Musings on the History of the Wunderkammer
In Olga Tokarczuk’s groundbreaking novel Flights that celebrates the strange and the ugly she writes: “I believe, unswervingly, agonizingly, that it is in freaks that Being breaks through to the surface and reveals its true nature.” Peculiarity is the essence of life—too often it is exorcised, marginalized, or altogether hastily suppressed and discarded with disgust and contempt. But what if I told you that the concept of the Museum—an institution overflowing with objects that have been deemed as “high art” and that is founded upon notions of beauty—actually originated from collections that praised the ugly, repulsive, and grotesque?
Wunderkammer roughly translates from German to English as “wonder rooms,” “cabinets of wonder,” or “cabinets of curiosities.” It refers to spaces many travelers, scientists, and especially aristocrats and monarchs dedicated to housing obscure man-made and found organic objects that inspired a sense of wonder and awe. These included anything from taxidermied animals stitched together to create new exotic creatures to paintings of people with deformities such as those Ferdinand II collected. While this practice began during the 16th century in the midst of the Age of Exploration and the Northern Renaissance, a period of time that was largely invested in injecting science and realism into art, it was also popular amongst the Victorian bourgeois as a way of showcasing high social statuses. Wunderkammers became ways of not only displaying and performing knowledge and wealth, but were also ways of conquering the globe one object at a time and showing possession, power, and ownership.
Perhaps one of the most famous wunderkammers is that of Frederick Ruysch who was a Dutch botanist and anatomist during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Ruysch is distinctly remembered for his significant advances in anatomical preservation and his artfully designed “still lifes.” Ruysch’s somewhat macabre scenes placed preserved body parts alongside birds, butterflies, and plants. Skeletons crying into handkerchiefs, wearing jewelry, and playing the violin were resurrected as characters in a fantastical world. In addition to these lurid exhibits, Ruysch created anatomical microcosms by decorating the glass jars in which he embalmed limbs, fetuses, and carcasses of small animals with beads, shells, flowers, and lace. Often referred to as the eighth wonder of the world, Ruysch’s extensive cabinet of curiosities housed in Amsterdam simultaneously preserves and transcends the curses of time.
Wunderkammers thrive in a sliver of liminal space, exposing the art in science (and science in art), beauty in the ugly (and ugliness in beauty), life in the dead (and death in the living). When I think about how the Museum sprouted from these collections of artifacts that blend the worldly and otherworldly into a chimerical realm, I feel the desire to create my own wunderkammer of collected knowledge, stringing together facts and narratives as if they were memories of my own. This blog will document my venture for the next best thing that can give us a glimpse into some universal seed of truth about our strange lives on this enormous floating rock and possibly beyond it, exploring the contradictory feelings of the ephemerality and infiniteness of life through art and wonder.
