Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Techno logy (Vintage) by Weschler Lawrence

Author:Weschler, Lawrence [Weschler, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307833983
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

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

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