Text (slightly modified) of the opening discussion under the aegis of Parabola given at a seminar held at the Museum of Garden History Thursday 20th July 2006 on Tradescant and the culture of collecting, called "Repatriating the Ark".
The Wunderkammer
In most English towns a distinction is made between the art gallery and the museum. The former contains strictly paintings and sculpture (the fine arts), whereas the museum may have anything from stuffed animals, theatre costumes, railway trains and indeed garden implements. British Museum, Natural History Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum but National Gallery and Tate Gallery. But this was a nineteenth century idea.
Twentieth and twenty first century art has tried to blur the distinction between fine and applied arts and natural history, starting with Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal, then going on to events, installations and happenings, but there has always been the theatre. And video art takes us right back to preserving the ephemeral and discovered objects right back to the Wunderkammer. Virtual museums have long existed too – The Paper Museum of Cassiano del Pozzo consists of collected drawings and illustrations of wonders in the sixteenth century and a great many catalogues, drawings and engravings of animals and rare plants were in existence by 1600.
It had started earlier: In the fifteenth century Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga was much more famous for his collection than for his saintliness, and Leonardo’s studies of comparative anatomy, of animal anatomy as well as of the human body at the end of the fifteenth century, were being copied in the 1560’s. But we may conveniently take Francis Bacon’s Gesta Grayorum of 1594 as our point of departure in England.
First, the collecting of a most perfect and general library, wherein whosoever the wit of man hath heretofore committed to books of worth … may be made contributory to your wisdom. Next, a spacious, wonderful garden, wherein whatsoever plant the sun of divers climate, or the earth out of divers moulds, either wild or by the culture of man brought forth, may be … set and cherished: this garden to be built about with rooms to stable in all rare beasts and to cage in all rare birds; with two lakes adjoining, the one of fresh water and the other of salt, for like variety of fishes. And so you may have in small compass a model of the universal nature made private. The third, 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. The fourth such a still-house, so furnished with mills, instruments, furnaces, and vessels as may be a palace fit for a philosopher’s stone.
With due allowance for the passage of 400 years, little has changed – museums are still in the business of sorting the products of man and nature and in promoting the understanding of their significance. The collector’s fondness for products of ‘singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things’ provides easy reinforcement for this tendency. Princely collections of fossils and shells, minerals and instruments and amazing artefacts were well advanced by the middle of the sixteenth century.
By defeating the ideas of Aristotle, Baconian science perhaps with Gutenberg & Caxton, represents the triumph of evidence over authority, and the Wunderkammer is a visual expression, a material collection, of that evidence.
It was not at first seen as an attack on religion. On the contrary, many of the first collections including Tradescant, in his letter to his son, reproduced in the catalogue of the present exhibition, were specifically seen as bearing witness to the wonder of god’s creation.
Nevertheless, as the evidence against the received and accepted authorities mounted, more and more people began to perceive that the religious, and in our case, biblical and Aristotelian account of the Natural world, was no longer tenable. The explanations are a profoundly secular manifestation, nothing remotely spiritual, despite occasional determined attempts to regard ‘god’s wonders’ as evidence of a manifest deity.
The Age of Enlightenment brought Newton in England, Locke in Scotland and the Encyclopaedists in France. Voltaire fled first to England and then to Switzerland.
The universal ideal was with them all from the start, and the first cabinets of curiosities were neither specialised nor polemic. On the contrary they set out to embrace the whole world as it is. Borghini had designed a cabinet (collection we would say) of curiosities for Francesco de Medici in the middle of the 16th century and so had many others. The Tradescants (and then Ashmole) opened their museum right here at the end of the 17th century.
The second half of the 20th century (say since World War II) saw the rise of ‘antiques’ which are now pretty well sold out. So shells and stalactites and stuffed animals and various natural objects have replaced them, first on mantelpieces and now once again in cabinets of collectors no longer able to find a renaissance bronze Apollo or a Meissen figurine.
Shops that used to sell antiques and interior decorators who used to recommend art, now sell and install trophies, and shells and minerals of various kinds. They invented an auction category called ‘collectables’, a pleonasm if ever there was one, now that almost anything goes.
Each man (or woman) for himself. I know someone who collects eggs: Eggs of birds yes, but mostly painted eggs, wooden or alabaster and precious stones, hundreds all different. Chocolate maybe. And I know a beautiful formal garden in Devon where every plant is a member of the cabbage (Brassica) family – from kale to colza, rape to kohlrabi, you might say. And I knew a woman who collected frogs. She has since died, but I always wondered if she kissed each one daily in the hope of finding a prince. But I also know of someone who collects ‘enclaves’ – bits of country enclosed by another, or whole very small countries. Collecting is in the mind, not only about possession and property.
