Lydia Pyne
HOUSTON — At the turn of
the 17th century, Ferrante Imperato, a well-to-do apothecary from Naples, had a
truly impressive collection of natural history curios. From skeletons to
seashells to swordfish, Imperato’s collection was a microcosm of how he, and
his fellow European curiosi, encountered and catalogued the then-known natural
world. When Imperato published a catalogue of his collection in 1599,
Dell’Historia Naturale, he included a fold-out, engraved illustration of how he
stored everything in floor-to-ceiling cabinets and bookshelves chockfull of
books and natural history bric-a-bracs. With an alligator on the ceiling to
taxidermied birds on the shelves, Imperato’s collection and its organization
quickly came to epitomize Renaissance Europe’s Wunderkammer — cabinet of
curiosities — and has for centuries.
The Houston Museum of
Natural Science (HMNS) has brought Imperato’s 16th-century engraving to life in
its Cabinet of Curiosities exhibit. On the second floor of the museum, nestled
between the Halls of Texas and African Wildlife, the HMNS has faithfully
recreated a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities, right down to the sprightly
lyre music plucking away in the background. The exhibit has the ethos and
aesthetic of Imperato’s Renaissance cabinet, complete with a school of
pufferfish hanging from the ceiling.
Cabinet of Curiosities at
the Houston Museum of Natural Science
The Houston exhibit has
been a part of the museum for over a decade but is coming to a close in
December. As a whole, it’s well worth a visit — few other exhibits, if any, so
authentically balance the science, natural history, and aesthetics so inexorably
intertwined in Europe’s early cabinets of curiosities.
Historically, cabinets like
Imperato’s contained a plethora of objects from the natural world, like gems,
corals, and fossils, as well as cultural artifacts from archaeological sites or
ethnographic travels. Most cabinets of curiosities also included paintings and
antiquities, in addition to maps, globes, and automata. Fundamentally, the
purpose of the cabinet of curiosities was to inspire awe and wonder about the
natural world and humankind’s place in it. The more exotic or striking the
object — the more obscure its provenance — the more cultural cachet it carried
for the collector.
Cabinet of Curiosities at
the Houston Museum of Natural Science
The Cabinet of Curiosities
at the HMNS has all of these sorts of curios and more. Turn one way, and you
see a row of bovid antlers hanging over a doorway across the room from African
pottery. Turn another direction, and elephant tusks frame the fireplace with a
mounted rhino head. In Imperato’s engraving, we see that the doors to the
cabinets holding his collections are open, inviting us to peer at the objects
contained inside. The HMNS also encourages visitors to open cabinets and
drawers. (The hordes of school-kids running through the Cabinet of Curiosities
weren’t sure whether items could be touched, but plenty of them pointed to
African spears and asked their field trip chaperones whether those were like
the ones from Black Panther.)
For hundreds of years,
cabinets of curiosities have been considered forerunners of encyclopedias and
of later museum institutions. But they’re more than just the physical
manifestations of how bits and pieces of the natural world found their ways to
the elite collectors of Europe. Cabinets of curiosities were the products of
their historical context, organized by those who did the collecting — the
European elite — and those who were collected. In other words, cabinets of
curiosities are not just the physical curios of their collections — they’re the
power dynamics of collecting and colonialism that followed the development of
natural history for centuries.
“Cabinets collections can
be beautiful, certainly, but they also speak to a history of colonial violence:
museums aren’t created in a vacuum,” curator and doctoral candidate in history
of science, Elaine Ayers, explained to me. Ayers, who is unaffiliated with the
HMNS exhibit, points out that, “Displaying puffer fish alongside stuffed
alligators evokes a sense of environmental diversity and provokes curiosity,
but it also gestures towards the extractive processes by which these
taxidermied specimens arrived at their new homes.”
Cabinet of Curiosities at
the Houston Museum of Natural Science
While the Cabinet of
Curiosities exhibit at the Houston Museum of Natural Science is a fantastic
recreation of a Renaissance phenomenon in natural history, it lacks
contextualizing information about what one is seeing, why those curiosities
might be part of a cabinet, or any sort of history about the science of natural
history. There are no labels, tags, or explanatory schema to walk visitors
through their experience or to explain what costs, economic or social, were
incurred in procuring these items historically. (There is a short wooden plaque
at the beginning of the exhibit that offers a couple of sentences about the
history of the creation of cabinets of curiosities.) Although the lack of
labeling is, interestingly enough, historically accurate for cabinets of
curiosities, not informing visitors of what they’re seeing and why isn’t doing
any service to natural history — especially at a time when museums and their
visitors are pushing for more transparency about the context of artifacts on
display.
“I believe, however, that
there is still a necessary place for wonder in museums,” Ayers offers. “I would
love to see a display that drew on these captivating early modern aesthetics,
but — at the very least — provided audiences with full attribution of the collection
and preparation of specimens to the indigenous peoples, women, and middle-class
practitioners who exist silently in the halls of museums.”
It’s been over 400 years
since Ferrante Imperato published his catalogue. If the Houston Museum of
Natural Science’s exhibit is any indication, cabinets and their curiosities
continue to inspire audiences with awe and wonder about the natural world.
Cabinet of Curiosities
continues at the Houston Museum of Natural Science through December 31.
https://hyperallergic.com/450998/cabinet-of-curiosities-houston-museum-of-natural-science/
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