Collection Of Curiosities Research Articles

The Cabinet of curiosities as a phenomenon of European culture: a source study

The article considers the history of the emergence of Cabinets of curiosities in Western and Central Europe. The works of museologists, historians, art critics, architects on the topic are analyzed. The expositions of the National Museum of Arts named Bogdan and Varvara Khanenko (Kyiv), the National Museum of Medicine in Kyiv, the Pharmacy Museum of Podil'sk district of Kyiv, the Lviv National Art Gallery named Boris Voznitsky, the Pharmacy-Museum "Under the Black Eagle" of Lviv, the funds and expositions of the State Historical and Cultural Reserve of the city of Ostroh of the Rivno region were involved. It turned out that the first "Collections of curiosities" meetings appear in the Middle Ages. Varieties of Cabinets of curiosities in Europe are known in the XVI—XVIII centuries. Museum treatises of that time were analyzed. The definition of the concept of "Cabinet of curiosities" during the Renaissance and Enlightenment is considered.

Into the odditorium: A pedagogy of the body at Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and in popular media

For the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, a cartoonist named Robert Ripley would create his first odditorium, a public archive of his personal collection of curiosities. While Ripley was not the first to capitalize on the display of “exotic” and “monstrous” curios, his odditoriums illuminate pervasive ideas about human difference circulating in public discourse in the early twentieth century. The odditorium and the freak show are seemingly anachronistic phenomena, but the forums and yearnings for “oddities” still surface in popular culture today: the proliferation of podcasts that detail the lives of serial killers and cult leaders, the massive audiences drawn to viewing cystic acne popped in YouTube videos, and youth makeup artists who cover and uncover dermatological conditions with myriad skincare products and makeup in self-produced video tutorials. This paper will investigate odditoriums as a specific—and troubling—form of public pedagogy, shifting between readings of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in New York’s Times Square and the role of body-as-mannequin and haptic simulation in contemporary sites of popular learning.

Completeness: How the Lack of a Mouse in a Box Revisits the Spectacle of the Kunstkammer

Set aside your expectations that this will be your typical museum visit – instead, prepare for a disruptive and engaging experience (Figure 1). ‘Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin and Other Treasures’ at the Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM) in Vienna and curated by Wes Anderson and Juman Malouf together with Jasper Sharp and Mario Mainetti is an exhibition that leaves visitors either perplexed or enchanted.

Le carnet de voyage au xviie siècle : Du terme de négoce au calligramme

In the 17thcentury, travellers described what they saw during their travels, but they also took careful note of what they spent or earned. In this sense, the "journal" is more a statement of account than a literary object. After tracing Melchisédech Thévenot's impressive collection of handwritten notebooks - a collection of curiosities, texts and foreign objects - and studying the use of the notebooks intended for publication by his nephew Jean Thévenot, the author focuses on the remarkable case of Accarette, who transformed his notebook into a calligram.

Curating Object-Oriented Collections Using the TEI

This article considers the possibilities and challenges in using TEI-based XML markup for curation of objects mentioned in historical documents such as catalogues and inventories, but also in unstructured forms such as diaries and personal correspondence. It takes as a case study documents related to early modern collections of curiosities. It first considers how far the current guidelines for manuscript description can be generalized for encoding other kinds of material objects and their contexts. It then examines what more is required for treating mentions and descriptions of objects in historical documents. It argues that the core affordance of curation for such materials is the ability to identify and select what constitutes a mention of an object and to relate that mention to its immediate context, including its relationships to object groupings.

The Curious and the Glorious

<p>This paper examines the narrative of British history and culture on display at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in London from 1913-1932. The Museum was founded by Henry Wellcome (1853-1936), an American pharmaceuticals magnate and naturalized British citizen. This paper focuses on the British scientific relics and healing amulets displayed at the Museum. By way of comparison, it explores the vision of British Empire that was portrayed in the advertising literature produced by Wellcome's firm, Burroughs Wellcome and Company. It also investigates Wellcome's relationship with the British folklorist, Edward Lovett (1852-1933).</p><p>My collection of curiosities, Indian [Native American] relics etc. tally admirably with the house, and so everybody seems rather fascinated with the effect, and in fact I rather like it myself. Some call it ‘Aesthetic’, some say ‘Heathenish’, some ‘Bohemian’, ‘Ideal’, ‘Artistic’, etc. … All in it is very cheerful …</p><p>[Wellcome's] gray eyes glow under his bushy grey eyebrows as he talks of [his childhood], and of the tomahawks, arrows and stone hammers he still treasures to show his British friends. He chuckles: "They sometimes think the people must have been ALL barbarians!"</p>

