Blogs as Wunderkammern

Wow!! This is exactly how I think about mine!

The difference is that mine isn't very public, I have one invited reader and I gave my son the link. There may be others who have stumbled here...Welcome to the flotsam and jetsam of my mind.

My cabinet of curiosities revisited

Realised I hadn't included an image of the bottom shelf. a slightly different theme.



Another example, with a short article.




Cabinet of Curiosity

May 17, 2008 in Science & Society

“Cabinets of curiosities (also known as Wunderkammer) were encyclopedic collections of types of objects whose categorical boundaries were, in Renaissance Europe, yet to be defined. Modern science would categorize the objects included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings) and antiquities. “The Kunstkammer was regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world, and a memory theater. The Kunstkammer conveyed symbolically the patron’s control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction.”

“A found object, in an artistic sense, indicates the use of an object which has not been designed for an artistic purpose, but which exists for another purpose already. Found objects may exist either as utilitarian, manufactured items, or things (including, at times, dead bodies) which occur in nature. In both cases the objects are discovered by the artist or musician to be capable of being employed in an artistic way, and are designated as ‘found’ to distinguish them from purposely created items used in the art forms.’

‘Found object’ can also refer to a small object found by chance which, though usually of little monetary value, captures the imagination of the finder and is therefore kept as a keepsake. Perhaps it is a penny or an unusual stone or even a pretty piece of metal. Often found just “on the ground,” it is kept as a curiosity or even a good luck charm. They are often associated with a trip or a special memory or an important time in a person’s life. The connotations of mystery about where it came from, the feeling that it is a lucky or providential occurrence, and the sense that it is simply a ‘free gift from the world’ or “from nowhere” can add to the sense of wonder or magic surrounding a found object. A ‘found object’ may stand alone or may form the basis for a collection.”

Link It has the links to the Wiki pages

A Cabinet of Curiosities

I love these images. This has a passing resemblance to mine.



This article explains it well:

The Cabinet of Curiosities

Wunderkammern or “Wonder-Chambers”: Forerunners of Modern-Day Museums

Dec 14, 2006 Suzanne Hill

Wunderkammern fostered the Renaissance craze to assemble strange, frivolous, yet aesthetic personal collections.

In the past, new scientific discoveries, strange finds, and striking pieces of original artwork were greeted with awe and wonder. It became popular during the Renaissance to build a "cabinet of curiosities" to display a private collection of art and natural objects of which the owner was extremely proud. These groups of objects were at first housed in an actual cabinet or ornate piece of furniture, known as Wunderkammern or Wunderkabinetts. They are simultaneously pieces of furniture and the collections of items within them.

In the exhibits of these early Wunderkammern, owners might display strange, beautiful, mysterious, and precious marvels like starfish, monkey teeth, alligator skins, phosphorescent minerals, Indian canoes, Egyptian figurines, and “unicorn tails.” Rich art patrons would display their new art acquisitions in the intimate backdrop of a prized spot in an ornate carved cabinet. At Kensington castle, Sir Walter Cope is said to have displayed, “holy relics from a Spanish ship; earthen pitchers and porcelain from China; a Madonna made of feathers; a back-scratcher; a Javanese costume, Arabian coats; the horn and tail of a rhinoceros; the baubles and bells of Henry VIII's fool; and a Turkish emperor's golden seal.” The collections demonstrated manmade wonders and the diversity of God’s creations as well as a fascination with new scientific approaches to the study of natural phenomena. Each collection’s commitment to miscellany dependended on the idiosyncratic interests of the collector.

Ole Worm
For example, Ole Worm, personal physician to King Christian IV of Denmark, assembled a fascinating collection that ranged from fossils to preserved plants, bones, tortoise shells, and any manner of curiosity. Much of these objects he collected during his extensive travels. Today the Georg Laue gallery in Munich recreates the Renaissance cabinet with many rare curiosities and objects made of exotic materials like coral, ivory, rhinoceros horn, chamois horn, rare woods, silver, gold, and semiprecious stones like rock crystal and serpentine.

The objects on display in these storage or display spaces were marvels of nature. Formal boundaries between scientific disciplines didn’t yet exist so science, art, and the natural order of the universe were all interconnected to those of the seventeenth century. The move toward the modern museum began in the eighteenth century.

Peale Museum
One of the earliest museums in the world open to the public was the Peale Museum founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, in 1784 by the painter and scientist, Charles Willson Peale. The collection consisted of both natural history objects and portraits (the majority of the paintings were done by him and his son Rembrandt Peale). Then Peale’s son established the Peale Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1814, and today this museum (still with a collection featuring paintings and natural history objects) is the oldest museum building in the Western Hemisphere. At the height of its popularity, the Museum’s Quadruped Room displayed 90 specimens of mammals. Its Long Room had more than 700 bird specimens situated in mini-dioramas, about 4000 insects in glass cases, numerous minerals, and scores of Peale's portraits. A third room showcased marine specimens. Peale's famous mammoth skeleton was among the first such mounting anywhere in the world.

