The Visual and the National: the Making of the Transylvanian Ethnographic Museum (1902)
The Visual and the National: the Making of the Transylvanian Ethnographic Museum (1902)

Summary/Abstract: The middle of the nineteenth century brought about the first debates related to the role and forms of the public museum in Hungary. There had been private museums before, but the founding of the Hungarian National Museum brought the issue of national representation to the forefront along with the similar Western examples of the time. Originally the only visitors of the Hungarian National Museum were researchers, the issue (and the fear) of the general public came into discussion only in the middle of the century. The process of “museification“ cannot and should not be separated from two nineteenth-century phenomena: the enormous need, impact and truth-making effect of visuality, respectively the “pantheonization“ of national culture, and the inscribing of grand national narratives into visual imagery.

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