Beauty is not the word we want
symmetry is better but wrong
*
where is the division consider
a line on one side of which is
not what is on the other.
Is this the best is this a little
life lived? Consider the lilies
who neither toil nor spin
who wither and die and return
according to encoded instructions,
written and read internally,
all is poem, all is reading
reasoned and reductive.
A Visit to Frederik Ruysch’s Cabinets
Diane Ackerman
Late one afternoon, fog encapsulated the city of Amsterdam, muffling the canals in a quiet so introspective the streets seemed merely to be dreaming of pedestrians. Maria hurried to meet Frederik Ruysch at his cabinet of curiosities on Bloemgracht, excited finally to see it, when she thought she heard someone behind her and turned around to find no person but a strangely lit crowd of vapors drifting across the canal, not exactly fog, and mumbling, it seemed.
She hadn’t had much food all day, and had worked hard collecting insects on the outskirts of town. Maybe the figments were summoned by her starved senses in the fog, trying to navigate when the usual landmarks were missing. Lacking stimuli, surely an exhausted brain might feed on itself. She didn’t care. The phantoms could be mystical, or deluding quirks of nature like echo or mirage, but to her senses they felt real. As real as the unpainted watercolors that sometimes floated in her mind’s eye.
Frederik Ruysch’s cabinet of curiosities was a family operation. For a small admission fee, one of his daughters would give tours to the general public, and after hours he held classes there for physicians, midwives, and other medical professionals. By the time Maria arrived, she was in good spirits, and ready to view his famous collection of wonders, and from the moment she entered the building, she knew she was in a strange new landscape, a small cameo of creation.
The number and variety of his “wet preparations” were daunting—a dozen shelves held large glass jars in which specimens dangled from nearly invisible horsehairs, allowing them to be viewed from all sides. In one jar, a floating human hand cradled a hatching reptile, topped by dried corals, butterflies, and flowers. In another, an embryo held in its hand a bundle of lymph vessels.
Entering the room quietly, to avoid startling her, Frederik saw her gasp and place one open palm on her chest, fingers spread, as if she needed to hold her heart in. It was a common reaction from first-time visitors, including the hand on the chest, a pattern that both intrigued and amused him.
“I removed that from a body more than twenty-five years ago,” he said quietly.
She turned with a start, and laughed at being caught like that, viewed while she was viewing his specimens, as if she herself were but his latest acquisition.
“And inflated and preserved them,” he continued, as he drew up beside her and pointed out details, “in such a way that all the tiny valves—here, here, and here—are clearly visible. What a lot of trouble beautiful things can be!”
In another jar sat a very small four-footed animal that had supposedly been regurgitated by a seventy-eight-year-old woman. That was followed by small toothy fish amid sheep intestines. Each jar seemed stranger than the one before, with all the items floating in exceptionally clear alcohol—quite a costly investment—and sealed with a thick layer of smeared resin, with pig’s bladder applied over the resin to keep the seals airtight. Sometimes Frederik also covered the jars with intestines or human skin.
“I tried several techniques,” he said, his eyes drifting to the left as he pictured them. “And I finally decided that all made equally good lids.”
Maria wasn’t sure what to say. “All the lids are red,” she thought matter-of-factly, without realizing that she’d said so out loud.
“Yes, because I’ve injected the vessels in those membrane seals with a waxy fluid that I invented—it looks more decorative, I think. Not only pleasing to the eye but useful as well for those who wish to observe the precise flow of these arteries.”
In some cases he’d also tied a red velvet ribbon around the top as a decorative touch.
“So much time and work went into preparing each of these specimens; you’ve no idea,” he said, sighing.
“But how fresh and alive they look,” she said, leaning in closer to both the specimen and Frederik.
“Ah, well, there’s much to be gained by the useful application of obsession! I’ve also begun cataloging everything, starting with the lowest shelf in the first room on the first floor. I’m nothing if not methodical. That’s one word for it anyway!”
