Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (11 page)

That, in turn, is the theme of Stephen Greenblatt's masterfully evocative study
Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World
(1991). “Wonder,” Greenblatt argues, was “the central figure in the initial European response to the New World, the decisive emotional and intellectual experience in the presence of radical difference.” And this was something new. “
Nil admirari
, the ancient maxim taught,” as Greenblatt continues. “But in the presence of the New World the classical model of mature, balanced detachment seemed at once inappropriate and impossible. Columbus's voyage initiated a century of
intense wonder.… European culture experienced something like the ‘startle reflex' one can observe in infants: eyes widened, arms outstretched, breathing stilled,
the whole body momentarily convulsed.”
⁸

America in the marveling eye of Europe: Theodor de Bry's depiction of Indian hunting stealth (Frankfurt, 1590
) (
illustration credit 2.2
)

At one point Greenblatt scrutinizes a passage from the French Huguenot pastor Jean de Léry's great
History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil
(1578, but based on travels of two decades earlier) in which Léry recalls a particularly unsettling and exotic evening among the Tupinamba natives in the Bay of Rio, concluding, “Whenever I remember it,
my heart trembles.”
⁹
This trembling, Greenblatt glosses, “is the authentic sign of wonder,” for “wonder, as Albertus Magnus wrote, is like ‘a systole in the heart.' … Someone witnesses something amazing,
but what matters most is not ‘out there' … but deep within, at the vital
emotional center of witness.”
¹⁰
The fact that Léry doesn't have a clue as to what the Tupinambas' rituals actually signify
for them
renders his own experience of that evening, and its subsequent recollection, all the more powerful, for himself. As the historian Michel de Certeau has written, “An absence of meaning opens a rift in time.” And that experience—of the ground opening before one's feet—was at the heart of the sensation of wonder ideally afforded by (or at any rate striven toward in) many of the cabinets of the time.
That
was the spirit, the taste of the age. (And the fault line runs clear through, from there to the Museum of Jurassic Technology.)

As Greenblatt goes on to observe, “The expression of wonder stands for all that cannot be understood, that can scarcely be believed. It calls attention to the problem of credibility and at the same time insists upon the undeniability, the exigency of experience.”

At the outset of his own account (Greenblatt points out), Léry asks how his French readers can be made to “believe what can only be seen two thousand leagues from where they live; things never known (much less written about) by the Ancients; things so marvelous that experience itself can scarcely engrave them on the understanding even of those who have in fact seen them?” (Bernal Díaz, who accompanied Cortés on the conquest of Mexico and subsequently recorded the adventure in his
The Conquest of New Spain
, at one point similarly recalls the Spaniards' first spellbound vision of the Aztec capital: “Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what
to say, or whether what appeared before us was real.”) In Guiana in the 1590s, Sir Walter Raleigh began hearing native reports about people in the interior with “eyes on their shoulders and mouths in the middle of their breasts.” Raleigh knows his readers may take this for “a meere fable,” the sort of thing with which Sir John Mandeville (d. 1372) was wont to fill his accounts of travel to the Far East and which earned him such a reputation as a liar. But for Raleigh, as Greenblatt notes, it is skepticism rather than credulity that is likely to be misleading: “Such a nation was written of by Mandeville, whose reports were holden for fables many yeeres, and yet since the East Indies were discovered, we find his relations true of such things as heretofore were held incredible.” Léry makes the same point about even earlier authors, noting how while he is still hesitant to believe everything he reads, nevertheless, ever since visiting America, “I have revised the opinion I formerly had of Pliny and others when they describe foreign lands, because I have seen things as fantastic and prodigious as any of those—once thought incredible—that they mention.”

