Upon visiting “Looking Glass of the World” in Paris’s Musée du Luxembourg, I was reminded of my childhood by the exhibition’s curious array of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century objects. Two globes from the show—one created in 1792 by Johann Georg Klinger in Nuremberg and another by Willem Janszoon Blaeu and Joan Blaeu circa 1643–48 also in Nuremberg—caused me to recall one from my childhood room that emulated a similar style. My father, though a mathematician by profession, was an aesthete who, like many of the prince-electors of the House of Wettin, added objects such as silver, china, and art to his house, which was already packed with heirlooms inherited by my mother. My father’s interest in collecting spurred my own curiosity and led me to discover peculiar books in my youth—all out of print now—such as Sacheverell Sitwell’s Splendours and Miseries and For Want of the Golden City (I discussed Sitwell’s works in The New Criterion’s October 2019 issue).
Organized by Paris’s Musée du Luxembourg in coordination with Dresden’s Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, “Looking Glass of the World” allows visitors to discover one of the great “cabinets of curiosities” that emerged in the sixteenth century.1 Forerunners of the modern museum, cabinets of curiosities displayed the world in miniature, a mirror of the world that appeared first in princely and ducal courts and then in the houses of more lowly aristocrats and prosperous burgesses. The first cabinet of curiosities (Kunstkammer in German) was founded in Dresden by Augustus I, Prince-Elector of Saxony, around the year 1560. Fascinated by recent scientific advancements and the discoveries of Columbus, Magellan, and Vespucci, Augustus gathered unique objects from around the world for a personal collection. As patrons of the arts and sciences, subsequent prince-electors, all from the House of Wettin, cultivated the collection for the next two centuries, adding mathematical and scientific instruments, objects from nature like sea shells, works of art, and cultural and military items from the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Their collections exemplified the insatiable Renaissance curiosity that continued into the Age of Enlightenment.
The Saxon prince-electors may not have been patrons of the arts on the scale of the Medici, but they lived in a period when artisans strove for beauty. Examples of this sense of beauty mixed with a craving for knowledge appear in the exhibition in both Willem Janszoon Blaeu’s early celestial globe of 1643 and in the mathematician Johannes Praetorius’s terrestrial globe, made in Nuremberg in 1588 with copper engravings that portray the various continents. The show also displays a 1750 mirror telescope by James Short that is the same model as the one used by Captain Cook on the island of Mauritius to observe the transit of Venus in 1769. The eighteenth century certainly was eager to discover the stars.
The exhibition places great emphasis on the many items of “extra-European” origin in the Dresden Cabinet. The curators give some nods, seemingly obligatory nowadays, to the effects of colonialism in a similar way to the museum’s previous exhibition, “Pioneers: Artists in the Paris of the Roaring Twenties.” In any case, the prince-electors did not play a part in colonial adventures abroad. Their enthusiasm for exotic items, the exhibition notes, derived from the same honest curiosity that marks the rest of the cabinet. For example, the exhibition shows a delightful assortment of shells and precious stones from India and the Pacific islands. These treasures, thought at the time to possess properties conducive to good health, were valued for their perceived uses as well as their beauty. The exhibition’s display of a receipt circa 1579 of Portuguese silver offered in exchange for nuts from the Seychelles thought to diminish melancholy and anger was particularly intriguing. Coral, too, was much prized by sixteenth-century contemporaries—a collection of silverware circa 1580 with coral handles is on display. A small statue of the Infant Jesus created in Sri Lanka and sourced from the island’s rock crystal and garnet sits nearby. In Nuremberg in 1608–09, Hans-Anton Lind created a boat-like mobile centerpiece for a table entirely from mother of pearl. German craftsmen were eager to learn from the resources and techniques of foreign artisans.
The exhibition includes only a few paintings, all of which are delightful. Notable among these is Roelandt Savery’s Paradise Landscape (1625–30), which depicts an exotic assembly of creatures from lands far beyond Saxony. Rudolph II, the Holy Roman Emperor, employed Savery at his court in Prague, where he painted for the prince-electors of Saxony with their cabinets of curiosities. Despite their recent discovery by Western science, the exotic animals are depicted by Savery with incredible precision and anatomical accuracy, again indicating the prince-electors’ fascination with the nature of the world abroad. Also appealing and housed in the same section (titled “Visions of the World and Formations of Stereotypes”) is Nicolaes Pieterszoon Berchem’s dazzling Merchant Receiving a Foreign Guest at his Portside Palace (ca. 1650). In the background of this eclectic painting, a peacock stands next to a lady in a yellow dress and a lute-playing musician, while a monkey and a dog play in the foreground. The piece focuses on a dark-skinned visitor in a turban appearing before a self-satisfied merchant, who seems more like a cavalier or a Restoration comedy fop than a businessman. The merchant, the lady, and the musician are as much caricatures as the exotic visitor.
There are two other sections in the exhibition, one on porcelain, which had become fashionable in the West by the eighteenth century, and the other on artifacts from the Ottoman Empire, forming what Dresden Castle labels the “Turkish Cabinet.” Augustus II the Strong (1670–1733), the elector of Saxony, king of Poland, and grand duke of Lithuania, amassed the largest collection of porcelain outside of China at the time—some of which is on view in the exhibition—and in 1710, he founded the Meissen Porcelain factory in an attempt to bring production to European markets. Augustus the Strong also collected arms, tents, and other equipment from the Ottoman court and enjoyed dressing in the typical garb of a sultan, a not-too-unusual practice for the period.
Unlike the Enlightenment, with its curiosity, the present age is jaded, happy to scrap the beauty of the past. That spirit cultivated so well by the prince-electors of Saxony has all but disappeared. We have discarded artisanship and replaced comeliness with ugliness. Rather than rejecting that which did not easily conform to their understanding of the world, Saxony’s leaders assimilated and displayed novel objects and ideas otherwise unfamiliar and foreign. We would do well to learn from their example.
Though the Musée du Luxembourg may be small in size, its exhibition of this “cabinet of curiosities” reveals insights into both the academic and leisurely interests of the sixteenth-to-eighteenth-century Saxon elite. The exhibition will successfully arouse the House of Wettin’s sense of curiosity in the open-minded visitor.