This chamber of curiosities has a second-period format, with an age-of-reason feel. Here similar items are grouped together and displayed in a manner which adheres to modern taxonomic notions. Along the south wall, items of natural history and science are displayed, and the minerals are presented by mineralogical family, the shells by genus within family, etc. The facing wall includes man-made materials, textiles, ethnographic artifacts, boxes and tools, also presented in a logical manner. As discussed in chapter 2, first-period wunderkammern would have more of a helter-skelter feel.

You first encounter a reasonably large mineral collection consisting of about 1500 of the world’s 4000 known minerals. The silicates are segregated from the sulfides and sulfates, etc. Some minerals are represented by beautifully-formed crystals, such as tourmaline and aquamarine. The specimens tend to be relatively small sized…fist size or smaller due to the space constraint. The extra-terrestrial section includes a meteorite found in Namibia and a piece of the Challenger space shuttle found in the Bahamas.

Two sections are dedicated to shells. You’ll note the drawers below are filled with specimens as well. This collection also includes about 1500 specimens, including some of the great rarities like the golden cowries, worn by Tahiti Chieftains as the emblem of their authority, and the imperial slit shell, traditionally thought to become automatically the property of the Emperor of Japan whenever recovered from the sea.

The next section displays a collection of US patent models from the period 1836 to 1880. This section represents science and technology, a typical wunderkammer theme. In the US, patent applications were normally submitted with a working model demonstrating the invention. To save space the Patent Office required these to be no bigger than a foot in any dimension. If the application was granted, the patent number was sequentially assigned –patent #1 was issued July,13,1836–and the model was put on display open to the general public at the Patent Office in Washington, DC. This was a very popular tourist site in the 19th century.

Nonetheless, the Patent Office ended the patent model after 45 years. Crammed with over 200,000 of these models, and believing better quality patents would be written if the inventors relied only on their words and diagrams, the Patent Office no longer accepted models with the applications after 1880. Twice fires raged through the collection destroying many of them, and finally the Patent Office sold off the remaining patent models in the 1940’s. The collection illustrated here consists of several hundred of them, including one issued September,22,1836, patent # 30, the model with lowest patent number in private hands. (Numbers 1-29 are in the Smithsonian.)

Here are a variety of wood working tools, drills, planes, hammers, saws, etc, through out the ages. Examples of the ax here date from as early as 4000BC and continue through Minoan Crete, 2000BC, through Roman, medieval, and to the 17th through 19th centuries. There are stone-age examples as well, from prehistory through American Indian to modern-day New Guinea. It’s fun to trace the evolution of such a simple and necessary item throughout history.

In the next section, see all the variety the simple idea of the box congers up. These examples date from the 17th to 19th centuries, represent all cultures, and are executed in all materials, from straw to gold.

This next section displays ancient and ethnographic material. The top two shelves are Asian, the next, Mesoamerican, the next classical Egyptian, Greek and Roman, and the last three shelves, Native American. Some connections are unexpected. For instance, all the glass beads here, those from 18th century China, 19th century Sumatra and Africa, those from 19th century Aleutian Islands, and those from 19th century American plains Indians were all made in the small Italian city of Venice. Venice had the world-wide monopoly in glass bead making from the renaissance through the 19th century, a monopoly it maintained by forbidding , on pain of death, its glass bead workers from leaving the city.

A collection of textiles includes a number of American quilts as well as 16th through 18th century needle works. Not shown are other collections of bronze-age implements, glass bottles from Roman to the 19th century, birds’ eggs from 19th century collections, butterflies, and so on.

This last section shows two unrelated collections, one of 19th century American enameled granite ware or agate ware (a cheap decorative surface put on common cookware to brighten up the day of the common man) and one of items decorated with feathers (from exotic feather headdresses from the jungles of Peru and New Guinea, to a pre-Columbian c 800AD cotton and feather pouch–top shelf, left–to fans and ladies hats from the Roaring 20’s.) These two materials contrast sharply, one being cheap, plentiful (at least at the time of manufacture), and indestructibly utilitarian, the other being rare, exotic and fragile. Yet when juxtaposed next to each other, a certain tension is created which adds drama to the presentation. This intentional juxtaposition is what the first-period wunderkammernists strived for. Moreover, alternating the two kinds of items was specifically recommended by Samuel Quiccheburg in his important treatise on wunderkammern, published in 1565, considered the definitive manual for marvels and curiosities.