Peregrine Pickle in the Low Countries

In chapters fifty-four to seventy-two of Peregrine Pickle Tobias Smollett gives a faithful though sketchy picture of the conditions of travel in the Low Countries. As to the sights, easily identified through contemporary travel journals, Smollett, writing a novel, stuck to the principal ones. They include the anonymous owners of collections of curiosities and works of art, who help determine the reader's picture of the inhabitants of the Austrian Netherlands and the United Provinces. Smollett agrees with most of his countrymen that the Flemish, apart from some members of their clergy, are more or less all right. As to the Dutch he differs from the typical tourist and conforms to the traditional view of them being rather odd characters, not to say uncivilized boors. In writing this section of the novel Smollett made use of his own travel experiences in 1749 and 1750. Many of the events referred to in the novel date from this period. However, fact and fiction are easily mixed: an eyewitness account of a theatrical performance in Amsterdam has been taken from Jean-Baptiste Dubos' Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture.

‘The purest examples from antiquity’ – Old Museums in a Modern World

Archaeological museums often came into existence from private collections of curiosities. When official museums were created in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, the question of which cultures belonged to the ‘ancient world’ (and which not) was hotly debated, as the example of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden shows us. In addition, the role of an archaeological collection in society could be regarded in various ways. In the 19th century the ‘purest examples from antiquity’ were used as models for architects, artists and artisans. Nowadays antiquity seems to inspire many aspects of our culture, but much can be argued against the feeling that the classical spirit is enlightening our lives. An important role can be played by archaeological museums and their curators in a world in which the humanities are severely at risk.

Clothing and early modern Venetian society

Clothing was paramount in early modern Europe. It accounted for a significant proportion of household expenditure at many different levels of society, and attracted much comment. Just as contemporaries described, often in minute detail, the garments worn by their compatriots, so foreign visitors to cities and courts devoted considerable attention to the appearance of the people they encountered. Such close observation was motivated by a serious purpose since clothing was thought to offer a kind of window on individuals and societies alike. The instructive qualities attributed to clothing may help to explain why so many costume books were printed during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; they also shed light on the inclusion of exotic garments in the collections of curiosities which similarly characterize the period.

Recusant Houses in the Southern Netherlands as seen by British Tourists, c. 1650–1720

The English who, in the seventeenth century, went abroad in order to get to know the countries and peoples of Europe looked upon the presence of their countrymen and women in convents in Flanders and Brabant as one of their many subjects of inquiry. Protestant travellers who had little occasion to mix with Catholics at home and who had gone abroad to widen their horizons visited these houses as a matter of course. For them, as for the much smaller number who came to see relatives and acquaintances, the informal conversations must have been a welcome change after the ‘Compulsory’ visits to public buildings and all sorts of collections of curiosities in cities far away from home.

