Visiting an art museum today, it is nearly impossible to imagine the early modern European roots that led to the high-tech and highly curated museums of the modern age. However, delving into the history of museum culture reveals a curiously human origin of art and artifact collection. In the 16th and 17th centuries, ‘museums’ established by private collectors were subject to the whim of the collector, and often consisted of items and materials that sparked curiosity due to their rarity or beauty. Primarily assembled by scholars, scientists, naturalists, and wealthy members of society, these collections were labeled “cabinets of curiosity,” and contained diverse and eclectic objects that were popular in Europe at the time. These collections were coveted as a symbol of wealth and status, leading to more collection, mobility, and trade of exotic items. As a result, cabinets of curiosity played a significant role in the global spread of culture and the early modern Baroque. The transfer of naturalia and art from faraway places to Europe—through imperialism, trade, or otherwise—added to the fascination with these collections. Cabinets of curiosity were not only about the objects they contained, but also the knowledge and prestige they conveyed. These cabinets of curiosity significantly contributed to the art and artifact transfer of early modern Europe through collection culture, and by blending cultures through art, developed the Global Baroque style.
Collection has occurred for centuries; Homeric hordes of treasure from battle, middle-age medicine cabinets with rare herbs and cures, and princely jewel collections. Although important, these types of collections remained stagnant if they were kept to oneself. The early modern Europeans diverged from this trend by displaying their collections. Royals like the Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol consolidated extensive family art collections and began adding to them—bringing together a “museum” in a castle named Schloss Ambras. Although the museum may have been limited to aristocrats and scholars during its time, Ferdinand vehemently supported an illustrated publication of his collection (the “great Kunstkammer”), printed posthumously in 1601. The catalog included art, furniture, armor, religious items, shells, specimens, clocks, scientific equipment, ivory, and even featherworks from the Spanish colonial era. Currently, the bulk of Ferdinand’s collection is housed in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum.
Ferdinand’s collection was impressive of course, but predated by the famous Ferrante Imperato’s Dell’ Historia Naturale, a 1599 book summarizing Imperato’s catalog of natural history curios and features an illustration of his cabinet. Imperato’s collection was much more characteristic of a typical cabinet of curiosities, and contained much more naturalia and specimens. Although Ferdinand’s Kunstkammer brought together art, science, and nature, his motivation was collection, whereas the Italian scientists and societies sought to understand the world. The Scientific Revolution in Europe was a time period beginning in the 16th century that was defined by rapid discovery and achievement in learning about the ways of the world. Ferrante Imperato, a scientist and naturalist himself, began collecting because of his dedication to the development of scientific knowledge—he wished to learn by growing his collection of plant and animal specimens, and establish himself as a man of the future. Although Imperato was one of the first Italian naturalists to lean into collection as a route to scientific discovery, he was by no means the most influential.
Imperato, Ferrante. “Ritratto Del Museo Di Ferrante Imperato.” Frontispiece for Imperato’s Dell’Historia Naturale. Dell’Historia Naturale. Naples, Italy: Ferrante Imperato, 1599.
Ulisse Aldrovandi, a naturalist and scholar from Bologna, Italy, was also an early collector of natural objects and curiosities. His extensive collection, housed in his own home, included a variety of fossils, animal specimens, and exotic plants. His cabinet of curiosities became a popular destination for naturalists and scientists seeking to research and learn about the natural world. Aldrovandi even described his collection as “the eighth wonder of the world.” Although many objects from his collection have not survived in their original form to this day, they exist in the medium of illustrations and written descriptions—Aldrovandi and other’s collections formed the basis of the catalog, which was enhanced and expanded upon going into the Baroque period. Catalogs of these cabinets became repositories of learning and history, serving to heighten the status of museums and their collections. One of the most famous of these came from the Accademia dei Lincei (“Academy of the Lynxes”) in Italy. Founded by naturalist Federico Cesi in 1603, the Academy became a distinguished group of naturalists and scientists that collected and recorded a wide variety of natural specimens. In 1611, The Academy inducted famous astronomer Galileo Galilei. One of Cesi’s key collaborators in the academy was Cassiano dal Pozzo—Cesi and dal Pozzo shared an interest in natural history and collaborated on numerous naturalistic projects.