The collections of the Wunderkammern have their beginnings in the curiosity spawned by the Renaissance. Later Western scholarship would sort natural finds into increasingly distinct categories, such as botany, biology, geology, archaeology, anthropology, and art. As the rigors of scientific thought developed, the chamber of curiosities or “Wonder Cabinet” began to seem primitive and went out of fashion. As it became important to specialize and separate by discipline, the Renaissance notion of the all-embracing collection was abandoned in favor of a more up-to-date view of the world. But certainly the Wunderkammern are evidence of humans’ timeless interest in collecting intriguing objects.

Link

My Cabinet of Curiosities

I've always been fascinated by the Renaissance idea of a cabinet of curiosities, in fact this blog could be looked upon as a virtual cabinet of curiosities.

This is looking like it will be a recurrent theme. I have always liked to find unlikely articles/artifacts in junk shops and flea markets. Through the years I have assembled my own.

It's not just me!!

Serpents' teeth, nuns' girdles and the joy of random stuff

Christopher Howse
Published: 12:01AM GMT 04 Nov 2006

Objects for a Kunstkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, belonging to Georg Lave Christopher Howse celebrates the oddball collectors who, throughout history, have accumulated hoards of peculiar, idiosyncratic and fascinating artefacts

''A hat-band made of the sting-ray", reads a typical entry in the catalogue of the cabinet of curiosities collected by the Tradescants, father and son, in the mid 17th century.

Such baroque treasure-stores have been inspiring a top-drawerful of artists in the past three decades. The results of Damien Hirst's fascination with cabinets of curiosities we all know about – his preserved creatures in jars, or, from 1993, a display case filled, not with museum exhibits, but dozens of cigarette ends (entitled Dead Ends Died Out). But as early as the 1930s Joseph Cornell was assembling objects in vitrines – glass cases of the kind used in museums. In 1984, the Tate bought a work by Joseph Beuys, a vitrine containing beeswax, a jar of pork dripping, a pile of lard and a zinc box of mutton tallow.

Something more arresting came from Rosamond Purcell in the 1990s. She produced photographic artworks simply by picking up on such extraordinary exhibits as the teeth from the collection of Tsar Peter the Great arranged in an old display case. The title she chose, Teeth Drawn by Peter the Great, reflected a chilling aspect of his cruel reputation, but it was the image that startled. In 2003 she assembled in her Massachusetts studio two rooms of objects based on the Wunderkammer, or roomful of curiosities, made famous by Olaus Worm, the 17th-century Danish collector.

A successful English artist who at first seems to share much with the 17th-century collectors is Polly Morgan. Her work, made in her east London studio, features stuffed animals. "Kate Moss bought a blue tit lying asleep on a prayer book beneath a glass chandelier," she says. "People who buy from me are used to buying art, not taxidermy. My work might be a modern take on the cabinet of curiosities, but the juxtapositions are quite different."

The name "cabinet of curiosities" suggests a piece of furniture. John Bargrave, a 17th-century collector of everything from medieval seals to the chains of slaves he freed, did house his meticulously annotated hoard in two large, beautifully tailored cabinets, which he left to Canterbury Cathedral, where they can still be seen.

But a piece of furniture was too small for all the bright-plumaged birds, ancient carved gemstones, tropic shells, Roman coins, unicorns' horns and mummified crocodiles of the aristocratic collector. The cabinet became a room of wonders. I suspect these represent in part a secularised version of vast medieval collections of relics, as at St Ursula's, Cologne.

Anyway, from cabinets of curiosities grew more ordered museums. Yet perhaps there is something in human nature that prefers oddness, serendipity, the impact of juxtapositions to regimented display.

The polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602-80) said Noah's Ark was the first museum, and "The Ark" was the name given to the house in bosky South Lambeth where the piratically bearded and ear-ringed gardener John Tradescant and his son John built up an astonishing collection in the 1630s. This "Collection of Rarities" came to boast a grander name, Musaeum Tradescantianum, and formed the heart of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The Tradescants' collection was the largest in Europe. Its flavour comes through in their catalogue:

An Arabian vest.
Nunnes penitential Girdles of Haire.
A pair of Scotch gloves wrapt up like a ball.
A Bracelet made of the thighes of Indian flyes.
Edward the Confessors knit gloves.
Divers night-caps made of grasse.
A Sempitan or Trunck wherewith they execute men to death with poysoned Arrowes.
A Hat-band of glasse spun into fine threads.
A Turks travelling bucket.
A little Box with the 12 Apostles in it.
Cloath spun of the downe of yellow feathers.
Variety of Chains, made of the teeth of Serpents.
A Cherry-stone holding 10 dozens of Tortois-shell combs.
A book of all the Stories in the glasse-windowes of Sancta Sophia lim'd in vellum by a Jew.
Flea chains of silver and gold with 300 links a piece and yet but an inch long.
A glasse-horne for anointing kings.
A piece of the Stone of Sarrigo-Castle where Helen of Greece was born.
Blood that rained in the Isle of Wight, attested by Sir Jo: Oglander.
A Turkish tooth-brush.
Poisoned Daggers – 2 waved, 2 plain.
An Umbrella.

