Engaging with Nature: Essays on the Natural World in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Chapter 5: Collecting Nature and Art, Artisans and Knowledge in the Kunstkammer

chapter five Collecting Nature and Art Artisans and Knowledge in the Kunstkammer Pamela H. Smith In his 1565 treatise on how a collection should be formed, Samuel Quiccheberg (1529–67) extolled collecting as “a first philosophy ”: I must explain that the invention of the first philosophy [of collecting ], as it calls itself, is a novelty in the whole of Europe; it has brought about the certainty of all scientific areas as well as the most complete methods; like the opening of the doors of wisdom, it has produced the greatest use and godly clarity in the sciences.1 Quiccheberg titled his treatise “Inscriptions or Titles for an Ample and all-encompassing Theater which includes particulars of the whole creation and outstanding images, or . . . a storehouse of artful and wonderful things . . . which will bring about a new knowledge of things and admirable prudence [cognitio rerum et prudentia admiranda], or wisdom in statecraft.” I do not think that Quiccheberg’s claims that collections would bring “a new knowledge of things” and “wisdom in statecraft” were hyperbolic. Although Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones vel 115 Tituli Theatri Amplissimi has often been seen as a set of instructions for displaying the wealth and power of a prince or of representing the plenitude of the cosmos, I argue in this essay that collecting was part of a new conception of philosophy that viewed knowledge as active, productive , and based on nature. This dimension of Quiccheberg’s plan for a Kunstkammer emerges in particular relief when compared with the work of the Nuremberg goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer (1510–85), his contemporary and a collector himself. The emergence of collections of antiquities, natural objects, and works of art in the sixteenth century, as well as their significance for the study of nature, has been a familiar subject since the 1980s and 1990s, when Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor’s The Origins of Museums signaled the onset of the serious study of art and curiosity chambers— Kunst- und Wunderkammern—in early modern Europe. Since then, the work of Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Horst Bredekamp, Paula Findlen, Martin Kemp, and numerous others has illuminated many aspects of this important study for the understanding of nature in the Renaissance .2 Scholars have noted the cluster of secular princely (as distinguished from Church) collections founded in the mid-sixteenth century . August I, Elector of Saxony, established a Kunstkammer in 1560, the same year that Archduke Ferdinand II began assembling one at Schloss Ambras near Innsbruck.3 It is clear, however, from Quiccheberg’s comments about his ideas and models for collecting that some of the first secular collections in the north were probably those of the Fugger family, the long-distance merchants based in Augsburg, for whom Jacopo da Strada was already collecting in the 1540s.4 Indeed, Quiccheberg praised the Fugger collections, which he had helped to build when he entered their service as librarian in 1555. He commented that their collections helped people think up new inventions.5 Even before these merchant collections developed, it appears that the artisans of Augsburg and Nuremberg held extensive collections. Quiccheberg claimed that his own collection was already far surpassed by the collections of tools and precious items possessed by the artisans of these Free Imperial Cities: “It happened, as I truly confess, that I was energetically surpassed by goldsmiths, painters, sculptors, and other almost illiterates.”6 Whatever the dates of the first secular collections—and we should not forget the collections of the dukes of Burgundy from the fifteenth 116 Pamela H. Smith century7 —Quiccheberg’s treatise has been viewed as marking an important moment in the history of collecting, for it represents the first written treatise, in contrast to the actual collections themselves, that suggests a systematic organization of a collection.8 A close reading shows, however, that Quiccheberg’s treatise is pragmatic rather than systematic , no doubt reflecting its composition in the service of the Wittelsbach duke, Albrecht V of Bavaria, and the fact that the wishes of this patron were uppermost in Quiccheberg’s mind.9 Quiccheberg, who had been born in Antwerp, raised in Nuremberg, and educated in Basel and Ingolstadt, entered the service of Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria in 1559. In 1565, the same year that he wrote the treatise, the duke ordered seventeen precious objects to be kept in perpetuity by the Wittelsbach family. A princely proclamation of this sort was necessary in order...