Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (12 page)

One of Frederik Ruysch's
vanitas mundi
tableaux, Amsterdam (early 1700s)
(
illustration credit 2.5
)

Sadly (I guess), none of Ruysch's
vanitas mundi
tableaux appear themselves to have survived the ravages of time, though many of his other preparations have—although, curiously, for the most part, not in Holland. Ruysch (who, incidentally, for all his preoccupation with frail mortality, himself managed to survive into his ninety-third year, in 1731) fairly late in his life sold virtually his entire collection to the Russian tsar Peter the Great, which is why students wishing to survey Ruysch's superb craftsmanship in person today
must travel to St. Petersburg.
¹³

T
SAR
P
ETER
'
S
PURCHASE
of Ruysch's collection, along with many others, in 1717, was an attempt to amass, ex nihilo, a vast
Wunderkammer
of his own—another of his many attempts to modernize the Russian Empire in one fell swoop. Ironically, however, the universalizing ambitions and wildly heterodox tastes which undergird such a venture were already beginning to seem anachronistic in the face of the onrushing Enlightenment, with its penchant for a more skeptical, vigorous, and systematically delineated type of order. Half a century later, Peter's granddaughter-in-law, Catherine the Great, wrote to a curator who still favored the old style: “I often quarreled with him [Peter] about his wish to enclose Nature in a cabinet—even a huge palace could not hold Her.” And, to a degree, during her reign she allowed Peter's cabinet to molder (meanwhile herself amassing, in the more modern style, a huge collection of over four thousand paintings and then erecting a vast palace, the Hermitage, within which to house them). For that matter, Ruysch himself was a transitional figure between one world that
seems entirely foreign to us and another that begins to feel much more recognizably our own. (Indeed, his own work was instrumental in helping to shape that latter world; a recent biographer has described him as “probably the most skilled and knowledgeable preparator in the history of anatomy.”)

For well more than a century before that, however, the sense of wonder afforded a steady undertow to any simple, straightforward
advances in positivist certainty.
¹⁴
And in fact it had to be beaten back—by Galileo and Newton and Spinoza and Descartes—before that steady positivist advance could once again forge forward, unimpeded. (“What we commonly call being astonished,” wrote Descartes, who wanted to get people out of their hearts and back into their heads, where they belonged, “is an excess of wonder which can never be otherwise than bad.”) And by the mid-1700s, the age of wonder was indeed giving way to the Enlightenment, with its bracing sense of steadily accumulating scientific certainty and progress, a sense of the world that would in turn retain its hegemony, largely unchallenged, right up until the dawning of our own era—until, say, Newton slammed into Heisenberg.

In her essay “Inquiry as Collection,” Adalgisa Lugli details many of the contemporary neopositivist objections to the
Wunderkammer
sensibility but then goes on to assert that such
Wunderkammer
-men as “Delia Porta, Cardano and Kircher were not alone among men of science [of their time] in looking upon wonder or marvel as upon one of the essential components of the study of nature and the unraveling of its secrets … wonder defined [as it was up to the end of the eighteenth century]
as a form of learning—an intermediate, highly particular state akin to a sort of suspension of the mind between ignorance and enlightenment that marks the end of unknowing and the beginning of knowing.”

Over two centuries later (on the far side of Heisenberg's new dispensation), according to James Gleick in his introduction to Richard Feynman's recently reissued
Character of Physical Law
, “Physicists had hands-on experience with uncertainty and they learned how to manage it. And to treasure it—for the alternative to doubt is authority, against which science fought for centuries. ‘Great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance,' Feynman jotted on a piece of notepaper one day, ‘teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed.' This became his credo: he believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but
as the essence of knowing.”
¹⁵

David Wilson has thus pitched his museum at the very intersection of the premodern and the postmodern—or rather, perhaps what he has done is to tap into the
premodern wellsprings of the postmodern temper.
¹⁶

F
OR
A
BIG
BOOK
,
Tradescant's Rarities
sure wasn't easy to find. Published in 1983 as a sort of companion volume to
The Origins of Museums, Tradescant's Rarities
, according to the notice on the backflap of the
Origins
volume, consisted in a study of the collections that had constituted the foundations for the Ashmolean Museum itself, along with a catalogue listing. For some time I'd harbored a vague interest in perusing that list, partly because of the number and quality of the references to the Tradescants
in other sources—but also, no doubt, because of some of the references to the Tradescants in several of Wilson's more farfetched exhibits, such as that of the horn of Mary Davis of Saughall—so that every once in a while I'd casually check the inventories of any libraries I happened to be using for other projects, but the volume never showed up, not until one day when I managed to track it down in the backstacks among the art-book holdings at the Forty-second Street Branch of the New York Public Library.