Next he led his curious visitor to a small room, whose centerpiece was a walnut pedestal covered in little stones of various sizes and hues, some dull and almost round, others with an odd sheen, some quite jagged. She tilted her head and studied it hard for a moment, as if that might help her construe the diorama.
“What exactly am I looking at?” she asked at last.
“These,” he said excitedly, “are bladder, kidney, and gallstones. I removed a few of them from an eighty-year-old woman. Some of the other stones were passed in urine and some I took from corpses. There’s even one here somewhere—now which one is it?—that was coughed up by a man who had a lot of trouble swallowing, and he coughed it right out at me! Two of the larger ones—there,” he said, pointing to a couple of irregular stones, “came from the breast of a very old woman. And that one”—he pointed to a tiny pale gray stone—“came from the urinary duct of a four-year-old girl, poor thing. It caused her death, I’m afraid. Such pain she must have gone through.” He winced. “That’s very disturbing.”
Branching blood vessels were woven through the heap of stones, and atop that little stage stood the skeleton of a four-month-old fetus, holding a string of pearls in its right hand, which it looked at thoughtfully, as if to ask, “Why should I care about ornaments?” Next to it stood a similar one of roughly the same age, but in this fetus’s right hand, dangling by a barely visible hair, were chalky white stones removed from the joints of an old gout-stricken man. But in its left hand the fetus held a membrane handkerchief to its eye socket, as though it were weeping about the sufferings humans must endure. A third fetal skeleton held a scythe in its right hand. And a little banner reminded viewers: Man, born of woman, lives but briefly and has many weaknesses. Death spares no one, not even defenseless babes.
“And here,” he said, drawing her attention to another walnut pedestal, “we have the skeleton of a girl of three. Just look at the extreme whiteness of the bones! And you can see, I think, where I’ve joined all the parts by their natural ligaments. That was a lot of work on my part, I can tell you. It took all of my spare time for more than a week,” he said, savoring the memory.
He was clearly in his element, Maria thought, and also at a considerable distance from his material. Otherwise, she couldn’t imagine his being able to stage such disturbing tableaux. He seemed serious but quite cheerful as he spoke about them.
Another composition featured three tiny skeletons playing musical instruments, with the middle one holding part of a damaged thighbone in lieu of a violin, a second beating time against its head with a bone stick, and a third playing a cello that appeared to be one part of the sacroiliac. A feather headdress sat next to a spear made of the hardened vas deferens of an adult male. Next to that, a girdle of sheep intestines encircled what appeared to be a ram’s horns nested in brilliant green lichen. Beside that lay a small silver fish with a pointed snout and exceptionally long, sharp teeth, followed by all manner of decoratively jarred body parts, being held by preserved infant hands.
Every room in his curiosity cabinet was a self-contained tabernacle of art, a tiny museum in itself with its centerpiece an anatomical still life on a bed of stones quarried from bladder, kidneys, or gall bladder. Out of that bed arose trees of branching blood vessels filled with red liquid,
and entwined in that thicket stood tiny fetal skeletons, symbolizing the fleetingness of life, all arranged with the artistry, playfulness, and pride that collectors of rarities usually brought to their expanses of shells, minerals, wildlife, and ancient relics. But Frederik was the first to set human anatomical wonders on center stage.
