Last weekend, I had the pleasure of viewing the new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum called Princely Splendor: The Dresden Court, 1580-1620. Sadly, it failed to capture the same bewitching sense of enchantment that I was besotted with by after reading "The Green Vault," a book on the same subject published by Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in 1988 (7th ed.). But then again, it's a truly amazing little book. Noted,
The Green Vault has the largest collection of a special group of jeweller's sculptures for which there is no appropriate name. These sculptures are small figures composed of pearls, precious stones and enamelled gold. The invention was usually stimulated by a misshapen pearl.The Green Vault sounds like quite an intriguing and special thing, and I hope to visit it in Dresden some day.
The exhibition at the Met is still very interesting and should not at all be judged by its inability to live up to my love of a magical but exceedingly slim volume - an elaborate tourist pamphlet, really - that I bought at a secondhand shop.
On display are many fine examples of precious objects constructed mostly from exotic materials - coral, shells, ostrich eggs, serpentine - and lots of more common ones - mostly silver and gold. There is also a gorgeous embroidered cape in the show, which the accompanying text helpfully notes was worn by the bridegroom for two of his weddings, and an exquisite crystal "bowl on a dolphin," which is exactly as it sounds.
We are in the midst of a revival for this sort of thing, I think, which seems rather hot right now as evidenced by The New York Times, "Currents" column, by Elaine Louie (11.8):
Bronze anatomical figures studied by 17th-century scientists, early hourglasses and a whale's tusk ($25,000) that once passed for a unicorn's horn are among the items on exhibit at ``A Collector's Cabinet of Curiosities: Objects for a Wunderkammer From the 16th to the 19th Centuries.'' The show runs through Jan. 29 at Peter Freeman Inc., a SoHo gallery. In the 16th century, monarchs and popes started collecting exotica and assembling them in wunderkammern, or rooms of wonder. ``It was the beginning of collecting and the beginning of our museums,'' said Georg Laue, whose Munich gallery is presenting the 120 objects in the show. Peter Freeman Inc. is at 560 Broadway (Prince Street); (212)966-5154.I may check that one out, or I might just go down to The Strand bookstore to flip through the display copy of the extravagantly beautiful Taschen edition of Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Curiosities again.
Also of interest, Trigger magazine's story on Obscura, a New York shop specializing in odd things:
One curio case alone contains black and white death portraits, antique jewelry, Cupie dolls and glass bottles that once contained strychnine. In another large case, there is a wax head from a London museum, a mummified cat and a glass box filled with the most beautiful butterflies one could hope to see … removed from nature.I am going to Paris for a few days soon, and I hope to visit Deyrolle, if my traveling companion can be persuaded to indulge me for a little while. I've always heard that it's strange and unusual, and I certainly like the sound of that.
Related:
What makes collectors collect?
A Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths
Stamp collecting's strange lingo, translated
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