Cabinet of curiosities
Cabinets of curiosities (
Cabinets of curiosities served not only as collections to reflect the particular curiosities of their curators but also as social devices to establish and uphold rank in society. There are said to be two main types of cabinets. As R. J. W. Evans notes, there could be "the princely cabinet, serving a largely representational function, and dominated by aesthetic concerns and a marked predilection for the exotic," or the less grandiose, "the more modest collection of the humanist scholar or virtuoso, which served more practical and scientific purposes." Evans goes on to explain that "no clear distinction existed between the two categories: all collecting was marked by curiosity, shading into credulity, and by some sort of universal underlying design".[1]
In addition to cabinets of curiosity serving as an establisher of socioeconomic status for its curator, these cabinets served as entertainment, as particularly illustrated by the proceedings of the Royal Society, whose early meetings were often a sort of open floor to any Fellow to exhibit the findings his curiosities led him to. However purely educational or investigative these exhibitions may sound, it is important to note that the Fellows in this period supported the idea of "learned entertainment,"[2] or the alignment of learning with entertainment. This was not unusual, as the Royal Society had an earlier history of a love of the marvellous. This love was often exploited by eighteenth-century natural philosophers to secure the attention of their audience during their exhibitions.
History
To c. 1600
The earliest pictorial record of a natural history cabinet is
In 1587 Gabriel Kaltemarckt advised
The highly characteristic range of interests represented in
The Kunstkammer of
Rudolf's uncle,
17th century
Two of the most famously described seventeenth-century cabinets were those of
Cabinets of curiosities would often serve scientific advancement when images of their contents were published. The catalog of Worm's collection, published as the Museum Wormianum (1655), used the collection of artifacts as a starting point for Worm's speculations on philosophy, science, natural history, and more.
Cabinets of curiosities were limited to those who could afford to create and maintain them. Many
Similar collections on a smaller scale were the complex Kunstschränke produced in the early seventeenth century by the
The juxtaposition of such disparate objects, according to Horst Bredekamp's analysis (Bredekamp 1995), encouraged comparisons, finding analogies and parallels and favoured the cultural change from a world viewed as static to a dynamic view of endlessly transforming natural history and a historical perspective that led in the seventeenth century to the germs of a scientific view of reality.
18th century and after
In seventeenth-century parlance, both French and English, a cabinet came to signify a collection of works of art, which might still also include an assembly of objects of virtù or curiosities, such as a virtuoso would find intellectually stimulating. In 1714, Michael Bernhard Valentini published an early museological work, Museum Museorum, an account of the cabinets known to him with catalogues of their contents.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, Belsazar Hacquet (c. 1735–1815) operated in Ljubljana, then the capital of Carniola, a natural history cabinet (German: Naturalienkabinet) that was appreciated throughout Europe and was visited by the highest nobility, including the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II, the Russian grand duke Paul and Pope Pius VI, as well as by famous naturalists, such as Francesco Griselini and Franz Benedikt Hermann . It included a number of minerals, including specimens of mercury from the Idrija mine, a herbarium vivum with over 4,000 specimens of Carniolan and foreign plants, a smaller number of animal specimens, a natural history and medical library, and an anatomical theatre.[14]
A late example of the juxtaposition of natural materials with richly worked artifice is provided by the "
Some strands of the early universal collections, the bizarre or freakish biological specimens, whether genuine or fake, and the more exotic historical objects, could find a home in commercial freak shows and sideshows.
England
In 1671, when visiting Thomas Browne (1605–82), the courier John Evelyn remarked,
His whole house and garden is a paradise and Cabinet of rarities and that of the best collection, amongst Medails, books, Plants, natural things.[16]
Late in his life Browne parodied the rising trend of collecting curiosities in his tract Musaeum Clausum an inventory of dubious, rumoured and non-existent books, pictures and objects.
Sloane meticulously cataloged and created extensive records for most of the specimens and objects in his collection. He also began to acquire other collections by gift or purchase.
Sloane acquired approximately three hundred and fifty artificial curiosities from North American Indians, Eskimos, South America, the Lapland, Siberia, East Indies, and the West Indies, including nine items from Jamaica. "These ethnological artifacts were important because they established a field of collection for the British Museum that was to increase greatly with the explorations of Captain James Cook in Oceania and Australia and the rapid expansion of the British Empire."[19] Upon his death in 1753, Sloane bequeathed his sizable collection of 337 volumes to England for £20,000. In 1759, George II's royal library was added to Sloane's collection to form the foundation of the British Museum.