After Cesi’s death in 1630, dal Pozzo continued to pursue these interests, using Cesi’s collection as well as building up his own extensive collection of scientific materials, specimens, drawings, and other visual representations. Like Cesi, dal Pozzo was a talented artist, and he often produced his own illustrations to accompany his scientific observations. From these observational illustrations, dal Pozzo constructed his “Paper Museum,” called the Museo Cartaceo in his time. This work is considered to be one of the most significant collections of scientific materials from the Early Modern period. The collection includes thousands of drawings and other visual representations of plants, animals, and other natural phenomena, as well as detailed scientific notes and observations. These descriptive catalogs retain significance because of the ephemeralism of the objects documented, compared to the permanence of the Paper Museum itself.
But how did Aldrovandi, Cesi, or dal Pozzo acquire these types of objects, and why were they popular in Europe in the first place? As Europeans expanded their global reach in the 16th and 17th centuries, they encountered exotic places, people, and objects from other parts of the world. These objects were often seen as curiosities and sparked a great deal of interest and curiosity among European collectors, who were eager to obtain and display them. Nicholas Thomas discusses this transfer in his book Entangled Objects, where he discusses the initial mobility of foreign objects to Europe and what means were necessary to acquire them: “Eighteenth-century voyages of exploration [are] suffused with the notion of curiosity, both as a subjective attitude and as an attribute of things noticed. An attempt to map European interests in artifacts in the period could thus take seriously the idea that a collection of curiosities in some sense stood as an objectification of the culturally and historically specific form of intellectual and experiential desire which ‘curiosity’ alluded to.” This quote suggests that “curiosity” was not just what the Europeans found in foreign places, but an actual attribute of themselves—denoting the cultural and historical situation of imperialism. Therefore, it is important to note that imperialism had an extremely large hand in the global spread of objects and art. Imperialism and “global art history” are virtually inseparable.
The objects acquired overseas by European imperialists, which gained traction in high society due to their rarity and interest, were emphasized by their display in various cabinets of curiosity. Art historian Claudia Swan considers this in her essay “Collecting Naturalia in the Shadow of Early Modern Dutch Trade,” where she examines the impact of the Dutch East and West India Companies as tools for art/object movement; famously, the incredibly small geographic area of the Netherlands had an enormous and disproportionate impact on the movement of global trade. She reiterates the claim of Thomas in relation to the types of materials brought back to Europe, “Their wonder is of course amplified by their foreignness, which translates into exoticism for all intents and purposes.” Shells, ebony, ivory, exotic animal specimens, feathers, porcelain, and countless other objects foreign to Europeans became wildly popular, encouraging collection further and expanding the greedy reach of Europe globally. This cosmopolitan curiosity greatly lengthened the exchange of the Baroque across borders and continents.
While “stubborn material objects” charted paths to collector’s cabinets in Europe, painters and artists began to depict cabinets in their works, even further extending the beauty and wonder of such collections. These depictions, similar to the catalogs occasionally published by collectors, allowed viewers to experience the wonder of the collections without physically seeing them. Painters played a pivotal role in shaping the greater public’s perception of curiosity cabinets, contributing to their already-massive cultural significance in Early Modern Europe. Among the most famous of these depictions is Frans Francken the Younger’s Chamber of Art and Curiosities from 1636. As many naturalistic cabinets featured, Francken’s painting contains aquatic specimens hanging from the wall, and a variety of shells gathered on the display table. The painting also pictures an example of Eastern blue-and-white porcelain, various statuettes from Greco-Roman antiquity, and a group of small Roman oil lamps—all items that would have captivated the fascination of Europeans. As a nod to himself and the artist’s place in curiosity cabinets, Francken also includes a variety of paintings, some narrative and some scenic, and possibly a self-portrait in the lower left corner.
