'Museum With Those Goddesses': Bloom and the Dublin Plaster Casts

Abstract

During the second half of the nineteenth century, as Dublin established its own public art gallery and museum, the display of white plaster casts of wellknown Greco-Roman statuary dominated the visitor’s first encounter with the collections housed in these new temples of art. The National Gallery of Ireland, in Merrion Square, opened its doors in 1864 while a Museum of Science and Art, which eventually became the National Museum of Ireland, situated only a short distance away on Kildare Street, was accessible to visitors from 1890. Both of these state-funded institutions, in the early decades of their existence, displayed classical casts in their entrance halls or first rooms and such an introduction coloured the whole visiting experience. As museum culture developed in the nineteenth century, many art institutions in Europe and North America displayed authentic classical statuary or casts in their entrance halls or rotundas so as to assuage contemporary fears that the art viewer would be bombarded with the new and/or the unknown. In 1828, the architect of Berlin’s Altes Museum, Karl Friedrich Schinkel and the Museum’s first director, Gustav Friedrich Waagen, were of the opinion that such a display would ‘first delight, then instruct.’1 By the end of the century, such a philosophy extended as far as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. This museum opened in 1876 and the classical greeted the visitor there well into the early years of the twentieth century.2 The story is no different in Ireland. This essay will chart the display of Greco-Roman casts in Ireland from their early nineteenth-century appearance in Cork to the National Gallery of Ireland’s acquisition of casts in the eighteen sixties. It will end with a consideration of Leopold Bloom’s fictitious visit in 1904 to the Kildare Street ‘museum with those goddesses’ (U 13.1215). The aim is to convey a sense of what was actually available as one wandered into a gallery or museum and as one participated in the newly accessible era of cultural consumption.