As Greenblatt goes on to observe, “The expression of wonder stands for all that cannot be understood, that can scarcely be believed. It calls attention to the problem of credibility and at the same time insists upon the undeniability, the exigency of experience.”
At the outset of his own account (Greenblatt points out), Léry asks how his French readers can be made to “believe what can only be seen two thousand leagues from where they live; things never known (much less written about) by the Ancients; things so marvelous that experience itself can scarcely engrave them on the understanding even of those who have in fact seen them?” (Bernal Díaz, who accompanied Cortés on the conquest of Mexico and subsequently recorded the adventure in his The Conquest of New Spain, at one point similarly recalls the Spaniards’ first spellbound vision of the Aztec capital: “Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to say, or whether what appeared before us was real.”) In Guiana in the 1590s, Sir Walter Raleigh began hearing native reports about people in the interior with “eyes on their shoulders and mouths in the middle of their breasts.” Raleigh knows his readers may take this for “a meere fable,” the sort of thing with which Sir John Mandeville (d. 1372) was wont to fill his accounts of travel to the Far East and which earned him such a reputation as a liar. But for Raleigh, as Greenblatt notes, it is skepticism rather than credulity that is likely to be misleading: “Such a nation was written of by Mandeville, whose reports were holden for fables many yeeres, and yet since the East Indies were discovered, we find his relations true of such things as heretofore were held incredible.” Léry makes the same point about even earlier authors, noting how while he is still hesitant to believe everything he reads, nevertheless, ever since visiting America, “I have revised the opinion I formerly had of Pliny and others when they describe foreign lands, because I have seen things as fantastic and prodigious as any of those—once thought incredible—that they mention.”
The point is that for a good century and a half after the discovery of the Americas, Europe’s mind was blown. That was the animating spirit behind, and the enduring significance of, the profusion of Wunderkammern.11 It wasn’t just the American (or, alternatively, African, Far Eastern, Greenlandian, etc.) artifacts that they displayed (phosphorescent feathers, shrunken heads, rhinoceros horns). It was how the palpable reality of such artifacts so vastly expanded the territory of the now readily conceivable. Horns, for example, were suddenly all the rage—rhinoceros horns, unicorn horns, sea unicorn horns … human horns, dainty round horns coming sprouting out of proper Englishwomen’s foreheads, for God’s sake! But rhinoceros horns were real; and sea unicorns did exist (in the form, anyway, of narwhals, with those uncannily spiraling unitary tusks seemingly protruding from out of their foreheads)—so why couldn’t unicorn horns or even human horns exist as well? Our great-grandfathers’ certainties, debunked by our grandfathers, were suddenly turning out to be not quite so easily debunkable after all.12
Obviously the mathematical and navigational sophistication necessary for Columbus to have been able to mount an expedition to America—and then make it back, and not once, but four times!—was of a considerable level, and was indicative of a steadily rising curve of such certain, positive knowledge (the earth wasn’t flat, and there clearly weren’t any sea monsters lurking along its edge to swallow up any stray doubters). But the stuff he found in America, and the stuff he brought back, was so strange and so new as to seem to sanction belief in all manner of wondrous prospects and phantasms for years thereafter.
So that collections, every bit as catholic and deliriously heterodox as Cope’s—to judge from the frontispieces gracing their respective eventual catalogues—began sprouting up all over Europe: the Tradescants’ in Lambeth, Francesco Calceolari’s in Verona, Ole Worm’s in Copenhagen, Ferrante Imperato’s in Naples, Manfredo Settala’s in Milan, Athanasius Kircher’s in Rome. In some instances, the main guiding principle of accumulation, echoing Bacon’s injunction, seemed to reflect a sort of Noachian passion: ideally, one or two of every single thing in the world—“the universal nature made private.” (As far as that ambition was concerned, an inside track perhaps belonged to Father Kircher, who, as a leading German scholar based at the Jesuit College in Rome, was able to draw on the order’s farflung contacts and resources all over the world.)