The point is that for a good century and a half after the discovery of the Americas,
Europe's mind was blown.
That was the animating spirit behind, and the enduring significance of,
the profusion of
Wunderkammern.
¹¹
It wasn't just the American (or, alternatively, African, Far Eastern, Greenlandian, etc.) artifacts that they displayed (phosphorescent feathers, shrunken heads, rhinoceros horns). It was how the palpable reality of such artifacts so vastly expanded the territory of the now readily conceivable. Horns, for example, were suddenly all the
rage—rhinoceros horns, unicorn horns,
sea
unicorn horns … human horns, dainty round horns coming sprouting out of proper Englishwomen's foreheads, for God's sake! But rhinoceros horns
were
real; and sea unicorns
did
exist (in the form, anyway, of narwhals, with those uncannily spiraling unitary tusks seemingly protruding from out of their foreheads)—so why couldn't unicorn horns or even human horns exist as well? Our great-grandfathers' certainties, debunked by our grandfathers, were suddenly turning out to be
not quite so easily debunkable after all.
¹²

Obviously the mathematical and navigational sophistication necessary for Columbus to have been able to mount an expedition to America—and then make it back, and not once, but four times!—was of a considerable level, and was indicative of a steadily rising curve of such certain, positive knowledge (the earth wasn't flat, and there clearly weren't any sea monsters lurking along its edge to swallow up any stray doubters). But the stuff he found in America, and the stuff he brought back, was so strange and so new as to seem to sanction belief in all manner of wondrous prospects and phantasms for years thereafter.

So that collections, every bit as catholic and deliriously heterodox as Cope's—to judge from the frontispieces gracing their respective eventual catalogues—began sprouting up all over Europe: the Tradescants' in Lambeth, Francesco Calceolari's in Verona, Ole Worm's in Copenhagen, Ferrante Imperato's in Naples, Manfredo Settala's in Milan, Athanasius Kircher's in Rome. In some instances, the main guiding principle of accumulation,
echoing Bacon's injunction, seemed to reflect a sort of Noachian passion: ideally, one or two of every single thing in the world—“the universal nature made private.” (As far as that ambition was concerned, an inside track perhaps belonged to Father Kircher, who, as a leading German scholar based at the Jesuit College in Rome, was able to draw on the order's farflung contacts and resources all over the world.)

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 the entire amphitheater, meanwhile, consisted of a woman's skeleton offering an apple to a man's beneath a scraggly Tree of Knowledge. Nearby, pennants bearing archly moralizing inscriptions on the terrible consequences of original sin drove home the necessary lessons for any dim souls who might still have been missing the point.

Interior of Theatrum Anatomicum, Leiden (1610)
(
illustration credit 2.4
)

This moralizing tenor persisted throughout the seventeenth century in Holland, reaching an astonishing crescendo in the Baroque labors of the great Amsterdam anatomist Frederik Ruysch, whose collection of over two thousand meticulous presentations eventually filled up more than five rooms in his home. Some of his tableaux were relatively straightforward: the skull of a prostitute, for instance, being kicked by the leg bones of a baby. Some were heartrending: Ruysch had perfected ways of preserving the entire bodies of dead infants in large glass jugs in presentations that were often lavished with extraordinary and loving care (the serene, stilled faces swathed in delicate lace, the limbs banded with prim beaded bracelets). Some were peculiar: Ruysch proudly exhibited a box of fly eggs taken from the anus of “a distinguished gentleman who sat too long in the privy” (Ruysch's own description from his catalogue). And some were downright bizarre: his masterworks, perhaps, were a series of
vanitas mundi
tableaux, exquisite skeleto-anatomical variations on traditional flower arrangements grouped around the theme of life's inevitable transience. For their base, Ruysch would contrive a mound of kidney stones and other diseased organs—this in itself was not that unusual since dried kidney and gallstones (the bigger, the better) were regularly featured in wonder-cabinets all over the continent. But then, on top of those … well, consider the contemporary engraving by C. Huyberts, as explicated more recently by Dr. Antonie Luyendijk-Elshout of the University of Leiden, based on Ruysch's own notes: