Existing comment:
Collector's Study:
This room evokes the private study or studioto (literally "little study"), where an educated, wealthy nobleman living in the 1600s in the Southern Netherlands (present-day Belgium) might spend leisure time studying beautiful objects. The walls were often lined with cabinets (with doors closed, not open as here) above which hung portraits of inspiring figures from the past, sometimes accompanied by an instructive saying reminding one of higher truths. Objects were studied as much as books. The cabinets contained small items that were especially treasured or useful to have at hand for examination and comparison. The legacy of Renaissance humanism is evident in the importance of objects and themes associated with antiquity and also in the emphasis on acquiring knowledge through study. Books may have been kept in some of the closed cabinets, but others were probably in a separate library.
Two aspects of these objects are celebrated: the artist's god-line native "genius" (or its less exalted form, ingenuity) that generates the idea and also the "art" that it took to complete it. The traditional concept of art meant special knowledge reflecting high achievement with a focus on technique involving mental agility, and not so much beauty for its own sake. It was in the quiet of his study that the collector experienced this achievement.
It is rarely known exactly how collections were organized. Some, like this one, were organized primarily by materials, based on the approach taken by the Roman author Pliny the Elder (AD 23-79) in his commentaries on human achievements in the visual arts, still an influential model in the 1600s. |