Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance: A Contribution to the History of Collecting by Julius von Schlosser, and: Kunstkammer: Early Modern Art and Curiosity Cabinets in the Holy Roman Empire by Jeffrey Chipps Smith (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance: A Contribution to the History of Collecting by Julius von Schlosser, and: Kunstkammer: Early Modern Art and Curiosity Cabinets in the Holy Roman Empire by Jeffrey Chipps Smith Rachel Daphne Weiss Julius von Schlosser, Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance: A Contribution to the History of Collecting, trans. Jonathan Blower, ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2021), xi + 231 pp., 98 ills. Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Kunstkammer: Early Modern Art and Curiosity Cabinets in the Holy Roman Empire (London: Reaktion, 2022), 317 pp., 189 ills. Efforts to understand the macrocosm through the conceit of the microcosm may well be transhistorical, but their modern Euro-American origins can be alluringly traced to the Kunstkammer. Emerging mainly within dominions of the Holy Roman Empire during the early modern period, Kunstkammern (pl., art and curiosity cabinets) describe both physical sites of collection display and a particular orientation to the practice of collecting shared among princely patrons. Kunstkammern were fundamentally eclectic, juxtaposing works of art, natural objects, natural objects reimagined as works of art, tools, instruments, antiquities, and other miscellanea in service of complex ambitions. Such collections had microcosmic pretensions; they functioned as representations of their owner’s wealth, power, and aesthetic judgment; they triggered scientific inquiry through their wondrous and challenging materializations; and they helped to fathom and to impose order onto a cosmos destabilized by religious strife and encounters with peoples and geographies previously unknown to Europeans. Research on Kunstkammern has proliferated since the 1970s and 80s, but Julius von Schlosser’s Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance planted the seeds of this avid interest upon its publication in 1908. Due to its hitherto untranslated state, Schlosser’s groundbreaking contribution has languished in the footnotes of Anglophone scholarship, rarely piercing the veil to become a subject of study in its own right. It is a boon, therefore, that this landmark was targeted for the Getty Research Institute’s (GRI) Texts and Documents series, appearing in translation by Jonathan Blower as Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance: A Contribution to the History of Collecting with a substantial introductory essay by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann. That this publication was closely followed by Jeffrey Chipps Smith’s Kunstkammer: Early Modern Art and Curiosity Cabinets in the Holy Roman Empire gives further cause for excitement, as Smith’s study grounds what had through a multitude of perspectives become a dauntingly expansive field of study. The GRI publication’s success lies, in part, in its treatment of Schlosser’s text as a historical document. While Kaufmann analyzes the text’s ideas about and interpretations of Kunstkammern, much of the introduction is given over to analysis of Schlosser himself. Kaufmann labors to correct a common perception of Schlosser as a marginal figure of the Vienna School, demonstrating his importance by way of his lengthy tenures at Vienna’s art museums and as a [End Page 265] professor at Universität Wien, where he supervised some of the glitterati of twentieth-century art history (Ernst Gombrich, Fritz Saxl, Charles de Tolnay, etc.). Kaufmann associates Schlosser’s theoretical dependence on the concept of court art with his terms of employment at Viennese institutions, which bound him functionally and symbolically to the Habsburg legacy. Finally, Kaufmann wrestles with the damning implications of a picture of Schlosser wearing a Nazi Party pin, but—aside from stray prejudicial comments in sync with the period’s abhorrent but more generalized forms of Eurocentric superiority—Kaufmann finds no overt manifestations of Nazi ideology in Schlosser’s writing. If one is still inclined to forge ahead with Schlosser’s text, rewards are to be reaped. His polymathic erudition is conspicuous to contemporary readers, and it produces epistemological traces as distinctive as those articulated in a Kunstkammer. The leitmotif that emerges across the chapters is Schlosser’s search for a way to define art, a desideratum born of the multimedia and cross-disciplinary chaos of the Kunstkammer. Ultimately, and rather presciently, he defines art as that which is valued for its form above all else, and he frames the act of collecting as constitutive thereof. While much is to be gained...