The Renaissance Discovery of the World: Collecting and Collections in the Early Modern Era

This course explores the development of the Kunstkammer and the cabinet of curiosities in Europe across the long sixteenth century, the great age of discovery, that saw the opening up of new worlds to European experience. It examines how the collecting of natural and artificial objects fortified princely power, transformed the nature of both aesthetic and scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals. Equal emphasis is placed on the great courtly collectors of central Europe, as on the collections of doctors, apothecaries, scholars and natural scientists, and on the networks of knowledge and sociability that grew up around them. The changing relationship between art, nature, and science, embodied in early modern collections, is used to chart the shift from a medieval to a recognizably modern understanding of the processes of nature and of man’s place in the world. Knowledge of French and German is an advantage but not essential. 3 credits. Satisfies the chronological requirement.