In the view of James Putnam of the British Museum, it is the "apparent lack of rational classification, with its bizarre sense of accumulation and juxtaposition" that makes cabinets of curiosities so appealing. This haphazardness led to their dismantling in an age when museums became more "scientific". Only at rare bristling temples of chaos such as the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford can there still be found a coracle hanging on the back of a totem-pole, display cases full of trepanned skulls, and drawers full of charms or teething-coral or things made with hair. This is not a museum of art; it is one huge, complicated work of art.

Alistair McAlpine, one of the greatest omnivorous collectors (who once possessed 900 truncheons), is credited with having revived the notion of cabinets of curiosities as the antithesis of minimalism. This week he is enthusing about marionettes from Mali. In 1981 there was an exhibition at the Bond Street Old Master dealers Colnaghi called Objects for a Wunderkammer, after which Lord McAlpine fuelled interest through his shop in Cork Street in London – and again in 1996 at the auction when he sold it. The skeletons flew like butterflies.

"A cabinet of curiosities is a microcosm," he tells me. "The Tradescants would have something like a Chinese sandal, an ordinary sandal. So now you'd have a Nike trainer. Or, if you were very competitive, a piece of Concorde, or a bit of the moon. There used to be a small piece of the moon in the waiting room at Downing Street. Perhaps someone's nicked it."

To Lord McAlpine, the influence of the cabinet of curiosities today is clear. "Hans Sloane, whose collection formed the nucleus of the British Museum, used to have a newt with two tails in a jar on his desk. Well, that's Damien Hirst."

The man who has bought a lot of curiosities for Damien Hirst is Danny Moynihan, son of the painter Rodrigo. "Those preserved specimens have been incorporated into his work," he tells me. "But he will have a few rooms devoted to these things – skulls, foetuses, body parts – at Toddington." Toddington is the astonishing Gothic pile Hirst has bought, built by an ironmaster's heir, to his own design, in the reign of George IV.

Moynihan, an energetic exhibition curator, can't help buying for himself too. "I'm not trying to simulate 17th-century cabinets, but I do like the eclectic. I buy things in jars, but also African objects and Chinese scholar stones." Those are the interestingly shaped stones regarded as metaphors for landscapes and focuses of meditation.

In his opinion the collectors building up their own cabinets remain few – "odd-ball people like me". But Lord McAlpine sees it as something anyone can do. "You don't have to spend thousands. Art is where you find it. You can pick up an interesting nut from the ground or a piece of branch in a park. You can collect anything. Prisoners collect pubic hairs."

The Edinburgh dealer Emma Hawkins is spoken of by collectors with admiration; her website includes a remarkable wax model of a Hottentot woman. In London a dealer with prosperous customers is Finch & Co. Their aim is "to create the greatest of 21st-century cabinets of curiosities". They offer a 16th-century mummified cat found in a wattle-and-daub wall; the iron floor of a Victorian paper factory cast in a hexagonal maze pattern; a preserved flying-fish; and a 19th-century table made from an elephant's ear.

The possibility of actually living in a cabinet of curiosities was demonstrated by the quirky architect Sir John Soane (1753-1837). From any room in his London house, now a museum, the eye is led through thickets of ancient architectural fragments, culminating in a three-storey fantasia, with an open sarcophagus in the basement and rising tiers of urns, busts, casts and mirrors.

The dealer Christopher Hodsoll turned his own house in Notting Hill into a cabinet of curiosities. He mixed small stuffed animals, old tortoiseshells, large pieces of patinaed minerals, nautical instruments, South Sea shells and walrus tusks with some gargantuan 19th-century furniture. It is no sterile show-space. "He would include broken furniture, and things that were worn," says Lord McAlpine. "He was the first to do the crashed look."

Crashed or not, cabinets of curiosities possess the lasting appeal of depending more on discrimination than money. Collecting can be a fierce lust, and to those of us not converted to a minimalist décor, the notion of a cabinet of curiosities lends a more kindly eye to the jumble amid which we prefer to live.

Curious desirables
The mummified crocodile was the must-have object of a truly princely cabinet of curiosities. Coming from Egypt in their papyrus bandages, they suggested not only the secrets of the pharaohs, but, to baroque neo-Platonists, also the esoteric teachings of the mythic Hermes Trismegistus.

The pleasantly named 17th-century Dane, Olaus Worm, even managed to accommodate a polar bear in the rafters of his Wunderkammer. But the collectors he visited in Naples were just as jealous of the Greenland kayak suspended from his ceiling as he was of their crocodiles. And either would have been bowled over by a Mexican idol.

Ethnological items from around the globe, such as spears or fabulously decorated tunics, capes and waistcoats, made the cabinet a microcosm of mankind’s variousness.

The ancient world was represented by coins, scarabs, fragments of statuary, oil-lamps, incised gemstone seals, urns and votive objects.

From the natural world, anomalous objects were particularly sought. These might lie on the boundaries between animal, mineral and vegetable, as with fossils, corals and fly-trapping amber. Or they could be composite creatures such as mermen or basilisks, or else freaks of nature – animals or even human foetuses, dried or preserved in jars.

Telegraph