UMAC is a relatively new committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), of which I am a member. Not very many people, even in my field, know about ICOM: "a non-governmental organization of roughly 20,000 museums and museum professionals from 140 countries dedicated to professional cooperation and exchange, dissemination of knowledge and raising public awareness of museums, training of personnel, advancement of professional standards, elaboration and promotion of professional ethics, and preservation of heritage and combating the illicit traffic in cultural property." That’s quite a huge responsibility, but the membership card certainly makes it worth it. Imagine, free access to nearly every museum on the planet!
We arrived there on a Sunday, and the city felt unusually quiet as we stepped out of the train station to make our way to our hotel. Save for the fast-food joints, most of the shops were closed, the streets clear, and the cobblestone paths empty. From a distance, we could hear the bells of the centuries old Uppsala Cathedral, Scandinavia’s oldest and largest, ringing – its celebratory spirit taking over this picture-perfect university town.
Our Uppsala experience began at the welcome reception for delegates at Museum Gustavianum, which houses Olof Rudbeck’s anatomical theater, one of Europe’s few preserved anatomical theaters from the 17th century. "Built in the form of an amphitheater with room for 200 people to stand… medical students and the fee-paying general public could view the dissections of executed criminals and other corpses carried out here until 1766."
In addition to an important Egyptology collection, the museum is also renowned for the Augsburg Art Cabinet, a miniature museum in its own right, which contains nearly 1,000 items. "With its opulent decorations and several hundred miniature paintings, the cabinet is a magnificent work of art. Inside the cabinet, there are nearly a thousand objects – from a dried baby crocodile to contemporary inventions and games of many sorts – intended to reflect the world view of the day."
Though conference delegates were invited from all over the world, most of the attendees came from Europe, North America, and Australia. It was certainly a welcome surprise then when Christine Khor, the new director of Singapore’s NUS Center for the Arts, which I visited last March, and formerly attached to its tourism board, entered the drawing room and greeted my wife, who is Filipino-Chinese, thinking that she had found a co-national. She was relieved just the same to find a fellow Asian. UST Museum of Arts and Sciences director Fr. Isidro Abaño joined us the next day. Funnily enough, we had never met before save for occasional correspondences in Manila, only to have our paths finally cross!
What made this meeting unique was that while we all worked in museums, our fields of interest were most diverse – running the gamut of history, medicine, anthropology, physics, natural environment, and the visual and performing arts. Our thoughts, however, converged on common ground – alma mater – and what it meant for a university to have a museum.
Being a source of intellectual wealth, we all agreed that university museums not only helped to promote schools, but also served as their voice or public persona. As symbols of academic freedom, we were one in saying that our museums embodied the integrity, disinterested inquiry, and high standards of the universities that we were attached to.
With a good collection to showcase, a dedicated staff, the right technical expertise, accessibility to an intellectual audience, and the prestige and credibility to back it up, a university museum could also certainly be considered as a tool for the promotion of scholarship and education, not to mention bringing honor to academia.
Museum Gustavianum was indeed a most apt embodiment of this synergy of higher learning and dedication to study. Some of Uppsala University’s more prominent professors included the botanist Carolus Linnaeus who devised the system of naming plants, and the astronomer Anders Celsius who invented the thermometer and made possible a universal basis of measuring temperature.
The university takes so much pride in Linnaeus’ contributions that his remains are buried in Uppsala Cathedral, which is located just across the museum. His home and private gardens are still preserved today, and form part of the university’s museum system. Moreover, 2007 will be celebrated as The Year of Linnaeus to mark his 300th birth anniversary.
On our visit to the Cathedral, we were fortunate enough to have met King Carl XVI Gustaf and his ravishing wife, Queen Silvia, the embodiment of Cinderella, having been a former airline stewardess. (It is a little known fact that she was the inspiration behind the hit song Dancing Queen by the Swedish pop group ABBA, which was first played at a televised tribute to the couple the day before their wedding in 1976.) The royals were there that afternoon for the annual meeting of the Swedish Lutheran Church – Uppsala after all being the country’s spiritual center.
Our hosts brought us to other places of interest, serving us tea at the Botanical Garden, which continues to be a living research environment. The Museum of Evolution (fossils, stuffed animals) really wasn’t my thing, but it did awaken me to the possibility of germinating ideas for a trans-disciplinary exhibition, and pushing for the creation of more science museums back home as a way to attract potential students, and promote professions.
Unfortunately, we did not have the time to enter the university library of Carolina Rediviva, which prides itself in housing the Silver Bible, Codex argenteus, which is written in Gothic language in silver script, as we were hurrying to Uppsala Castle for our private viewing of the university’s art collection which consisted of, among others, dazzling, gilt-framed and gold-leafed medieval Siennese school religious paintings, Dutch landscapes, peasant scenes by Hieronymous Bosch, and the renowned portrait of Martin Luther by Albrecht Dürer.
It was in the same castle where our weeklong conference drew to a close with a gala banquet hosted in our honor by the Governor of Uppsala Province. As we feasted on reindeer and arctic berries, toasted aquavit, and listened to the Renaissance music played on period instruments wafting through the Hall of State, I thought it most appropriate that we were ending our Swedish voyage in the very room that Queen Christina abdicated her throne in 1654 and sadly bade her subjects adieu, leaving her glorious country to embark southward on a journey of faith.
Like Christina, we too were heading to Italy.