Hmm, that’s odd
A bit more rooting around in other people’s boxes of stuff lately. Nothing to get alarmed about though. Specifically it’s the curiosity cabinets alluded to in previous posts on Mark Ryden and assemblages.
Due to my adolescent predilection for collection, I can’t get enough of the boxed sets carefully laid out by 16th- and 17th-century Europeans, as wonderfully detailed by McGill University history buff GillesThibault on his lovely website (high-school French or better required).
Folks back in the just plain curious days before television gathered together all the oddities they could from the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms and arranged them in fine wooden cabinets to show their friends. They were evidence of serious scholarship for some, conversation pieces for most, but they were usually always interesting to look it, certainly a lot more so than the sticks of furniture surrounding them.
The world was revealing its secrets at a brisk pace in those times too, with explorers coming home every other weekend toting some new, strange-looking thing. The cabinets were microcosms of that crazy old world beyond the city wharf, and weren’t nearly so mundane as an encyclopaedia. With these collections, Thibault points out, you were “able to seize, to surprise the process of Creation”, right their in your own private museum, as opposed to the large museums that in that day really were private, requiring a letter of introduction to get through the door.
Cabinets devoted to minerals were filled with pieces that weren’t so much rare or precious but funny, bizarre or perhaps magical. Pearls were common, but only if the oyster was still trying to hang onto them. Magnetic stones appealed, of course, as did fire-resistant asbestos. When I was a kid I had an asbestos nugget that was fascinating, a deep emerald green rectangle wearing a snow-white fur coat. A decade later when they started tearing down school walls, muttering something about asbestos causing cancer, I wasn’t worried, just … curious.
Rocks that rang when struck, or came in animal or geometric shapes, hollowed-out geodes, any fancy crystal for that matter, coral and amber, petrified wood, sheets of shale with fossils … many ways to kill an afternoon.
Botanical curiosity cabinets brought the garden inside on rainy days, where you could compare its leaves and roots with what was growing on the other side of the planet. Thibault suggests that some collectors reckoned they could accumulate every single plant there was, as many as, say, 10,000. They would never have got close, of course — there are hundreds of thousands.
Herbariums were common among the cabinets, especially if they featured things like mandrake roots mimicking human form, alleged aphrodisiacs and the mysterious Jericho rose, which opens only at night when there are no women around, or so they say.
The animal boxes were, of course, boneyards, with generous helpings of dried skin, claws, hooves, beaks, horns, feathers and fur. Armadillos, easily preserved, were a guaranteed hit, well ahead of crocodiles, tortoises, lobsters, urchins, seahorses, eels and queer fish like skates. But nothing satisfied like a solid assortment of exotic seashells — or a half-decent stuffed toucan if you really wanted to show off.
In 1547, Thibault says, Dutch traders brought the first casowarry to Europe from Java (quite dead) and Amsterdam went crazy, people lining up for a month for the privilege of paying to see it. A narwhal’s tusk was to die for. Insects were not to be ignored, the more monstrous the better, though butterflies were always big.
And then there was man. Imagine getting a mummy.