Opening the volume to its preface, my glance casually strayed over to the copyright statement on the facing page:

Just above, the Oxford University Press's address was given as “Walton Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,” and below that came an equally familiar (though entirely different) litany of place names:

The first essay in the book, authored by the volume's editor Arthur MacGregor, was entitled “The Tradescants:
Gardeners and Botanists.” And indeed much that followed was similarly familiar: the Tradescants—John the Elder and John the Younger—were, like the Thums, primarily gardeners and botanists (the Elder had even been appointed Keeper of His Majesty's Gardens, Vines, and Silkworms at Oatlands Palace). The father died in 1638, after which the son continued his labors, further expanding the marvelous collection based in their home, known
as the Ark, in Lambeth. The son married a young woman named Hester, but when
their
son died they began casting about for another means of transmitting the family's bounteous legacy to posterity. During the early 1650s they were befriended by one Elias Ashmole, an ambitious gentleman of considerable social standing—he was Comptroller of the Excise, an astrologer regularly consulted by the king, author of several historical and alchemical works, and a founding member of the Royal Society.

John Tradescant the Elder, Elias Ashmole, and John Tradescant the Younger with his wife, Hester
(
illustration credit 2.6
)

On one of their first outings together, Ashmole and John the Younger traveled to Maidstone to attend a witchcraft trial. In 1652, Ashmole began cosponsoring an inventory and cataloguing of the Ark's entire collection. “Following publication of the catalog in 1656,” MacGregor reports, “our knowledge of Tradescant stems mainly from legal documents, such as the deed of gift of 1659 by which the collection of rarities was assigned to Ashmole, and the recensions in two subsequent wills.” For, indeed, the Tradescants did try to revoke that clause in their will, though Ashmole, perhaps owing to his superior legal training, had managed to frame its original wording in such a way that it could only be revoked through the mutual consent of both parties. Even after John the Younger's death in 1662, his widow strove mightily, through a succession of “unhappy lawsuits much disturbed,” to wrest the collection from Ashmole's clutches, though these efforts ceased in 1668, after she was discovered mysteriously drowned in her own pond.
¹⁷

Thus, the preposterously unlikely saga of the Thums and Gerard Billius turns out to be the very foundation
tale behind one of the foremost collections in England today. Ashmole, for his part, deeded the collection to Oxford University, where he had briefly studied, with a stipulation that the building containing the collection become the site, as well, for a “school” for the study of natural history, or “philosophical history,” as it was then known—England's first. (Like his contemporary Frederik Ruysch—or, for that matter, countless other contemporaries, including Isaac Newton himself—Ashmole was a man with one leg planted in the prior world of shaggy superstition and the other striding confidently toward the new era of systematic science; and indeed, the seat of the Tradescant collection, itself so emblematic of that earlier era of indiscriminate wonder, thus became a principal locus, over the next several centuries,
for that wonder's domestication and standardization.)
¹⁸

The story of the Tradescants, for that matter, bore out many of Stephen Greenblatt's assertions as well. As gardeners and botanists, both father and son were farflung fieldworkers—the father traveling as far as Muscovy and Algiers, the son to Virginie itself, in their ongoing efforts to bring back and introduce novel plant species to the English countryside. It was in the very course of these travels that they first began compiling their own cabinet of wonders, and it was the fame of that cabinet (and of their gardens) which in turn garnered them the contacts necessary to enlist other travelers in their collecting efforts. A wonderful letter, dated 1625, from Tradescant the Elder (writing on behalf of his new patron, the Duke of Buckingham), to Edward Nichols, the then-Secretary of the Navy, begins: “Noble Sir,”