Francesco Calceolari’s museum in Verona (1622) (illustration credit 2.3)
Often there seemed to be no order whatsoever to the pell-mell pile, or none discernible to us, save that of continuous, compounding amazement. Adalgisa Lugli, a contemporary Italian art historian, writing on “Inquiry as Collection” and referring to lists such as Platter’s (she’s obviously been exposed to a good many of them in the course of her work), notes wryly how the seventeenth-century museum “was still conceived of as a place where … one could move about without having to solve or face the problem of continuity.” (Arthur MacGregor, an assistant keeper at the Ashmolean, and one of the editors of the Origins volume, strikes a similar note of straight-faced hilarity in describing how “Rudolf II [1552–1612] established at the Hradschin Palace in Prague one of the most impressive artistic centers of his time. As well as being an outstanding patron, Rudolf built up a truly remarkable collection which has frequently been likened to his own personality in its immense richness and lack of purposeful direction.”)
Sometimes a sort of taxonomical order was imposed upon the hoard, though one which might seem oddly arbitrary to modern sensibilities: At the Anatomical Museum in Leiden, for example, specimens in one corner were grouped by type of defect, such that separate pickling jars containing two-tailed lizards, doubled apples, conjoined Siamese twin infants, forked carrots, and a two-headed cat were equably ranged side by side. (Of course, the point is that these were themselves the very years when the so-called modern sensibility, with its own eventual taxonomical imperatives and conventions, was in the hit-and-miss process of taking shape.) Other times, a sort of moral order was overlaid across the material. Note, for example, how the pelican atop the shelf to the right in Imperato’s museum (see back endpaper of this book) has been stuffed and mounted as if stabbing itself with its own beak (and indeed, this appears to be the very thing that’s caught the attention of the courtiers inside the picture as well). This detail doubtless refers to the belief, pervasive at the time, that pelicans were given to tearing their breasts open so as to resuscitate their dead young with their own blood, a contention first adumbrated by Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23–79) in his Natural History but one which naturally dovetailed quite nicely with subsequent Christian iconography. The curious thing here, of course, is that the taxidermist in question, who in all likelihood never himself saw an actual live pelican, chose to confabulate precisely that scripturally resonant posture for the animal’s display in his natural history museum.
The Dutch in particular seemed partial to such moralizing presentations. As early as the 1590s, the Theatrum Anatomicum in Leiden housed a veritable emporium of rearticulated skeletons, both animal (ferret, horse) and human. In many cases the human skeletons, as accompanying banners proclaimed, proved to be those of executed criminals (a cattle thief’s skeleton, for instance, was mounted astride the skeleton of an ox). The centerpiece of the entire amphitheater, meanwhile, consisted of a woman’s skeleton offering an apple to a man’s beneath a scraggly Tree of Knowledge. Nearby, pennants bearing archly moralizing inscriptions on the terrible consequences of original sin drove home the necessary lessons for any dim souls who might still have been missing the point.
Interior of Theatrum Anatomicum, Leiden (1610) (illustration credit 2.4)
This moralizing tenor persisted throughout the seventeenth century in Holland, reaching an astonishing crescendo in the Baroque labors of the great Amsterdam anatomist Frederik Ruysch, whose collection of over two thousand meticulous presentations eventually filled up more than five rooms in his home. Some of his tableaux were relatively straightforward: the skull of a prostitute, for instance, being kicked by the le
g bones of a baby. Some were heartrending: Ruysch had perfected ways of preserving the entire bodies of dead infants in large glass jugs in presentations that were often lavished with extraordinary and loving care (the serene, stilled faces swathed in delicate lace, the limbs banded with prim beaded bracelets). Some were peculiar: Ruysch proudly exhibited a box of fly eggs taken from the anus of “a distinguished gentleman who sat too long in the privy” (Ruysch’s own description from his catalogue). And some were downright bizarre: his masterworks, perhaps, were a series of vanitas mundi tableaux, exquisite skeleto-anatomical variations on traditional flower arrangements grouped around the theme of life’s inevitable transience. For their base, Ruysch would contrive a mound of kidney stones and other diseased organs—this in itself was not that unusual since dried kidney and gallstones (the bigger, the better) were regularly featured in wonder-cabinets all over the continent. But then, on top of those … well, consider the contemporary engraving by C. Huyberts, as explicated more recently by Dr. Antonie Luyendijk-Elshout of the University of Leiden, based on Ruysch’s own notes:
