A t the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, a handful of enlightened men scattered across Europe felt the desire to bring the world towards themselves: to examine it, sort it, classify it, reduce it, understand it, and arrange its artefacts on surfaces that surrounded them, including walls, floors and ceilings.
Apothecaries, doctors, priests and literary men eventually constituted a discreet international group whose members – intent on wrangling over the same rarities – were connected by a network of correspondence. Their letters, packages and discussions aimed to grasp – or come as closely as possible to grasping – the essence of reality: a reality, in their view, woven of analogies, echoes and numbers (another form of correspondence) that it was up to them to reveal.
Before long, the cabinet space that began as domestic and private grew into a public attraction, to satisfy another way of sharing knowledge. They were opened to visitors and passers-by, whom the master of the house generally took it upon himself to guide as he described the pedigree of his finds. This could give rise to various eccentricities: Rémi, an expert living in Paris in the 18th century, saw it fit to slip on one of the Native American headdresses that was the highlight of his collection; a century earlier, the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher enjoyed surprising visitors by speaking to them through a shaft concealed within the entryway to his Roman museum.
There were no heroes nor übermenschen among this assembly of curious minds: they were exclusively distinguished by their insatiable appetite and their determination to know. However, their legacy did not die out with their times, and indeed we are familiar with many of their faces.
From the Neapolitan apothecary Ferrante Imperato in 1599 to his alter ego from Verona, Francesco Calzolari, some twenty years later; from the Bolognese Ulisse Aldrovandi to the Milanese Manfredo Settala in 1666; from the Danish Ole Worm to the Nuremberg native Basilius Besler – all of whom are included in the admirable pantheon federated through this collection –; and from the Aix-en-Provence-based Nicolas Peiresc to the British Tradescants, both Elder and Younger.
Ferrante Imperato pioneered the practice at the end of the 16th century, and it only came to an end in the mid-19th century with the Bergamo-based Count Vimercati Sozzi, the old-fashioned aficionado of a culture of which the aura had begun to fade a century earlier. He offered up the example – or proof – of the remarkable force of attraction that the culture of curiosity has always exerted, in and of itself, so to speak. The advent of the Lumières threw most of the founding principles of “wonder-rooms” into the shadows, driving them to the fringes of credulity: the passion for collecting; the pursuit of the hapax; the taste for mixture and hybrids; the contiguity between art and nature; and the twenty-five categories, mingling history and geography, styles and periods, kingdoms and species, into which Vimercati Sozzi had classified the entirety of his collections, as if to offer up the last remaining traces of an obsolete classification method.
Those were erased as his treasures were dispersed, moving on to be categorised according to their true natures or their functions in various settings after his death. Such was the common fate of most cabinets of curiosities, causing them to lose one of their essential characteristics: the art of composition.
By their very disparity, the various adherents of this practice were connected through a tightly-knit network of interests, competitiveness, friendships and lines of descent. Nothing – or very nearly – could keep them from their passion. It may seem surprising, considering the distances and means of travel at the time, that Nicolas Peiresc crossed Provence, the Alps and Italy to reach Naples, simply to visit the cabinet of Ferrante Imperato; that Manfredo Settala took it upon himself to visit Cyprus, Syria, Egypt, Smyrna, Ephesus and Constantinople in search of a missing piece; or – to keep the list limited to just three examples – that Maximilien Misson (the private tutor of Charles Hamilton, Count of Arran) included a trip to Lodovico Moscardo’s cabinet in Verona among the essential stopovers of his “Grand Tour”.
Open as they were to “foreign” lands, this community of curious academics was also cultivated by local networks, and indeed family connections, which spanned generations: Manfredo Settala succeeded to his father, Ludovico; Levin Vincent took over from his brother-in-law, Anthony Breda; Ferrante Imperato found a deserving heir in his son, Francesco; and the cabinet of Francesco Calzolari was passed down through his great-grandson and on to Lodovico Moscardo. Ferdinando Cospi merged his collections with those of Ulisse Aldrovandi before bequeathing them to the city of Bologna in 1672; and, upon the death of Athanasius Kircher, Filippo Buonanni took over his collections, into which those of Alfonso Donnini had previously been incorporated.
That concern with transmission shows the enthusiasm of these aficionados, who literally spent their lives seeking relics, faced with the threat of dispersion and the ravages of time. They knew that any collection is just dust in the wind; letters, conversations, travels, visits, and the trade of objects left behind only intangible, transitory traces. Only books could record the evidence of these assemblages and stand as a monument to them. Admirable folios thus remain as the legacy of this penchant for curiosity, and the most extraordinary examples are to be found here. Dedication epistles, lists and notes suffice to outline this history; plates and frontispieces definitively delineate its fascinating approach.
Like the places of which they document the appearance and memory, the engravings that illustrate them are today less important for their scientific value than for the naivety of their wisdom: their distinctive aesthetic quality; that strangeness that naturally drives them to the edge of fictitiousness. Mermaid tails, giant bones, unicorn horns, mandrakes, bezoars, mummies and hanging alligators occupy these “theatres of nature and art” in a complex play on concordances, symmetries and themes, from the understated scenery of Molinet’s father to the impressive spaces of Levin Vincent to the baroque layouts of Athanasius Kircher.
What could be more anachronistic, you might ask, than these heavy volumes and cumbersome folios, in a time when the entire world’s knowledge may be consulted from a parallelepiped of anodised metal which glows with a swarm of pixels both countless and immaterial? That is precisely what makes them precious: they provide some of the best testimonials to the definition of that resistant, opaque, tangible, tactile world filled with secrets and riddles; a definition that faded even as immaterial – and indeed virtual – realities gradually took hold of us.
By gathering together the descriptions of the most famous among the hundred and fifty-nine enumerated by Michael Bernard Valentini in his 1704 Museum Museorum, the library of rariora by Loïc Malle offers a true catalogue of anthologies. One might feel wistful to see the pieces of such a patiently constituted puzzle on the verge of being dispersed to other cabinets, other places; and yet they are simply playing by the rules followed by all aficionados, of which this collection of collections is a superb illustration.