Places of exhibitions of and places of new societies that promoted natural knowledge also seemed to culture the idea of perfect civility. Some scholars propose that this was "a reaction against the dogmatism and enthusiasm of the English Civil War and Interregum [sic].[21]" This move to politeness put bars on how one should behave and interact socially, which enabled the distinguishing of the polite from the supposed common or more vulgar members of society. Exhibitions of curiosities (as they were typically odd and foreign marvels) attracted a wide, more general audience, which "[rendered] them more suitable subjects of polite discourse at the Society."[21]
A subject was considered less suitable for polite discourse if the curiosity being displayed was accompanied by too much other material evidence, as it allowed for less conjecture and exploration of ideas regarding the displayed curiosity. Because of this, many displays simply included a concise description of the phenomena and avoided any mention of explanation for the phenomena. Quentin Skinner describes the early Royal Society as "something much more like a gentleman's club,[21]" an idea supported by John Evelyn, who depicts the Royal Society as "an Assembly of many honorable Gentlemen, who meete inoffensively together under his Majesty's Royal Cognizance; and to entertaine themselves ingenously, whilst their other domestique avocations or publique business deprives them of being always in the company of learned men and that they cannot dwell forever in the Universities.[21]"
Cabinets of Curiosities can now be found at Snowshill Manor and Wallington Hall, and the Ashmolean Museum has a display of items from its disparate Ashmole and Tradescant founding collections.
United States
P. T. Barnum established Barnum's American Museum on five floors in New York, "perpetuating into the 1860s the Wunderkammer tradition of curiosities for gullible, often slow-moving throngs—Barnum's famously sly but effective method of crowd control was to post a sign, 'THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS!' at the exit door".[24]
In 1908, New York businessmen formed the Hobby Club, a dining club limited to 50 men, in order to showcase their "cabinets of wonder" and their selected collections. These included literary specimens and incunabula; antiquities such as ancient armour; precious stones and geological items of interest. Annual formal dinners would be used to open the various collections up to inspection for the other members of the club.[25]
Declining influence
By the early decades of the eighteenth century, curiosities and wondrous specimens began to lose their influence among European natural philosophers. As Enlightenment thinkers placed growing emphasis on patterns and systems within nature, anomalies and rarities came to be regarded as potentially misleading objects of study. Curiosities, previously interpreted as divine messages and expressions of nature's variety, were increasingly seen as vulgar exceptions to nature's overall uniformity.[26]
Notable collections started in this way
- Tradescantcollections
- Boerhaave Museum in Leiden
- British Museum in London — Sir Hans Sloane's and other collections
- Chamber of Art and Curiosities, Ambras Castle in Austria remains largely intact
- Deyrolle in Paris
- Fondation Calvet, Avignon
- Grünes Gewölbe in Dresden
- Kunstkamera in Saint Petersburg, Russia
- Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford, England) — Ex-Ashmolean dodo
- Teylers Museum in Haarlem
- Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan
- World Museum in Liverpool - XIIIth Earl of Derby collection
In contemporary culture
The Houston Museum of Natural Science houses a hands-on Cabinet of Curiosities, complete with taxidermied crocodile embedded in the ceiling a la Ferrante Imperato's Dell'Historia Naturale. In
In Spring Green, Wisconsin, the house and museum of Alex Jordan, known as House on the Rock, can also be interpreted as a modern day curiosity cabinet, especially in the collection and display of automatons. In Bristol, Rhode Island, Musée Patamécanique is presented as a hybrid between an automaton theater and a cabinet of curiosities and contains works representing the field of Patamechanics, an artistic practice and area of study chiefly inspired by Pataphysics.
The idea of a cabinet of curiosities has also appeared in recent publications and performances. For example,
The concept has been reinterpreted at The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History.[30] In July 2021 a new Cabinet of Curiosities room was opened at The Whitaker Museum & Art Gallery in Rawtenstall, Lancashire, curated by artist Bob Frith,[31] founder of Horse and Bamboo Theatre.