The word Wunderkammer of course comes direct from the German for ‘wonder’ and ‘kammer’ which gives English chamber, hence room or just a series of vitrines. My own Wunderkammer is not laid out as a museum and it strongly resists order and control. Objects (like books) tend to spread around the house, over any flat surface, in corners and only occasionally on hopelessly overcrowded shelves designed for them.
I have collected it over my whole life. I started with shrapnel during the war, then I stuck stamps into loose leaf pages in pretty patterns before someone told me I must arrange them by countries and values (why must I? – so I gave up stamps). My collection has a single simple defining characteristic, though it took me a while to realise it: It must preserve some element of wonder, amazement, arousing, in me, astonishment, surprise and curiosity.
Beauty maybe too, but beauty as a secondary thing, second to wonder. What I sometimes call the “Coo-er factor”. Look at that. Even when I include artefacts and works of art, they are there for their amazing workmanship or obscure material or strange origin rather than aesthetic merit. I have excluded books and fine art from my list, mostly oil paintings on canvas or panel. There is no great logic to this and I own a great many books. Certainly fine art should also be classed as coo-er and I do have some fine art. But partly because it is also my business and partly because, for me, the emotion and the intellectual processes are slightly different, I have not included my books nor my collection of fine art as part of the Wunderkammer. But they are certainly displayed together and we shall hear how another collector has taken the opposite, more integrative view.
I have not made a full inventory, let alone full catalogue entries, but even so my simple hand list runs to several pages. I have a few copies here if you want to see the list.
Of course any museum worth visiting, this room too, is a kind of Wunderkammer. But the best Wunderkammer I know, almost the perfect one, exists in London. Of course it is only so perfect because it embodies my personal interests most perfectly.
There are old gold bound books, and stuffed animals and fake monsters, and a dinosaur skeleton in fossil; orreries and other scientific instruments, old microscopes, globes and telescopes and busts of philosophers; Greek and Roman antiquities, Indian miniatures and Aztec pottery and Inca gold. And Egyptian fossil pussycats. And to allow us to read the hieroglyphs, hey there is the Rosetta stone. Now you know. I can only dream and aspire to all that but it is no disgrace to realise that my means do not allow me to compete with the King’s library at the British Museum. They call it the Age of Enlightenment.
I would include the whole Science museum too and my own collection contains a plasma ball and a computer chip, a mother board, a hard disc and a stainless steel ball race and steel bearings.
For Christmas 1993 The Economist published the seven NEW wonders of the world
The old ones, by Antipater of Sidon in 2nd century BC were the
1. The Pyramids at Giza
2. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
3. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia
4. The Temple of Artmesis at Ephesus
5. The Mausoleum of Helicarnassus
6. The Colossus of Rhodes
7. The Pharos at Alexandria
Only the pyramids survive.
The new ones as stated were
1. The Micropressor - the thinker
2. The Pill - equaliser
3. The Telephone network - Messenger
4. The Jumbo Jet - The Traveller
5. The Off-shore Oil Rig - The Colossus
6. The Hydrogen Bomb - The Destroyer
7. The Moon Landing (tranquility base) - the Outpost
Note that the modern set has only one (quasi) building and no works of art at all. But they were chosen to amaze and stun – and the authors felt that buildings are not sufficiently amazing these days. My own view is that the sky scrapers built in some parts of the world might well qualify but maybe they get superseded too quickly. They do have, and are intended to have, a 'coo-er' factor. These days, only 13 years later, we might also choose to substitute the internet for the telephone network but maybe it is the same thing. The most wonderful wonders go out of date rather quickly these days.
In this church, this museum, we honour the Tradescants, father and son, and due honour is paid to what Arthur MacGregor in the catalogue of the exhibition calls “a culture of curiosity” – that’s it exactly. They built up an early, secular, non-aristocratic Wunderkammer and their collection passed to their neighbour Elias Ashmole. Ashmole seems to have financed it, certainly he catalogued the collection and preserved it. In doing so he introduced science and knowledge, the essential ingredients perhaps of the dawning enlightened mind, but maybe thereby he reduced something of the excitable childish naïve curiosity, the innocence of the eye, which, once lost, is so hard to recapture. For us, the urge to understand and to know is inescapable and omnipresent, but it may interfere with excitement and mystery.
Be that as it may, Ashmole’s actions led to the opening of the first surviving public museum in England, perhaps in the world. The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford opened its doors in 1683 and is today as fine a collection of universal wunderkammer and fine art gallery as any one could wish. It is currently undergoing a huge rebuilding programme, and while that is happening, their booklet proudly states, the “larger part of the Tradescant collection has been lent to the Museum of the History of Science.” which was the original Ashmolean building in Broad Street, Oxford.
See partial inventory of my own Wunderkammer or, to see works of art for sale go to Home Page? or works of art or Alphabetical List