His Inscriptiones provides the rationale for the wunderkammer. The best place to see both the strangeness (from a modern viewpoint) and the power of the worldview is a 1565 book by Samuel Quiccheberg, a Flemish physician, librarian and curator.
There was power bound up in this knowledge - in the Hermetic tradition, as well as in the burgeoning scientific tradition, useful knowledge was power: medical understanding, technological prowess, the power of command over the natural world and the newly discovered lands and peoples across the oceans. Look at all of these amazing things! What a worldly person the collector must be! What a deep understanding of the secrets of the world he has! But it wasn’t just about knowledge. These heterogeneous, unsystematic, displays sent a message of exoticism and variety. What did the similarities and difference mean? What were the hidden connections? She suggests that a “system of sideways looks” characterized these displays, that artifacts “cacophonously ‘chatted’ among themselves and with the spectator.” Juxtapositions, she argues, served to simulate conversation. Each object was wonderful in itself, and at the same time revealed the secrets of the world.Īrt historian Barbara Stafford has explored the way that cabinets of curiosity encouraged this kind of understanding. The worldview of the time found wonder in resonance it saw linkages between things, and between things and spirit and nature, everywhere. “By wonder,” he writes, “I mean the power of the displayed object to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention.” Resonance, on the other hand, is the “power of the displayed object to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world, to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged.” Cabinets of curiosity did both at the same time. Literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt suggests that museums encourage two kinds of response: resonance and wonder. Marchese Ferdinando Cospi’s cabinet of curiosities included taxidermied animals, some of them manmade, weapons - and a dwarf. Cabinets of curiosity were set up to reflect and encourage this worldview. Together, these ideas offered a way of understanding the world, and viewing objects. The theater of memory - a way of organizing facts and ideas as stories in a real or imagined space - provided a rationale for arranging objects. The doctrine of signatures - that herbs resembling various parts of the body would treat ailments of those body parts - suggested a particular kind of object display.
The idea of “the great chain of being” encouraged people to look for hierarchical structures that connected God to angels to people to animals to plants to things. Hermeticism, a psuedo-ancient belief popular at the time, held that there were always connections between the microcosm and the macrocosm - the universe, the human body, the big and the small in nature. The combination of these two worldviews shaped the wunderkammer. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were an era of discovery, humanism, and science, but also an era permeated by older ideas of magic and sympathy. Why were they so appealing in early modern Europe? What was going on in the culture that made these odd conglomerations seem like the right way to display artifacts both human and natural? No self-respecting naturalist, prince, or wealthy merchant was without a cabinet of curiosity. These cabinets were designed to show wealth and taste and an inquiring mind.
Here, paintings and objet d’art might be promiscuously mixed with natural wonders, the exotic imports of the New World, the fine creations of craftsmen, personal keepsakes, and memento mori. Courtesy Wikimedia.Īrt collectors also displayed their treasures in wunderkammer. Domenico Remps, “Cabinet of Curiosities,” 1690s.