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Cabinets of Curiosities

andy — Sun, 23 May 2010 13:13:35 +0000

Two of the most famously described 17th century cabinets were those of Ole Worm, known as Olaus Wormius (1588–1654) (illustration, above right), and Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680). These seventeenth-century cabinets were filled with preserved animals, horns, tusks, skeletons, minerals, as well as 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 theMuseum 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” WhenAlbrecht 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. 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 sacrificingLibera) and modern and religious (Christ at the Column) 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-lifepainting 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 Dodowas 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. Manymonarchs, 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 Kunstkamerafounded by Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg in 1727. Many items were bought in Amsterdam from Albertus Seba and Frederik Ruysch. The fabulous Habsburg 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 scientific 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 inDresden to display his chamber of wonders. The “Enlightenment Gallery” in the British Museum, installed in the former “Kings Library” room in 2003 to celebrate the 250th anniverary of the museum, aims to recreate the abundance and diversity that still characterized museums in the mid-18th century, mixing shells, rock samples and botanical specimens with a great variety of artworks and other man-made objects from all over the world.

Notable collections started in this way

Chamber of Art and Curiosities at Ambras Castle in Austria remain largely intact
Ashmolean Museum Oxford — Ashmole and Tradescant collections
Boerhaave Museum in Leiden
Kunstkamera in Saint Petersburg, Russia
British Museum London — Sir Hans Sloane‘s and other collections
Teylers Museum in Haarlem
Grünes Gewölbe in Dresden
Pitt Rivers Museum (Oxford, England) — Ex-Ashmolean Dodo
Fondation Calvet, Avignon

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The Hunterian Museum

andy — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:04:47 +0000

In 1799 the government purchased the collection of the surgeon and anatomist John Hunter (1728-1793). It was placed in the care of the Company (later the Royal College) of Surgeons. Hunter’s collection of around 15,000 specimens and preparations formed the nucleus of one of the greatest museums of comparative anatomy, pathology, osteology and natural history in the world. The Hunterian Collection today contains approximately 3,500 specimens and preparations from John Hunter’s original collection.

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Dr Kahn’s Museum: obscene anatomy in Victorian London

andy — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:51:03 +0000

Dr Joseph Kahn’s Anatomical and Pathological Museum was the19th century’s best-known and most visited public museum ofanatomy. Established in England in 1851, at the height of popularinterest in anatomy, Kahn’s museum was intended to show the‘wondrous’ structure of the body and to warn ofthe harmful consequences to health of abuses that ‘distortor defile’ its ‘beautiful structure’. Itssubsequent decline into a front for the sale of quack remediesfor venereal disease damaged the reputation of anatomy museums.After 22 years, and several bizarre legal cases, oppositionfrom self-appointed representatives of the medical professionand anti-vice campaigners forced it to close. The successful prosecutionof Kahn’s museum under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 brandedall public display of anatomical specimens as potentially obscene. Thereafter,anatomical education was restricted to medical professionalsand public anatomy survived only in sideshows. The public anatomicalmuseum has remained, for increasingly outdated reasons, a lostopportunity.

THE RISE OF PUBLIC ANATOMY

There had been well-known anatomy museums in England since the 18th century. The famous collection amassed by John Hunter 1728-1793 was purchased by the government in 1799 for £15 000 and presented to the Company later the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Although there were many hundreds of visitors, the collection was not open to the public and was viewed mainly by medical men or others who could obtain an introduction. On a smaller scale, metropolitan hospitals and some medical teachers maintained private anatomy collections for their students. For the London public, there were exhibitions of anatomical waxworks, open to anyone with the price of admission. Guillaume Desnoues’s 1650-1735 detailed full-length anatomical models were brought to London in 1719 to educate and entertain the curious ‘without exciting the feeling of horror men usually have on seeing corpses’.

Other shows were more sensational; Abraham Chovet 1704-1790, the son of a London wine merchant, advertised in 1733 a model of: ‘a woman… suppos'd opened alive…’ showing the circulation of blood between mother and child with coloured liquids.

Desnoues's and Chovet's models ended up in Rackstrow's public museum in the Strand, which included an ‘anatomical exhibition’ with ‘a collection of real anatomical preparations’ and ‘a great variety of skeletons’.

