the sword and skull as objects altered and imposed upon by a natural process emphasizes their curious status as classificatory puzzles, neither wholly man-made nor entirely natural.
Bibliography
“An Account of the British Museum.” New London Magazine 4.40 (1788): 377-78. Print.Artist Unknown
Delineator:
Image Date:
1791