An extravagant visual feast of 272 illustrations, this sumptuous book covers the history of the cabinet of curiosity - or estude, studiolo, theatrum mundi or Wunderkammer- which blossomed in the 16th and 17th centuries as a successor to mediaeval relic collections and royal treasure chambers. The aim, as laid out in Francis Bacon's Gesta Grayorum (1594), was to compile "a goodly, huge cabinet, wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance and the shuffle of things hath produced; whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept; shall be sorted and included." In other words, a microcosm of the world - all knowledge, the cosmos arranged on shelves, in cupboards, or hanging from the ceiling, "infinite riches in a little room" at a time when individuals could still aspire to know everything.
For the princely collectors of Renaissance Italy, the arrangement of individual objects in their studioli was crucial, placing them in a neo-platonic framework of meaning and correspondences, revealing unity in multiplicity. As Patrick Mauries says: "Cabinets were perpetually susceptible to the passion for finding analogies, a theme that belongs as much to the realm of magic as to that of aesthetics."The hierarchical view of society inherited from mediaeval scholasticism found expression in a hierarchy of spaces, a sequence of containers of ever-diminishing volume nestling one within the other, like Russian dolls.
A great pioneer of curiosity gathering was the French Due de Berry (1340-1416) who amassed "ostrich eggs, wild boar tusks, mammoth bones, snake skins, amulets to protect against poison, shells, and objects with occult powers". Astudiolo rich in curiosities was made in Florence by Pietro de Medici (1414-69), and inherited by Lorenzo the Magnificent. Princely collections proliferated between 1560 and 1580, enriched by wonders garnered from the New World.These ranged from the well-labelled and accessible Kunstkammer of Duke AlbrechtV of Bavaria, to the more hermetic cabinet of Francesco I de'Medici in Florence.
A special place was reserved for hybrids (such as composite creatures and petrified living things), which exemplified the continuities between artifidalia and natumlia, the treasures of art and the wonders of nature, just as automata bridged the divide between animate and inanimate. The quest for rarity encouraged the acquisition of aberrations and freaks - unicorn horns, two-head animals, marvels of miniaturisation - as well as scientific instruments, carvings and metalwork of incredible virtuosity.
Archduke Ferdinand n of Tyrol (1529-95) created one of the great Wunderkammern in SchloB Ambras near Innsbruck, which after his death became an appendage to the grander collection of Rudolf H of Habsburg. Mauries points out that Rudolf, like many of the major collectors, was melancholic and obsessed by the passage of time. The first non-aristocratic collectors appeared in the 16th century and were mainly medical men such as Ulisse Aldrovandi in Bologna, Francesco Calzolari in Verona, and Ferrante Imperato in Naples, who eschewed the occult symbolism of the studioli, and whose cabinets more closely resembled an apothecary's shop. Aldrovandi's posthumous Monstrorum Historia (1642), a compendium of animal and human Cabinets belong as much to the realms of magic as to that of aesthetics monstrosity, is of particular fortean interest. Outstanding cabinets of the 17th century included those of Ole Worm in Copenhagen, Manfredo Settala in Milan, Athanasius Kircher in Rome, and Frederik Ruysch in Amsterdam.
The pioneer curiosity buffs in England were Sir Walter Cope, Sir Thomas Browne (another medical man) and John Tradescant whose collection of 'Rarities' [see 'Tradescant's Ark' by Ian Simmons, FT66-.32-35] passed to Elias Ashmole, royal astrologer, founding member of the Royal Society and England's "first known freemason" (Frances Yates). In 1683 this formed the basis of Britain's first purposebuilt museum, the Ashmolean in Oxford. It included a wealth of fortean artefacts such as "a piece of wood from the cross of Christ", "the hand of a mermaid", "blood that rained in the Isle of Wight" and "a goose which had grown in Scotland on a tree", many of which are now sadly lost. One thing the Ashmolean does still have is "the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone".
Paradoxically, the waning of encyclopaedic collections in the 18th century coincided with the great Encyclopedic of the Enlightenment. The champions of the Age of Reason poured scorn on the naivety and archaic approach of their predecessors. Fine art, craftsmanship, antiquities, ethnography, natural history, and mechanical invention were separated out from the chaotic jumble of the cabinets and the cult of curiosities declined. In the eccentric collections of Horace Walpole and William Beckford, "the only cult celebrated... was that of art as such, and of memory". In a rational Newtonian world, bizarre and inexplicable oddities were by degrees banished to the realm of low culture and fairground sideshows.
In the 20th century, the cult of curiosities received a new lease of life in the 'ready-mades' of Marcel Duchamp and the objets trouves central to surrealist aesthetics. Torn from their mundane associations, these objects became imbued with the mysterious and the irrational.
Mauries rounds off his erudite survey in a nondescript Los Angeles suburb, home of David Hildebrand Wilson's 'Museum of Jurassic Technology', which he describes as "an inscrutable statement and performance piece that can claim its place as a work of art alongside the most complex of installations". In its pre-modern and post-modern amalgam of fact, faction and fantasy, visitors experience a disconcerting slippage, a loss of familiar contexts.
Despite its steep price, this book is a worthy addition to any fortean library - though it barely skims the surface of an absorbing subject.
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