Knowledge at the Service of Curiosity: Collectors and Custodians in the Seventeenth-Century German Lands

• In Event: Knowledge Embodying Power: Textual Interactions between Early Modern Professionals and Their Eminent Audiences

Abstract

When thinking about the great Renaissance collections, we often forget about their custodians, yet they played a crucial role in shaping their contents. In-house curators were present in all the major collections, with their duties ranging from advising the collectors on what to purchase and how to arrange objects to giving tours to visitors and writing catalogues of the Wunderkammern. However, the essential nature of these positions was not apparent to everybody and attempts to solidify it are present already in the earliest treatises on collecting. Contributing to the understanding of the complex relationship between the collectors, collections, and custodians, this paper analyzes discussions of the role of supervisors of cabinets of curiosities in the museological works by Samuel Quiccheberg, Johann Daniel Major, Daniel Wilhelm Moller, Leonhard Christoph Sturm, and Kaspar Friedrich Jenquel.

Author

• Irina Savinetskaya, Independent Scholar