10) Vienna, 200-plus Years of Hapsburg Collecting
Vienna is about 300 miles (5 hour’s drive time) east of Innsbruck. About 100 miles into the trip you will pass through Salzburg, home of the Dommuseum. Located in the dome of the cathedral, simply called Dom, this wunderkammer was founded in the late 17th century by [...]
About 6 hours south of Kassel, and on the other side of the Alps is the beautiful city of Innsbruck, Austria, surrounded by snow-capped mountains, and nestled in a lush green valley ablaze, in early May, with the cherry and lilac blossoms.
It is here that Hapsburg Archduke Ferdinand II (1529-1595) moved to in 1564, [...]
Halle is about a 1 ½ hours’ drive northwest of Dresden. This is the home of the Francke Foundation and its cabinet of curiosities and artifacts.
Founded in 1698 by Lutheran theologian and educator August Herman Francke (1663-1727), the Foundation was first and foremost an orphanage and secondly a progressive school for all social classes. [...]
Although only an hour’s drive from our last stop, Waldenburg, the wunderkammern of Dresden are clearly in another world.
Despite being firebombed to rubble by the Allies during World War II, Dresden has arisen from the ashes miraculously to its former baroque glory and today houses two, not one, over-the-top wunderkammern. The Historic Green [...]
About 3 hours by car northeast of Landshut (our last stopover) and say 4 to 5 hours from Munich is the little town of Waldenburg, Germany (formally, East Germany) which houses an appealing wunderkammer, the Cabinet of Natural Sciences. The wunderkammern discussed in the last two chapters in Munich and Landshut were both [...]
Installed in the 13th century Trausnitz Castle, overlooking the town of Landshut, about 50 miles northeast of Munich is the wunderkammer begun by the Bavarian Duke Wilhelm V (1548-1626), Duke Albrecht V’s son. When Wilhelm assumed the title of duke in 1579, he moved his whole household including his collection to Munich, joining [...]
THEMES
Generally there were few rules governing the creation of a wunderkammer. 1) Be broad in your collecting. These after all were renaissance men. But the impetus to be broad was more than good manners. Consultants in this field back then advised you to be so broad that you were creating [...]
Imagine what Europeans experienced during the age of discovery, roughly 1500 to 1550 AD. New continents were being discovered and the world was being shown to be a far more diverse and complex…and wonderful …place than originally thought. Ships were frequently returning from uncharted lands, their holds crammed full of strange and wondrous [...]
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