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Workshop Summaries
From Objects to Ideas: Material
Culture in Art and
Science
Pamela Smith, Columbia University
"From Objects to Ideas:
Material Culture in Art and
Science" was held in the
Chamber of Wonders at the Walters
Art Museum The Chamber of Wonders
is part of three-room display of
objects assembled by Joaneath
Spicer to represent the collection
of a courtier in the retinue of the
Habsburgs in Flanders in the
seventeenth century. It contains
over 1000 objects, prints, books,
and paintings.
There has been a great deal of work
on Kunst- und Wunderkammern
and collecting in recent years
which has added enormously to our
understanding of these spaces and
activities, and we assumed this
research as background in this
workshop. We did not aim to
recapitulate the interesting work
that has been done on wonder,
curiosity, and the significance of
objects in cabinets as
representations of power, status,
or as attempts to represent the
macrocosm or mastery over nature.
In holding our workshop in the
Chamber of Wonders, we aimed
instead to discuss three principal
themes that relate to objects,
collecting, and the reconstruction
of historical experience. First, we
wanted to think about the
relationship between material
culture and intellectual history.
This came particularly out of
Pamela Smith’s work as an historian
of science. The history of science
as a discipline emerged out of the
history of philosophy, and, until
not so very long ago, the history
of science was concerned mainly
with theoretical and conceptual
change. Historians of science
largely ignored the objects of
nature and practices by which
people engaged with objects. Even
scientific instruments have only
recently begun to attract greater
interest from historians of
science. The situation is naturally
somewhat different in art history,
and, while Kunstkammer
objects have now emerged from being
regarded largely as decorative, at
the same time, the actual artisanal
engagement with the objects in
their making and the collector’s
modes of experiencing objects has
remained largely unexplored in
mainstream art history. Thus, in
this workshop, we wanted to think
about how the histories of material
culture, art and intellectual
history are interconnected.
Our second theme focused on
historical modes of experience. How
could we begin to describe the
patterns of experience that a given
object or accumulation of objects
might have called forth? What were
the sensual and sensory experiences
of objects? What kinds of
experiential knowledge emerged from
the engagement with objects, both
in their making at the hands of the
artist/artisan as well as in the
engagement with them on the part of
collectors? How did people comport
themselves in relation to objects?
Our final theme was methodological
in character. What techniques can
historians use to reconstruct the
historical experience of engaging
at all levels with objects? Our
experience in museum collections
today is unavoidably different from
the early modern collector’s
engagement with objects. Textual
and pictorial sources are obvious
avenues to begin to understand
historical modes of experiencing
objects, but in this workshop we
wish to consider what kind of new
knowledge emerges from the
reconstruction of a space
such as the Walters’ Chamber of
Wonders. Such a methodological
exploration raises further
questions about authenticity and
the use of fiction to develop
historical sensibility.
Each of the workshop presenters
briefly introduced the themes:
Andrew Morrall (Bard Graduate
Center, New York) considered
several sixteenth and
seventeenth-century
Kunstschränke in order to
explore the ways in which the
display of objects took place
within a variety of conceptual
schemes and natural philosophical
frameworks. He examined a cabinet
that appeared to connect the
structural underpinnings of nature
to the five Platonic solids, as
well as cabinets that were clearly
intended as mirrors of virtue.
Pamela Smith (History, Columbia
University) discussed case studies
from the history of alchemy, art
history and garden history in which
the reconstruction of historical
objects, techniques, and spaces
have been employed as sources by
historians of art and science. In
the history of alchemy, for
example, some alchemical processes
that have been understood to be
purely spiritual or allegorical
have been shown through
reconstruction to have an actual
material referent and product, thus
transforming the meaning of
alchemical work for the historian.
Joaneath Spicer (Curator of
Renaissance and Baroque Art, The
Walters Art Museum) explained how
the Chamber of Wonders at The
Walters Art Museum represents one
such attempt at reconstruction and
what may be learned from such a
project. Some of the lessons she
noted were gained from the breadth
of knowledge required for
installing the display, from arms
to shells, a breadth not often
demanded of art historians. This
brought to light new connections
such as that between mental and
physical virtuosity (made in the
hall of armor portion of the
exhibition). In the same vein, the
juxtaposition of many different
objects from different cultures
highlighted the response to objects
as technological, rather than
aesthetic wonders. The
juxtaposition of paintings and
objects also brought out the
similarity of themes in both types
of art work, leading to new ideas
about the meanings we should
ascribe to paintings and
Kunstkammer objects.
Contributions from the audience
included an introduction by Suzanne
Karr Schmidt on paper instruments
contained in early modern texts,
and discussion of how the space of
the Kunstkammer could
function epistemologically in the
early modern period to make new
connections between objects, just
as it functioned for the curator
and for the viewers of the modern
reconstruction at the Walters.
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