Popular interest in anatomy waned in the late-18th century and Rackstrow's closed in the late 1780s.In the 1820s, two things happened that stimulated public interest in matters anatomical. One was, of course, the scandal of the murders committed by Burke and Hare in Edinburgh in 1827/1828, which provoked real or imagined concerns in London and elsewhere. The other was the increasing interest in wax or pasteboard anatomical models as a substitute for real bodies. In 1828 the word anatomical ‘turned to gold’ and wax modellers again began to stage public exhibitions of their work. Simmons’s waxworks at 167 High Holborn exhibited an ‘anatomical Samson’, which could be taken apart to reveal the viscera, ‘with a view to superseding the use of dead bodies’. Alongside it were waxworks of Burke and Hare. The Edinburgh scandal highlighted the shortage of subjects for dissection and models were presented as a way forward. Although models were never widely accepted as an alternative to dissection for medical student teaching, they made anatomy available to a wider audience: when Signor Sarti’s exhibition, with an anatomical Venus and Adonis, opened at 27 Margaret Street in 1839, the Athenaeum recommended it to ‘younger male readers’ who wanted to obtain ‘a few general ideas on the subject of anatomy, which they may do without labour or disgust’. The study of his models, claimed Sarti, would give the visitor ‘the power to communicate intelligibly with his medical advisor’ and ‘teach him the absolute necessity of putting implicit faith in those men who have made Anatomy and Physiology the study of their lives.’

via Dr Kahn’s Museum: obscene anatomy in Victorian London — Bates 99 12: 618 — JRSM.

The Hunterian Museum In 1799 the government purchased the collection of the surgeon...
Dissection rooms During the 18th century, the population of London was expanding...
Cabinets of Curiosities Two of the most famously described 17th century cabinets were...

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Holophusikon

Android — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 08:06:02 +0000

The Holophusikon (or Holophusicon, also known as the Leverian Museum) was a museum of natural curiosities exhibited at Leicester House, on Leicester Square in London, England, from 1775 to 1786 by Ashton Lever. The collection was acquired by a James Parkinson (not the famous doctor) through a lottery in 1786, but continued to be displayed at Leicester House until Lever’s death in 1788. Parkinson then moved the collection to a Rotunda at No. 3 Blackfriars Road, before it was dispersed in an auction in 1806. The museum took its name from its supposedly universal coverage of natural history, and was essentially a huge cabinet of curiosities.

Lever collected fossils, shells, and animals (birds, insects, reptiles, fish, monkeys) for many years, accumulating a large collection at his home at Alkrington, near Manchester. He was swamped with visitors, whom he allowed to view his collection for free, so much so that he had to insist that visitors that arrived on foot would not be admitted. He decided to exhibit the collection in London as a commercial venture, charging an entrance fee.

Lever acquired a lease of Leicester House in 1774, converting the principal rooms on the first floor into a single large gallery running the length of the house, and opened his museum in February 1775, with around 25,000 exhibits (a small fraction of his collection) valued at over £40,000. The display included many natural and ethnographic items gathered by Captain James Cook on his voyages.

Lever charged an entry fee of 5s. 3d., or two guineas for an annual ticket, and the museum had a degree of commercial success: the receipts in 1782 were £2,253. In an effort to draw in the crowds, Lever later reduced the entrance fee to half a crown (2s. 6d.), and was constantly looking for new exhibits. He also set out his exhibits to impress the visitor, as well as (unusually) including educational information. However, he spent more on new exhibits than he raised in entrance fees.

The British Museum and Catherine II of Russia both refused to buy the collection, so Lever obtained an Act of Parliament in 1784 to sell the whole by lottery. He only sold 8,000 tickets at a guinea each – he had hoped for 36,000 - and it was then broken up by a James Parkinson (not the famous doctor). It was displayed at Leicester House until Lever’s death in 1788, at a reduced entrance fee of 1s., and Parkinson then transferred it to a Rotunda at No. 3 Blackfriars Road. Leicester House was then demolished in 1791.

Parkinson sold the collection in lots by auction in 1806. Many items were bought by collectors such as Edward Donovan, Edward Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby and William Bullock; many items also went to other museums, such as the Imperial Museum of Vienna. The contents of the museum are unusually well recorded, from a catalogue of the museum created in 1784, and the sale catalogue in 1806, together with a contemporary series of watercolours of its contents by Sarah Stone.

The Hunterian Museum In 1799 the government purchased the collection of the surgeon...
Cabinets of Curiosities Two of the most famously described 17th century cabinets were...
Dr Kahn’s Museum: obscene anatomy in Victorian London Dr Joseph Kahn’s Anatomical and Pathological Museum was the 19th...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.