sionaries to Iraq—who negotiated these acquisi tions, and it is clear that their value to these men and their alma maters lay in their relation ship to Biblical history and their use in moral instruction. In a letter of 7 August 1855, Reverend Dwight Marsh offered five of the slabs to Williams College and informed President Mark Hopkins that "my great desire 8c prayer is that students who look upon the relics of the past may think wisely of time 8c be led to take a deeper interest in the efforts to rescue the degraded from the beastliness of their present life, 8c the eternal dangers im
now stripped of its natural and ethnographic specimens. While thirty years earlier Yale could speak of the wedding of art and science, Martin Brimmer described the new Bowdoin museum as a "building devoted not to religion, nor to letters, nor to science, but to art."69 This sudden narrowing of the focus of the col lege museum followed three decades of impas sioned calls for public art museums. Early in the nation's history, those who supported the arts were forced to contend with almost iconoclastic opposition 011 the part of those who equated art with decadence, an opposition encapsulated in John Adams's widely-quoted assertion that "from the dawn of history [the arts] have been prostitut
pending. . . . May they remember that God is older than the ages—that the glorious future of America is not eternity."68 Bowdoin's slabs were consigned to the art gallery built as part of the college chapel, as was much of Bowdoin's art collection before 1894, but the location was appropriate given the degree to which art was considered illustrative of the history of religion. The historical and moral lessons to be learn ed from art depended largely upon its subject
ed to the service of superstition and despotism."70 As the nineteenth century progressed, however, the passion for culture grew. Enthusiasm for the arts covered a broad spectrum of positions rang ing from jingoistic insistence on the superior character of American art to an obsequious wor ship of the European Old Masters, but both camps held that Americans needed to become cultured and that museums were one means to that end. European critics agreed. When Jarves exhibited his collection of Italian primitives in Paris in 1859, Thomas Adolphus Trollope wrote that "they have furnished forth galleries for the delight and art instruction of every nation of Europe, and now they are called 011 to perform a similar civilizing office on the other side of the
matter, of course, but questions of aesthetics were by no means ignored. Those questions were asked not in the context of dispassionate formal analysis, however, at least not in En gland and America, where the moralistic ap proach of John Ruskin was the predominant method of appraising the value of art. For most of the artists and critics of the late nineteenth centiny, aesthetic excellence was both an end in itself and a means to an end, having as its goals the elevation of public taste and the pro motion of what was loosely termed "culture."
Atlantic."71 Jarves entertained the same hope, and although his collection was eventually consigned to a college museum, he continually advocated the establishment of public museums for the edu cation and edification of the American people. He shared this attitude with men like Comfort, Benson, and Perkins, all of whom subscribed to the view that art had the power to raise both the
THE UTILITY OF BEAUTY
A
s noted above, the realms of art and sci ence—once juxtaposed if not actually com bined in the Wunderkammer•—would eventually separate and become independent, both physical
moral tone and the aesthetic sensibilities of its audience. Perkins maintained that museums could "raise the standards of taste, furnish materi als for study to artists and archaeologists, affect industry, and provide places of resort for the gen eral public where amusement and unconscious
ly and intellectually. In 1893 the ethnographic specimens that shared Street Hall with Yale's art collection were moved to the Peabody. One year later, Bowdoin College dedicated a museum com
instruction will be combined."72 It was an idea whose time had come. In 1870, the same year in which Perkins issued that state
mitted solely to the fine arts, the same year in which Oxford opened a new Ashmolean Museum
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