Cabinet of curiosities

For the 2002 novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, see The Cabinet of Curiosities

Cabinets of curiosities (also known as Wunderkammer, Cabinets of Wonder, or wonder-rooms) were encyclopedic collections of types of objects whose categorical boundaries were, in Renaissance Europe, yet to be defined. Modern science would categorize the objects included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings) and antiquities. "The Kunstkammer was regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world, and a memory theater. The Kunstkammer conveyed symbolically the patron's control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction."^[1] Of Charles I's collection, Peter Thomas has succinctly stated, "The Kunstkabinett itself was a form of propaganda"^[2] Besides the most famous, best documented cabinets of rulers and aristocrats, members of the merchant class and early practitioners of science in Europe, formed collections that were precursors to museums.

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History

The term cabinet originally described a room rather than a piece of furniture. The first of the cabinets of curiosities were assembled in the mid-sixteenth century. The Kunstkammer of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor] (ruled 1576-1612), housed in the Hradschin at Prague was unrivalled north of the Alps; it provided a solace and retreat for contemplation^[3] that also served to demonstrate his imperial magnificence and power in symbolic arrangement of their display, ceremoniously presented to visiting diplomats and magnates.^[4]

Two of the most famously described 17th century cabinets were those of Ole Worm (also known as Olaus Wormius) (1588-1654), and Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680). These 17th-century cabinets were filled with preserved animals, horns, tusks, skeletons, minerals, and other types of equally fascinating man-made objects: sculptures wondrously old, wondrously fine or wondrously small; clockwork automata; ethnographic specimens from exotic locations. Often they would contain a mix of fact and fiction, including apparently mythical creatures. Worm's collection contained, for example, what he thought was a Scythian Lamb, a woolly fern thought to be a plant/sheep fabulous creature. However he was also responsible for identifying the narwhal's tusk as coming from a whale rather than a unicorn, as most owners of these believed. The specimens displayed were often collected during exploring expeditions and trading voyages.

  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.

In 1587 Gabriel Kaltemarckt advised Christian I of Saxony that three types of item were indispensable in forming a "Kunstkammer" or art collection: firstly sculptures and paintings; secondly "curious items from home or abroad"; and thirdly "antlers, horns, claws, feathers and other things belonging to strange and curious animals" ^[5] When Albrecht Dürer visited the Netherlands in 1521, apart from artworks he sent back to Nuremberg various animal horns, a piece of coral, some large fish fins and a wooden weapon from the East Indies.^[6] The highly characteristic range of interests represented in Frans II Francken's painting of 1636 (illustration, left) shows paintings on the wall that range from landscapes, including a moonlit scene— a genre in itself— to a portrait and a religious picture (the Adoration of the Magi) intermixed with preserved tropical marine fishes and a string of carved beads, most likely amber, which is both precious and a natural curiosity. Sculpture both classical and secular (the sacrificing Libera)^[7] and modern and religious (Christ at the Column^[8]) are represented, while on the table are ranged, among the exotic shells (including some tropical ones and a shark's tooth): portrait miniatures, gem-stones mounted with pearls in a curious quatrefoil box, a set of sepia chiaroscuro woodcuts or drawings, and a small still-life painting^[9] leaning against a flower-piece, coins and medals — presumably Greek and Roman — and Roman terracotta oil-lamps, curious flasks, and a blue-and-white Ming porcelain bowl.   The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford inherited the collection of Elias Ashmole, itself largely derived from John Tradescant the elder and his son John the younger. Parts of this are still displayed together, giving a good sense of the diversity of these collections. What was left of the famous and unique complete stuffed Dodo was passed to the new Pitt Rivers Museum in the nineteenth century. An important Native American artifact, Chief Powhatan's Mantle, the cloak of the father of Pocohontas, remains in the collection.   Obviously cabinets of curiosities were limited to those who could afford to create and maintain them. Many monarchs, in particular, developed large collections. A rather under-used example, stronger in art than other areas, was the Studiolo of Francesco I, the first Medici Grand-Duke of Tuscany. Frederick III of Denmark, who added Worm's collection to his own after Worm's death, was another such monarch. A third example is the Kunstkamera founded by Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg in 1727. The fabulous Hapsburg Imperial collection, included important Aztec artifacts, including the feather head-dress or crown of Montezuma now in the Museum of Ethnology, Vienna.

Similar collections on a smaller scale were the complex Kunstschränke produced in the early 17th century by the Augsburg merchant, diplomat and collector Philipp Hainhofer. These were cabinets in the sense of pieces of furniture, made from all imaginable exotic and expensive materials and filled with contents and ornamental details intended to reflect the entire cosmos on a miniature scale. The best preserved example is the one given by the city of Augsburg to King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1632, which is kept in the Museum Gustavianum in Uppsala.

The juxtaposition of such disparate objects, according to 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 scientic view of reality.

A late example of the juxtaposition of natural materials with richly-worked artifice is provided by the Grünes Gewölbe, the "Green Vaults" formed by Augustus the Strong in Dresden to display his chamber of wonders.

In contemporary culture

In Los Angeles, the modern-day Museum of Jurassic Technology anachronistically seeks to recreate the sense of wonder that the old cabinets of curiosity once aroused.^[10]

This idea of a cabinet of curiosities has been drawn from in recent publications and performances. Cabinet magazine is a quarterly magazine of cultural artifacts and obscure historical footnotes. Several internet bloggers describes their sites as a wunderkammer, either because they are comprised primarily of links to things that are interesting, or because they inspire wonder in a similar manner to the original wunderkammer (see External Links, below). Cabinet of Natural Curiosities (band), a Brooklyn-based folk/experimental music and art collective named after Albertus Seba's collection of oddities, has released eclectic folk and improvisational albums based on the idea of the wunderkammer, as well as staging a performance of the Theater of Natural Curiosities at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York. Playwright Jordan Harrison's Museum Play is structurally based around the cabinets, habitats and hallways of a natural history museum.

Notable collections started in this way

• Teylers Museum in Haarlem
• Boerhaave Museum in Leiden
• Ashmolean Museum Oxford — Ashmole and Tradescant collections
• British Museum London — Sir Hans Sloane's and other collections
• Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford, England) — Ex-Ashmolean Dodo
• The Museum of Jurassic Technology
• Kunstkamera in Saint Petersburg, Russia
• Grünes Gewölbe in Dresden

Further reading

• Under the Sign: John Bargrave as Collector, Traveler, and Witness, Stephen Bann, Michigan, 1995
• The Origins of Museums: The Cabinets of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, 2001, paperback, 431 pages, 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, Lawrence Weschler, 1996, trade paperback, 192 pages, ISBN 0-679-76489-5 (see website link above)
• The Cabinet of Curiosities (novel), Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Warner Books, 2003, paperback, 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 978-3110177367
• The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology Horst Bredekamp (Allison Brown, translater) (Princeton: Marcus Weiner) 1995.

References

See also

• Medical oddities

Modern "cabinets"

• Weblog modern equivalent of a Wunderkammer (Anthropology Essay)
• Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, Brooklyn-based folk/experimental music and art collective named after Albertus Seba's collection of oddities.
• The Museum of Jurassic Technology official website
• 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.
• The Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Institute includes a contemporary Cabinet of Curiosity entitled "Bureau of Bureaucracy" by Kim Schmahmann