Maria had no idea what to say, what to express, or precisely what to feel. Impressed by the intense labor, skill, and imagination that must have gone into creating these dioramas? Shocked? Faint? Fascinated in an objective, professional way? One fetal skeleton was so arranged as to be clearly laughing. Surely that had been difficult to engineer. Frederik’s artistry was plain. The moral messages were admirable. And his enthusiasm was unequaled for this massive, sprawling, multifloored, many-roomed cabinet of curiosities, in which he was perhaps the most curious specimen of all—that is, the specimen of his own omnivorous curiosity. The cabinet contained all the usual animals, plants, minerals, and anthropological rarities, but also human rarities, on the same par, equally odd and wondrous, inviting fearless study. It was as if he were a visitor from another planet who had come to earth exploring and collecting, returning home now with all the oddities he’d compiled to study and catalog. She smiled tenderly. There was something endearing about his resolve to soften the shock many people would feel in seeing human viscera on display in jars. His artful designs allowed all but the faintest hearts entrance to the mystery, and a way of perceiving his exhibits almost without horror. Almost. Not quite. She was shocked by his manipulation of the dead—was it heartless of him? No, his eyes had watered when he’d described the suffering of the little girl who died from a stone trapped in her urinary tract. He was clearly moved, deeply, by the lives and stories of the people whose parts he preserved. She had known in general about his collection, that it included human body parts among all the other fascinating arcana, but nothing prepared her for actually seeing it. And this was only the first room!
Most visitors moved slowly, timidly, through the exhibits, and some left after the first room. He hoped Maria would absorb the reverence and wonder he brought to the collection. It was macabre—not to his eyes, but so he’d been told—and even a bit shocking to some medical people. Her quiet perusal didn’t disappoint him. That was usual for first-time visitors, who might not always like what they saw, but always left not only awed by his craft but with a richer sense of themselves as life-forms.
“You know,” he said, “now that I think about it, no visitor has ever stayed long enough to see my whole collection!”
“I’m not surprised!” Maria laughed uneasily. “Everything everywhere,” she said, turning slowly in a circle, “is unique. There’s almost no background. The eye catches on everything, so each alcove takes time to properly explore.”
“And to slowly digest,” he said. “I know that can be a bit overwhelming at first, and I don’t mean to disturb you, madam.”
He normally showed guests dozens of shelves, drawers, and boxed specimens, as well as hundreds of glass jars containing the body parts of children, each specially treated to look plump cheeked and lifelike.
“Oh, no, you do mean to disturb,” she corrected him. “This is extraordinary artistry, but it’s not designed like still lifes just to be beautiful.”
“Yes, yes, you’re right, of course,” he said, thinking that he liked the way she contradicted him, with respect and attention. Not just recoiling and keeping peace by ignoring much of what he said—his wife’s habit. To be fair, they’d been married so long that his stories and ideas had grown stale to her. All the more reason, and fun, to deploy them with this willing companion.
“It’s an unusual art form and science, I admit, an acquired taste. But much of it overlaps with your own studies, does it not?” He gestured into the hallway, where dozens of shadow boxes of various sizes held a colorful array of butterflies and moths.
“And some of it is designed to shock,” she said with a sly smile, “to provoke conflicting emotions, and make one rethink everything one is. Curiosity engendering more curiosity.”
He smiled. “You understand.”
“I’m trying to … I’d like to.”
“Let’s enjoy something wondrous and yet simple that’s a little less fraught perhaps.” He led her into a side room and smoothly slid out a velvet-lined drawer, from which he removed one of several horizontal glass pyramids.
“Mr. Newton’s prism….” Frederik slowly turned the pyramid in his hand, drawing his fingertips along the sharp edges, turning it gently until it captured a ray of sunlight.
“You’re taken by the way he splits light into the colors of the rainbow?” Maria asked.
“Oh, no, I like being able to create my own rainbows with them—six or eight or twelve of them if I want—all over the walls, twenty feet away,” he said with a dramatic flourish of a hand, casting rainbows across the room.
“I see!”
He narrowed his eyes, picturing a single large rainbow across the skirt of her simple navy-blue dress.
“Or I could cast one onto a cliff or a boat hull. I can pick a rainbow right out of the air anytime I want! That’s the collector’s true art. Not just a discerning eye or an urge to accumulate and organize, but to make the lost, the rare, the invisible visible. Whenever he wants, so that nothing is ever lost.”
