A composite image of the state: The role of collections in the cultural diplomacy of the early modern state

Abstract

A new form of identity that emerged in the late Renaissance grew even more vivid in the Baroque Age. It was a novel, complex type of identity, that was fashioned by the individual, according to social norms and expectations. That type of identity was often immortalised in the painted or sculpted portraits, but not only there. The image that one left for posterity could have been a manifold one, represented in lavish libraries and the first cabinets of curiosities. Simultaneously with the development of the first collections as mirrors of identity, grew a parallel notion where a collection surpassed the confines of the particular and became a symbolic signifier of the collective identity of the state. The role of the collections in the cultural diplomacy of the early modern state are the main topic of this article. But in order to be fully understood, this mechanism would need to be explained first on the individual and then on a wider plane.