One of Frederik Ruysch’s vanitas mundi tableaux, Amsterdam (early 1700s) (illustration credit 2.5)
With eye sockets turned heavenward the central skeleton—a foetus of about four months—chants a lament on the misery of life. “Ah Fate, ah bitter Fate!” it sings, accompanying itself on a violin, made of osteomyelitic sequester with a dried artery for a bow. At its right, a tiny skeleton conducts the music with a baton, set with minute kidney stones. In the right foreground a stiff little skeleton girdles its hips with injected sheep intestines, its right hand grasping a spear made of the hardened vas deferens of an adult man, grimly conveying the message that its first hour was also its last. On the left, behind a handsome vase made of the inflated tunica albuginea of the testis, poses an elegant little skeleton with a feather on its skull and a stone coughed up from the lungs hanging from its hand. In all likelihood the feather is intended to draw attention to the ossification of the cranium. For the little horizontal skeleton in the foreground with the familiar mayfly on its delicate hand, Ruysch chose a quotation from the Roman poet Plautus, one of the favorite authors of this period, to the effect that its lifespan had been as brief as that of the young grass felled by the scythe so soon after sprouting.
Sadly (I guess), none of Ruysch’s vanitas mundi tableaux appear themselves to have survived the ravages of time, though many of his other preparations have—although, curiously, for the most part, not in Holland. Ruysch (who, incidentally, for all his preoccupation with frail mortality, himself managed to survive into his ninety-third year, in 1731) fairly late in his life sold virtually his entire collection to the Russian tsar Peter the Great, which is why students wishing to survey Ruysch’s superb craftsmanship in person today must travel to St. Petersburg.13
TSAR PETER’S PURCHASE of Ruysch’s collection, along with many others, in 1717, was an attempt to amass, ex nihilo, a vast Wunderkammer of his own—another of his many attempts to modernize the Russian Empire in one fell swoop. Ironically, however, the universalizing ambitions and wildly heterodox tastes which undergird such a venture were already beginning to seem anachronistic in the face of the onrushing Enlightenment, with its penchant for a more skeptical, vigorous, and systematically delineated type of order. Half a century later, Peter’s granddaughter-in-law, Catherine the Great, wrote to a curator who still favored the old style: “I often quarreled with him [Peter] about his wish to enclose Nature in a cabinet—even a huge palace could not hold Her.” And, to a degree, during her reign she allowed Peter’s cabinet to molder (meanwhile herself amassing, in the more modern style, a huge collection of over four thousand paintings and then erecting a vast palace, the Hermitage, within which to house them). For that matter, Ruysch himself was a transitional figure between one world that seems entirely foreign to us and another that begins to feel much more recognizably our own. (Indeed, his own work was instrumental in helping to shape that latter world; a recent biographer has described him as “probably the most skilled and knowledgeable preparator in the history of anatomy.”)
For well more than a century before that, however, the sense of wonder afforded a steady undertow to any simple, straightforward advances in positivist certainty.14 And in fact it had to be beaten back—by Galileo and Newton and Spinoza and Descartes—before that steady positivist advance could once again forge forward, unimpeded. (“What we commonly call being astonished,” wrote Descartes, who wanted to get people out of their hearts and back into their heads, where they belonged, “is an excess of wonder which can never be otherwise than bad.”) And by the mid-1700s, the age of wonder was indeed giving way to the Enlightenment, with its bracing sense of steadily accumulating scientific certainty and progress, a sense of the world that would in turn retain its hegemony, largely unchallenged, right up until the dawning of our own era—until, say, Newton slammed into Heisenberg.
In her essay “Inquiry as Collection,” Adalgisa Lugli details many of the contemporary neopositivist objections to the Wunderkammer sensibility but then goes on to assert that such Wunderkammer-men as “Delia Porta, Cardano and Kircher were not alone among men of science [of their time] in looking upon wonder or marvel as upon one of the essential components of the study of nature and the unraveling of its secrets … wonder defined [as it was up to the end of the eighteenth century] as a form of learning—an intermediate, highly particular state akin to a sort of suspension of the mind between ignorance and enlightenment that marks the end of unknowing and the beginning of knowing.”