Maria thought about the scope of his quest. “That’s certainly powerful, godly even,” she said, silently marveling at the hubris it must require. There was a certain swagger to his voice, and something else, endearing, a spirited playfulness.
“No, godly would be to mount a storm and gallop across the sky,” he said, growing animated. “Splitting and casting colors that already exist, that’s more benign. But it means I can capture nature on my own terms, subdue and localize it, tuck a prism into my pocket and cast a rainbow anywhere I please, and she can’t repulse me or retaliate.”
She. What an interesting slip of pronouns, Maria thought.
“It’s a conquest perhaps?”
He laughed. “There’s a thrill in acquisition. I don’t deny it’s not always easy to separate the object from the experience of getting it. You have to know what’s available at any given time, not just the particulars you want. But surely you also feel a sense of conquest when you net a little butterfly?”
“First of all, they’re not all that ‘little,’” Maria said, a bit annoyed.
“Do forgive me,” he said quickly. “I didn’t mean to minimize. I hear some of the tropical species are a foot across, with long, dangling tails, and others flutter like the flags of nations!”
“And not quite that big! Not in nature. But, in my own private world, they’re much larger. In my world they’re certainly objects of wonder and beauty, but also keys to doors that wouldn’t otherwise open for me. Your door, for instance.”
He smiled and lifted his forefinger to his brow, as if he were tipping his hat to her.
She hesitated. There were social constraints with men who weren’t family, but she’d encountered him in public several times over the past few months. And from their first meeting at Waltha, the Labadist commune he’d come to a year earlier, hoping to commission a watercolor of a luna moth from her, she’d felt uncommonly at ease with him.
“When I sell my paintings, I receive money, which buys me time and a bit more freedom. And I raise the caterpillars myself, which is very time-consuming. My God, the patience one needs! I often have to wait a whole year for a moth or butterfly to emerge! But, in the end, I can see deeper into nature’s handiwork, deeper into the relationships between plants and animals, watch their behaviors entwine, and then all of them together into a single fabric of plant and animal and human too, one large mingling of creatures with quite different missions, all dependent on each other.”
“Like a society.”
“Of infinite families. And the butterflies’ wings are beautiful separately, like little shards of color, but they’re also like …”
She paused a moment, search
ing through her mental larder of images for a close enough comparison, and finally followed the word shard that had arisen out of who knew what corner of her memory.
“… panes of stained glass. Yes, like that. Separately, they’re beautiful and quite small, even trivial, in size. But when they’re viewed together in bright sunlight, they create something grander and even more awe-inspiring. So, you see, for me, they stay life-size on paper—I’m scrupulous about that—but some days they can seem much larger or smaller.”
“Ah, when you put it that way,” he said, nodding his head in thought. Although he hesitated to say so, they were magnified for him too.
“And do you actually believe that all the colors on earth come from that simple spectrum of seven colors?” Maria asked.
“I’d argue with the word ‘simple.’ Mixtures are never simple. Think of the mixture of male and female, and the complexity of the organism they give rise to.”
“That’s true,” she said, “though I disagree with … But, forgive me, I’m getting ahead of myself.”
“No, no, madam, go on. I’ve never had someone I could talk with so easily about these things. Most people find them too …”
His voice fell away as he sought the right word, but he didn’t need to complete the sentence. She knew the word was strange, and her nod implied that she understood.
“Well, I disagree with Mr. Newton about color,” she said. “There are shades in nature that can’t be made—not by me, at least—from those seven alone. And he chose seven because there are seven notes in a musical scale? Really? That makes no sense to me. Also, I find some colors are tinted by glare or cold or heat or shadow, and some in forests shed their own light. I find I must grind most of my own pigments to be pleased with the results.”
“You do? May I ask you to tell me more about your ingredients, and what binders you use?”
Looking at him askance, she slyly smiled. “No, sir, you may not!”
“Just so. I have no intention of telling you my embalming secrets either.”
A Cabinet of Curiosity Page 37