Advertising History

Review Essay ADVERTISING HISTORY J O H N S I A U I) E N M A I E R, S. J., A N I) P A M E I. A W A I. K E R I. U R I T O LAIRD Material culture history typically evolves from antiquarian litera­ ture toward contextual analysis. Thus, with only four exceptions, histories of advertising published before 1975 were collections of curiosities, emissaries from advertising’s quaint past.1 Recently, how­ ever, the genre has come of age. Scholarly interest in advertising has so quickened in the decade that one can speak, if not of a “school” of new advertising critique, at least of a vigorous new universe of discourse. The works are mixed in quality, methodology, and thematic focus. In this essay we will discuss eight, offering a brief commentary, descriptive and critical, in an attempt to map the terrain. We judge two books to be the best of the lot and worth somewhat greater attention: Roland Marchand’s Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985) and Daniel Pope’s The Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983). Marchand’s synthesis of the ideological and aesthetic content of mainstream advertising in its two most formative decades (1920-40) stems from an important methodological premise: before advertise­ ments emerge as published messages, they gestate in the womb of the advertising agencies’ in-house culture. Industry champions such as Stephen Fox speak of advertisers as “mirror makers” who respond to, rather than shape, American cultural values. Marchand reveals a more complex reality. Caught between their desire to see themselves as “missionaries of modernity” and their more pragmatic commitDr . Siaidenmaier is associate professor of the history of technology at the University of Detroit. Ms. Laird teaches at Emerson College and is a doctoral candidate in American history at Boston University. 'Neil H. Borden, The Economic Effects of Advertising (Homewood, Ill., 1942); Erank Presbrev, History and Development of Advertising (Garden City, N.Y., 1929); Henry Sampson, A History ofAdvertisingfrom the Earliest Times (London, 1874); James P. Wood, The Story of Advertising (New York, 1958).©1989 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/89/3004-0005$01.00 1031 1032 John Staudenmaier, SJ., and Pamela Walker Lurito Laird ment to selling the product, they create not a mirror but a “Zerrspiegel , a distorting mirror that would enhance certain images” at the expense of others (p. xvii). The distortions are magnified by agency biases resulting in part from their urban, upwardly mobile homogeneity, a relentless male projection of the consumer as feminine (indexed references to “women” and “men” may well become a primary source for students of gender bias in public discourse), and the pressures, anxieties, and humiliations inherent in the agencies’ dependency relationship with client firms. Based on a thorough reading of standard professional publications such as Printers Ink and Advertising and Selling, agency publications and archives, and the spate of monographs written by such major successful practitioners as Bruce Barton and Albert Lasker, Marchand’s complex hypothesis provides the most balanced and sophisticated explanation to date of how agencies, as a distinct subculture, influence advertising copy and iconography. By studying over 180,000 ads published between 1920 and 1940, Marchand has also created an immensely helpful vocabulary of analysis—the con­ cepts of “great parables” and “visual cliches” being the most striking— to help the reader make sense of the seemingly incomprehensible mélange of shifting styles and strategies. Pope’s study covers a much longer period, with a different focus: advertising as a business enterprise. His governing question, “Who pays whom for what specific services?” provides a frame of reference for a remarkably thorough account of the agencies’ changing charac­ ter as they shifted front mid-19th-century space brokers to this century’s full-service establishments. Although his treatment of ad content and style is necessarily less thorough than Marchand’s, his final chapter, with its contrast between agency technique in the 1920s and today, goes well beyond Marchand’s chronologically more limited period. Pope also transcends his business focus to address...

EGYPTOLOGY AND FORGERY IN THE SEVENTEETH CENTURY: The Case of the Bodleian Shabti

Discussion of an ‘Egyptian idol’ originally in the Bodleian library's collection of curiosities. The statuette,long recognized as a forgery,is shown to be derived partly from an illustration published in the mid-seventeeth century,partly from accurate observation of genuine shabti figures: its hybrid nature reflects the keen but ingenuous interest in Ancient Egypt among early collectors and explorers.Its source remains obscure—a traditional association with Archbishop Laud is shown to be mistaken.

Early American museums: From collection of curiosities to popular education

Early American museums: From collection of curiosities to popular education

'Notitie der Teekeningen van Sybrand Feitama': de boekhouding van drie generaties verzamelaars van oude Nederlandse tekenkunst

'Notitie der Teekeningen van Sybrand Feitama': de boekhouding van drie generaties verzamelaars van oude Nederlandse tekenkunst

The Zoo: 150 years of research

In the 150 years since its inception, the Zoological Society has developed from a collection of curiosities on which only observational research was carried out, to one of the world's most comprehensive collections of animal species, with two attached experimental research institutes. Dr Harrison Matthews traces the evolution of the Zoo from the time when the idea first occurred to Sir Stamford Raffles on a visit to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.

Roger Bacon as Magician

The practice of magic was much in vogue in the Renaissance and even the word had gained a limited respectability. Thus in 1558 when Giambattista della Porta published his collection of curiosities of art and nature he did so under the title Magia naturalis, and even in the next century the far more sober Bishop John Wilkins was to publish a book entitled Mathematicall Magick. Such works indicate essential similarities between magic and science in that each has as part of its aim the application of not readily apparent knowledge to practice. But we should not think that the widespread acceptance of natural magic in the Renaissance meant that the term had become a synonym for what we should now call science, for we still have to bear in mind such pictures as those of Marsilio Ficino chanting his Orphic hymns, of John Dee conversing with spirits through his medium Edward Kelly, and of Tommaso Campaneüa and Pope Urban VIII closeted together and performing secret rites to ward off the plague.