Several internet bloggers describe their sites as "wunderkammern" either because they are primarily links to interesting things, or inspire wonder similarly to the original wunderkammern (see External Links, below). Researcher Robert Gehl describes such internet video sites as YouTube as modern-day wunderkammern, although in danger of being refined into capitalist institutions "just as professionalized curators refined Wunderkammers into the modern museum in the 18th century."[32]
See also
- Antiquarian
- Holophusikon
- Found objects
- Maximalism
- Medical oddities
- Museum
- Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities
References
- ^ Impey, MacGregor, Oliver, Arthur. The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe. Oxford University Press. p. 737.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ Fontes da Costa, Palmira. "Singular and the Making of Knowledge at the Royal Society of London in the Eighteenth Century". Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Retrieved 9 December 2014.
- Metropolitan Museum; the Urbino studiolo remains in situ.
- ^ Sixteenth-century cabinet-makers serving the luxury trades of Florence and Antwerp were beginning to produce moveable cabinets with similar architectural interior fittings, which could be set upon a carpet-covered table or on a purpose-built stand.
- ^ B. Gutfleish and J. Menzhausen, "How a Kunstkammer Should Be Formed", Journal of the History of Collections, 1989 Vol I: p. 11.
- ISBN 0-691-00326-2
- ^ Her base is inscribed LIBER[A]
- ^ It appears to represent a reduction of a well-known sculpture by Alessandro Algardi.
- ^ Still life was considered a lesser genre than even portraits or landscapes.
- ^ This is the secretive aspect emphasised by R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History (Oxford) 1973.
- ^ Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, "Remarks on the Collections of Rudolf II: The Kunstkammer as a Form of Representatio", Art Journal 38.1 (Autumn 1978:22–28).
- ^ Francesaco Fiorani, reviewing Bredecamp 1995 in Renaissance Quarterly 51.1 (Spring 1998:268-270) p 268.
- ^ Thomas, "Charles I of England: The tragedy of Absolutism", A.G. Dickens, ed. The Courts of Europe (London) 1977:201.
- COBISS 1242502. Archived from the originalon 2017-08-18. Retrieved 2015-05-27.
- ^ "Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum". Britishmuseum.org. Archived from the original on 2015-09-23. Retrieved 2011-12-22.
- ^ Diary of John Evelyn, entry dated 17th October 1671
- ^ Alexander, Edward P. Museum Masters: Their Museums and Their Influence, (Walnut Creek, London, New Delhi: AltaMira Press, 1995), 20–42; Clark, Jack A. " Sir Hans Sloane and Abbé Jean Paul Bignon: Notes on Collection Building in the Eighteenth Century," in The Library Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 4 (October 1980), 475–482; de Beer, G. R. "Sir Hans Sloane, F.R.S 1660–1753," in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 10, No. 2 (April 1953), 81–84; and Kriz, Kay Dian. "Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies in Hans Sloane's "Natural History of Jamaica", in The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 57, No. 1 (January 2000), 35–78.
- ^ Alexander, Edward P. Museum Masters: Their Museums and Their Influence, (Walnut Creek, London, New Delhi: AltaMira Press, 1995), 20–42; de Beer, G. R. "Sir Hans Sloane, F.R.S 1660–1753," in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 10, No. 2 (April 1953), 81–84; Gray, Basil. "Sloane and the Kaempfer Collection," in The British Museum Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 1, Sir Hans Sloane (March 1953), 20–23; and "The Sloane Collection of Manuscripts" in The British Museum Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 1, Sir Hans Sloane (March 1953), 6–10.
- ^ Alexander, Edward P. Museum Masters: Their Museums and Their Influence, (Walnut Creek, London, New Delhi: AltaMira Press, 1995), 31.
- ^ a b Ivins, Jr., William M. "The Tradescant Collection", in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol. 20, No. 8 (August 1925), 194–197; Josten, C.H. Elias Ashmole (1617–1692): His Autobiographical and Historical Notes, His Correspondence, and Other Contemporary Sources Relating to His Life and Work: Texts, 1661–1672, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967); Leith-Ross, Prudence. The John Tradescants: Gardeners to the Rose and Lily Queen, (London: Peter Owen, 2006); MacGregor, Arthur. Tradescant's Rarities: Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum 1683; with a Catalogue of the Surviving Early Collections, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Potter, Jennifer. Strange Blooms: The Curious Lives and Adventures of the John Tradescants, (London: Atlantic, 2006)
- ^ a b c d Fontes da Costa, Palmira. "Singular and the Making of Knowledge at the Royal Society of London in the Eighteenth Century". Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Retrieved 9 December 2014.
- ^ [1] Archived March 4, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "James G. Mundie's Cabinet of Curiosities". MundieArt.com. 2013-03-17. Archived from the original on 2013-06-06. Retrieved 2013-05-28.
