Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Foreword

foreword k Malcolm Baker The publication of Collecting Across Cultures marks a significant moment within the history of collecting as it has developed as a distinctive discipline over the previous quarter century. But what of its lineage? The generally acknowledged starting point for this area of study was Julius von Schlosser’s Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaisssance, published in 1908, with its analysis of that astonishing range of material that made up the ‘‘Cabinet of Curiosity.’’ After that, however, the most innovative work on collecting was concerned largely with art collecting, led by Francis Haskell with his Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations Between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (1963) and Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion, and Collecting in England and France (1976). In 1983, however, a groundbreaking conference was organized at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford to commemorate the tercentenary of the institution’s foundation. As a member of that audience, I remember vividly how, through a succession of papers about the amassing in many different places of objects as diverse as shells, Kleinplastik, scientific instruments, and fossils, the collection was once more revealed to be made up of much more than works of art. Of course, these papers did not grow out of nothing and pioneering work on the breadth of specific collections had already been done by, among others, Lina Bolzoni on Francesco de Medici’s studiolo, Krzystof Pomian’s studies of Parisian and Venetian collectors, and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann on Rudolf II’s Kunstkammer. Around the same time, Stephen Bann’s influential book, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (1984), exploring the rhetorical models employed by early public museums, opened other interpretative possibilities, while the research for Paula Findlen’s equally important Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (1994) was xvi malcolm baker already well advanced. But the Ashmolean conference was a turning point. Out of this event came not only the proceedings, edited by Arthur MacGregor and Oliver Impey as The Origin of Museums (1985), but also the first issue of the new Journal of the History of Collections (1989), which gave this emergent discipline a periodical that established its identity and legitimacy. Since then, the history of collecting has moved center stage, as it were. Collecting and the collection have become prisms through which we perceive the shifting valencies of meaning, the social life of things, and the gendering of the material world, to mention but a few of the preoccupations of those working within the humanities and the historical disciplines. Already implicit in the 1983 Oxford conference, the history of collecting has been understood to be, above all else, an interdisciplinary activity. An important part of its appeal and a prime reason for its centrality are the way it not only requires but also provides a structure for the crossing of customary disciplinary boundaries. So far, so familiar. But what of Collecting Across Cultures and what of the future of the history of collecting? If the most striking feature of the 1983 Oxford conference was its reestablishment of a sense of the totality of collections, the present volume takes this further by going global. By making the movement of objects across continents and cultures its principal theme, Collecting Across Cultures reorients the subject and allows us to recognize a new dynamic at work. If The Origin of Museums established the history of collecting as a major field of study, Collecting Across Cultures registers how, twenty-five years or so later, it has come of age. COLLECTING ACROSS CULTURES This page intentionally left blank ...