Over two centuries later (on the far side of Heisenberg’s new dispensation), according to James Gleick in his introduction to Richard Feynman’s recently reissued Character of Physical Law, “Physicists had hands-on experience with uncertainty and they learned how to manage it. And to treasure it—for the alternative to doubt is authority, against which science fought for centuries. ‘Great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance,’ Feynman jotted on a piece of notepaper one day, ‘teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed.’ This became his credo: he believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but as the essence of knowing.”15
David Wilson has thus pitched his museum at the very intersection of the premodern and the postmodern—or rather, perhaps what he has done is to tap into the premodern wellsprings of the postmodern temper.16
FOR A BIG BOOK, Tradescant’s Rarities sure wasn’t easy to find. Published in 1983 as a sort of companion volume to The Origins of Museums, Tradescant’s Rarities, according to the notice on the backflap of the Origins volume, consisted in a study of the collections that had constituted the foundations for the Ashmolean Museum itself, along with a catalogue listing. For some time I’d harbored a vague interest in perusing that list, partly because of the number and quality of the references to the Tradescants in other sources—but also, no doubt, because of some of the references to the Tradescants in several of Wilson’s more farfetched exhibits, such as that of the horn of Mary Davis of Saughall—so that every once in a while I’d casually check the inventories of any libraries I happened to be using for other projects, but the volume never showed up, not until one day when I managed to track it down in the backstacks among the art-book holdings at the Forty-second Street Branch of the New York Public Library.
Opening the volume to its preface, my glance casually strayed over to the copyright statement on the facing page:
© Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 1983
Published in cooperation with the Visitors of the Ashmolean by the Delegates of the Press
Just above, the Oxford University Press’s address was given as “Walton Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,” and below that came an equally familiar (though entirely different) litany of place names:
London Glasgow New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo
Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town
Melbourne A
uckland
and associates in
Beirut Berlin Ibadan Mexico City Nicosia
The first essay in the book, authored by the volume’s editor Arthur MacGregor, was entitled “The Tradescants: Gardeners and Botanists.” And indeed much that followed was similarly familiar: the Tradescants—John the Elder and John the Younger—were, like the Thums, primarily gardeners and botanists (the Elder had even been appointed Keeper of His Majesty’s Gardens, Vines, and Silkworms at Oatlands Palace). The father died in 1638, after which the son continued his labors, further expanding the marvelous collection based in their home, known as the Ark, in Lambeth. The son married a young woman named Hester, but when their son died they began casting about for another means of transmitting the family’s bounteous legacy to posterity. During the early 1650s they were befriended by one Elias Ashmole, an ambitious gentleman of considerable social standing—he was Comptroller of the Excise, an astrologer regularly consulted by the king, author of several historical and alchemical works, and a founding member of the Royal Society.
John Tradescant the Elder, Elias Ashmole, and John Tradescant the Younger with his wife, Hester (illustration credit 2.6)
On one of their first outings together, Ashmole and John the Younger traveled to Maidstone to attend a witchcraft trial. In 1652, Ashmole began cosponsoring an inventory and cataloguing of the Ark’s entire collection. “Following publication of the catalog in 1656,” MacGregor reports, “our knowledge of Tradescant stems mainly from legal documents, such as the deed of gift of 1659 by which the collection of rarities was assigned to Ashmole, and the recensions in two subsequent wills.” For, indeed, the Tradescants did try to revoke that clause in their will, though Ashmole, perhaps owing to his superior legal training, had managed to frame its original wording in such a way that it could only be revoked through the mutual consent of both parties. Even after John the Younger’s death in 1662, his widow strove mightily, through a succession of “unhappy lawsuits much disturbed,” to wrest the collection from Ashmole’s clutches, though these efforts ceased in 1668, after she was discovered mysteriously drowned in her own pond.17
Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder Page 7
