Ashmolean

There is a new exhibition on at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, and it is... the Ashmolean Museum. Almost a year after the doors were locked to allow completion of a huge redevelopment programme, the self-proclaimed “world’s oldest public museum” has become, for the time being, the world’s newest.

Rick Mather Architects and the specialist exhibition designers Metaphor have accomplished what is far more than a makeover. After spending £61m over three years, they have replaced half the building and in the process increased the floor area by 50 per cent, rethought the method of display, flooded the place with light and colour and added a rooftop restaurant that will be open late, even when the museum itself is shut.

The Ashmolean is a venerable Oxford institution, an accretion of collections made across four centuries. Its progenitors were the Tradescants, father and son, who were not only distinguished gardeners in early Stuart England but also avid travellers and collectors of curiosities. There had been many collectors in western Europe before: the Tradescants were following, in their own way, the example of the Medici in Florence, the Premonstratensian fathers in Prague and the painter Rubens in Antwerp, each of whom (and hundreds of others) had their own style of antiquarium, wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities.

With the accent on what was unfamiliar and exotic, these presented permutations of man-made and natural objects: oil paintings, Hellenic statuary, tribal artefacts, Persian miniatures, coins and medals jostled for space with bones, fossils, gemstones, shells, desiccated insects, stuffed birds and animal skins. These collections were partly manifestations of collecting mania, but they were also essential to the Renaissance way of understanding the world, at a time when it was being rapidly “expanded” by traders, explorers and colonisers.

The Tradescant Ark, as it was known, quickly became one of the sights of London’s Lambeth, open to the public and giving a fund of insights into the variety, mystery and power of the exotic. The Tradescants’ neighbour Elias Ashmole was an astrologer and would-be magus as well as an antiquarian, who inherited the collection and eventually passed it on to Oxford University with his own collections, on condition that a museum be built to house it.

The new 21st-century museum looks little changed when seen from the street. Its familiar façade, looking across Beaumont Street and towards the Randolph Hotel, has been barely disturbed. Designed in the early 1840s by the classical architect Charles Robert Cockerell, it still has three floors and contains the bulk of the Ashmolean’s exquisite collection of European oil paintings. It is the shabby additions tacked on to the back of Cockerell’s masterpiece that have now been swept away and replaced with a modern annexe that fuses almost seamlessly with the original building. Here are the ethnological collections, the oriental ceramics, the Egyptian, Assyrian and classical material, the Mughal paintings, the Anglo-Saxon artefacts and the previously little-seen historic textiles.

After the demolition of 4,600 square metres of old exhibition space, Mather’s brief was to create a new one of 10,000 sq m, all on a very restricted site. This quart-into-a-pint-pot trick has been achieved by dramatically lowering the ceilings to squeeze an extra two levels into the same vertical space. To gain a vital few inches, all wiring and pipes are concealed in the extra-thick walls, while the problem of how to marry a neoclassical three-floored building with a modern six-floored one is solved by interposing a great atrium that is ascended by a serpentine “cascade” staircase, crossed in mid-air by bridges, and dominated by a huge plaster cast of Apollo.

The panoptic views up, down and across from gallery to gallery are intrinsic to a museum that now prides itself on its philosophy of cross-cultural display, while paying a dramatic dividend in natural light. Augmented by 1,370 spot lights, this new light banishes all memories of the weighty, labyrinthine gloom of the old Ashmolean.

“Crossing cultures, crossing time” is the motto adopted to underpin the museology. It means in theory an end to the chronological and culture-specific envelopes into which exhibits have previously been sorted, in favour of the typology of objects – grouping them according to use or meaning. Persian ceramics might be shown with Italian Majolica, Anglo-Saxon jewellery with personal adornment from ancient Assyria, so that cultures are connected rather than separate, and the world seen as a whole.

This should make for displays that are in keeping not only with the educational and social desiderata of today, but also with the probable arrangement of the Tradescant Ark. The 1656 catalogue tells us that the man-made exhibits were classified into such categories as “Utensills, House-holdstuffe, Habits, Instruments of Warre used by severall Nations, rare curiosities of Art &c”. The notion was to present a microcosm of the world: as one visitor to Lambeth wrote, one saw “more curiosities than hee should see if hee spent all his life in Travel”.

In practice, though, it is both undesirable and impossible for the museum to go back to the Ark. As a study centre integral to the University of Oxford, the Ashmolean serves higher as well as primary education, which means enabling specialists to see, in the one place, the museum’s full range of, for instance, old English glass (more than 600 items), Japanese porcelain, European stringed instruments (with one of the most celebrated Stradivarius violins), or Pre-Raphaelite paintings. So the new Ashmolean has opted for a hybrid strategy, with many culturally or historically specific displays offset by “orientation galleries” to do the cross-cultural work.

The latter approach has the unintended side-effect of exposing the gaps in the Ashmolean’s collections. There is, for instance, very little American material here, either southern or northern, and hardly anything from equatorial Africa. That is not really a criticism, for no museum can be exhaustively comprehensive, especially when it is formed by as promiscuous a succession of donors as the Ashmolean. The upside is that the place is crammed with surprises and delights, and these are now to be seen in optimum and expertly appointed conditions.