Frans Francken the Younger, Chamber of Art and Curiosities, 1636. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Antonio de Pereda, Still Life with Ebony Chest, 1652. The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
Spanish painter Antonio de Pereda’s Still Life with Ebony Chest pictures a very similar scene, but is a staged still life instead of a portrayal of a cabinet of curiosities. Like Francken’s painting and other examples of cabinets of curiosity, de Pereda’s painting features an Eastern or Eastern-inspired example of porcelain and a chest made from African ebony wood, but focuses more on objects from the Americas—a textile, a pot for sipping chocolate, and a cochineal vessel made from the red dye of insects only found in South America. These items, likely imported to Spain during the late Age of Exploration, gained popularity in Europe because of their exotic rarity, which de Pereda capitalizes on by including them in his still life. With this messy table, de Pereda painted a map of the world in items. What is significant about this painting is the casual nature of these items; not depicted behind glass in a collector’s cabinet, nor in a museum, but simply in the home of a painter, on the table next to some bread. These exotic items were slowly becoming incorporated into everyday life for the wealthy and important, advancing a cosmopolitan art world and the spread of the Global Baroque.
Paula Findlen summarizes this global phenomenon, referring to collectors specifically; “Like their museums, they were mosaics, composed of the fragments of the culture they had inherited. They were at once profoundly unique and profoundly derivative, determined to achieve individual recognition for their incomparable activities yet forever defined and contained by the communities they inhabited.” The Global Baroque style was exactly that: a mosaic of things found and taken, a new style that was synthesized by collectors and artists from a small-scale movement that eventually snowballed to a cosmopolitan art culture. Europe’s identity was constructed by these collectors and artists, and thus the Baroque period was defined by this emerging culture.
Although it may be difficult to see how the museums of the modern era evolved from the curious collections that defined Early Modern Europe, it is clear that collections inspired by a fascination with exoticism contributed to the necessity, popularity, and history of museum culture and contributed to a global art style. The movement of art and objects associated with the efforts of collectors and artists shaped the identity of Europe and the emergence of the Global Baroque, a period of cross-cultural artistic exchange. Through cabinets of curiosity and all museums that have followed since, the human characteristic of collection has left an indelible mark on the history of art.
Bibliography
Bleichmar, Daniela. “Learning to Look: Visual Expertise across Art and Science in Eighteenth-Century France.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 46, no. 1 (2012) http://www.jstor.org/stable/23272377.
De Pereda, Antonio. “Still Life with Ebony Chest,” 1652. The State Hermitage Museum. Saint Petersburg, Russia.
Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Francken the Younger, Frans. “Chamber of Art and Curiosities,” 1636. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frans_Francken_(II),_Kunst-_und_Rarit%C3%A4tenkammer_(1636).jpg.
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Freedberg, David. The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Hamann, Byron Ellsworth. “The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay.” The Art Bulletin 92, no. 1/2 (2010): 6–35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27801653.
Schlosser, Julius von. Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance; a Contribution to the History of Collecting. Edited by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann. Translated by Jonathan Blower. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2021.
“Selected Masterpieces.” Kunsthistorisches Museum. Accessed April 11, 2023. https://www.khm.at/en/visit/collections/kunstkammer-wien/selected-masterpieces/.
Swan, Claudia and Londa L. Schiebinger. “Collecting Naturalia in the Shadow of Early Modern Dutch Trade.” Essay. In Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, 223–36. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
Thomas, Nicholas, and Karen Sykes. Entangled Objects. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
MY DIGITAL TOOL: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/5ccf8d30d7fe4dffa0799702f47c8bdb
ArcGIS was certainly a whirlwind. As a whole, I’d rate it 7/10 for overall experience, factoring in the difficulty of use and my annoyance about features locked behind paywalls—however, it did foster a fairly professional-looking platform once I got the hang of it. I think it is particularly useful for art history, because of the different ways to present images, with built in citation and captioning tools, and I definitely used those features to my advantage. My tool is basically a more accessible and less-academic translation of my essay, with the addition of the curated “cabinet of curiosity” of the High Museum’s digital collections. Initially I wanted to focus on the audio experience of a museum tour based on the literary descriptions of early modern art, but that factor got very lost in my essay research and I just ended up replacing it in my digital tool. I regret not doing this, because I think it would have enhanced my digital tool, but I ran out of time a little and didn’t think it would fit anymore (and also the audio feature on Arc was locked…). However, I am really glad I chose to stick it through with ArcGIS because I think this could be a really useful tool for future class presentations/multimedia projects. The storyboards platform is very flexible with different types of information presentation, and I can definitely see myself organizing information like this in the future. Yay for digital humanities!