- ^ Barrymore Laurence Scherer, "Catalog of Curiosities" Archived 2017-06-21 at the Wayback Machine, Wall Street Journal. January 1, 2013.
- ^ According to its constitution, "This Club shall be called THE HOBBY CLUB. The object of the Club shall be to encourage the collection of literary, artistic and scientific works; to aid in the development of literary, artistic and scientific matters; to promote social and literary intercourse among its members, and the discussion and consideration of various literary and economic subjects."Annals of the Hobby Club of New York City, 1912–1920.
- ISBN 9780942299915.
- ^ The American writer Lawrence Weschler, wrote an entire book about the museum: Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology (1996)
- ^ Wunderkammern Archived 2008-03-25 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ wunder-kamer.com
- ^ Wainwright, Oliver (2014-10-28). "A two-headed lamb and ancient dildos: the UK's strangest new museum". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 2015-10-04. Retrieved 2015-10-04.
- ^ "The community that wouldn't let its museum die". TAITMAIL. arts industry.co.uk. 23 July 2021. Archived from the original on 2 August 2021. Retrieved 2 August 2021.
- S2CID 143673368.
Further reading
- Under the Sign: John Bargrave as Collector, Traveler, and Witness, Stephen Bann, Michigan, 1995
- Beßler, Gabriele, Chambers of Art and Wonders, EGO - European History Online, Mainz: Institute of European History, 2015, retrieved: March 8, 2021 (pdf).
- The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and ISBN 1-84232-132-3
- Cabinets for the curious: looking back at early English museums, Ken Arnold, Ashgate, 2006, ISBN 0-7546-0506-X.
- Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, ISBN 0-679-76489-5(see website link above)
- The Cabinet of Curiosities (novel), ISBN 0-446-61123-9.
- Helmar Schramm et al. (ed.). Collection, Laboratory, Theater. Scenes of Knowledge in the 17th Century, Berlin/New York 2005, ISBN 978-3-11-017736-7
- The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology Horst Bredekamp (Allison Brown, translator) (Princeton: Marcus Weiner) 1995.
- Steven Lubar, "Cabinets of Curiosity: What they were, why they disappeared, and why they’re so popular now"
External links
Historic cabinets
- J. Paul Getty Museum Augsburg Cabinet: 3-D model online interactive with high-resolution photography, description of subjects depicted, and mapping of exotic materials.
- Ashmolean Museum: Powhatan's Mantle, pictures, full descriptions and history.
- The Augsburg Art Cabinet, about the Uppsala art cabinet.
- Dutch influence on 'wunderkammer' or 'rariteitenkabinet'.
- The King's Kunstkammer, a Danish Internet exhibition on the idea behind renaissance art and curiosity chambers (text in English).
- Mauritshuis, Royal Picture Gallery, The Hague: Room for Art[permanent dead link] exhibition.
- Metropolitan Museum, New York: Collecting for the Kunstkammerexhibition.
- Museum Exhibition:museum exhibition by museum display cases [2][permanent dead link] Museum Showcases.
- Rijksmuseum Amsterdam: Presentation and very large and detailed imageof the art cabinet made for Duke August of Brunswick-Lüneburg.
- Smithsonian Institution: Crocodiles on the Ceiling exhibition.
- Website with photos of remaining Germanic cabinets
- Wunderkammer Theorie High resolution images of two Wunderkammer
- Kunstkammer Image rich German site of Kunstkammer and Wunderkammer
- Idols of the Cave A history of science website devoted to Wunderkammern
- Salvadoriana History and current items of the Wunderkammer that the Salvador family started in the 17th century in Barcelona.
Modern "cabinets"
- Cabinets of Curiosities. Museum in Waco, TX with a Cabinets of Curiosities Room named for John K. Strecker, who was curator for 30 years, the museum was established in 1893 and was the oldest museum in Texas when it closed in 2003 to be incorporated into the Mayborn Museum Complex.
- A Small Wunderkammer. Web magazine issue dedicated to building a small, contemporary Cabinet of Curiosities.
- MuseumZeitraum Leipzig. Work and collections of the pioneering German modernist Johann Dieter Wassmann (1841–1898).
- The Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution includes a contemporary Cabinet of Curiosity entitled "Bureau of Bureaucracy" by Kim Schmahmann
- Weblog modern equivalent of a Wunderkammer (Anthropology Essay)