This wunderkammer, I am assured, helps the owner celebrate on a daily basis what a great world it is, brings him much pleasure, and improves his mind. Do you know of any private curiosity cabinets, large or small which perform the same service for their owners? Please email me if you do at funstonantiques.com.

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. Thus Francke formed the wunderkammer as a teaching tool. Francke was obviously an effective fundraiser for not only did he raise the money to build the substantial Foundation but also induced people worldwide to provide as gifts most of the almost 5000 items of the collection.

A decade after this kindly-looking gentleman’s death, a local artist and naturalist, Gottfried August Grundler (1710-1775), began to reorganize the jumble systematically and create a group of 16 individual cabinets, one for each category, and each one beautifully painted to communicate the theme. The result is a second period systematically organized wunderkammer presented behind the very glass cabinets created for them in the 1730’3 and 1740’s.

Surviving the wars in tact , the wunderkammer was then threatened for a while in the East German era by leaky roofs and other deferred maintenance, thus some restoration was done in the early 1990’s. This was done closely referring to Grundler’s original documents, placing all cabinets in their original position in the orphanage attic. Thus today we have an excellently preserved example of a well-sponsored, middle-class baroque wunderkammer, which one author calls “perhaps the most complete survivor of a cabinet of curiosities” (Mauries,p 25-7) The natural history is concentrated at one end, and the man-made artificialia at the other.

Here the minerals and petrifactions (fossils) are presented in a case the crest of which is painted with a garland of rocks and crystals. This collection was donated in part by an influential father of a student (Bahlke, p4). Other components were sent by fellow Pietists, believers in that form of Lutheranism Francke preached. Nearby (not shown) is a similar cabinet of sea shells.

The plants case, painted with floral garlands and a face composed of plant parts (after Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1527-1593) houses exotic seed pods, nuts, dried fruits, branches, roots and leaves.

The animal kingdom cabinet is painted with a garland of frogs, bats and butterflies all of which is surmounted with a grinning leopard.

The animal cabinet houses a number of specimens preserved in spirits such as the eerie group of fetuses, reminiscent of the presentation in Waldenburg (Chapter 5).

There is also an egg collection, some of which was donated by the elector of Brandenburg, straight from his wunderkanmmer.

The artificialia end of the large room contains a case with artifacts from India, painted with a native from that subcontinent, and another case for Borneo. The contents were provided by fellow Pietist missionaries stationed in those remote areas.

Another cabinet was reserved for manuscripts and writing instruments of the world, its crest painted with 25 specimens of different alphabets and scripts. The written word was particularly important to Pietists as the one pure form of communication, versus pictures, paintings, theatre, and music, all of which were a tad too worldly and decadent for their tastes (Bahlke, p19).

Another section is dedicated to a collection of conception models or mechanical models. A nearby cabinet (not shown) holds holy items from other religions, another, fine art, another, clothing of the world, and another, a collection of masks and coins.

The middle of the room contains oversized specimens, including at the natural history end the obligatory crocodile (see photo at the start of this chapter), huge whale bones, python skins, etc, and at the man-made end, an Eskimo kayak, exotic and medieval armor, etc.

Finally the center of the room is dominated by globes, models of the planetary system and universe.

While the classification of this collection feels somewhat modern (after all, its designer Grundler paid for translating Linneus’s Systema Natura into German), the scope of the collection is universal or encyclopedic, consistent with a wunderkammer goal of creating a microcosm of God’s entire universe in one room.

One of the more authentic and untouched wunderkammern, the Halle wonder chamber is definitely worth a visit. Bring a flashlight because the contents of the cases are sometimes shaded by the glass doors. We were lucky enough to receive a fascinating guided tour by Dr. Claus Veltmann, the curator. The booklet published by the Francke Foundation noted as a reference below as translated into English also provides a great guide…be sure to ask for one if not available in the bookstore.

An hour and a half is sufficient to see the wunderkammer and I’d also recommend viewing Francke’s nearby library of 35,000 books as well as the Foundation grounds which also serves the local university. The address is Francenplatz 1, 06110 Halle and the web site www.francke-halle.de.

References:

Cabinets of Curiosities, Patrick Mauries, (London,2002)

The Cabinet of Artefacts and Curiosities in the Francke Foundation in Halle, Dr.Thomas Muller-Bahlke, Halle,2004) as translated by Helen Louise Tate