Visual Order to Organizing Collections - Hunting For Precious Objects, Horticulture And Culture, Cabinets Of Curiosity, "portraits" Of Authors
knowledge examined cues distinctive
A generation trained to select icons on a desktop computer is able to take a fresh approach to the visual cues within early rooms of collection. Visual cues often preceded catalogs and inventories, helping users to situate themselves in the room and to locate items of the collection. In searching out the modes of conceptualizing, mapping, and classifying of collections, we shall see that the distinctive details of ceilings, walls, cabinets, or furniture of a collection room may be functional elements organizing manuscripts or other valuable objects in the room. Scholars Alain Besson, André Masson, Eric Garberson, and Maryanne Cline Horowitz have examined visual classification schemes, especially in libraries and studies, but a plethora of extant as well as defunct rooms of collections might similarly be examined. The Journal of the History of Collections (founded 1989) might be the appropriate venue.
Each section of this entry features a distinctive type of iconography for rooms of collection: hunting, horticulture, cabinets of curiosity, author portraits, imperial busts, the
disciplines of knowledge, the circle of knowledge, secular temples, and towers of knowledge.
Additional Topics
Excavations in the basement of the Louvre reveal the circular fortress of the Tour de la Fauconnerie (Tower of Falconry), where medieval French kings sent birds out tower windows and stored their hunting gear. In 1367, imitating the three floors of manuscripts of the Tour de la Garde-Robe (Tower of the Vestments) of the papal palace in Avignon, King Charles V (r. 1364–1380) moved the royal …
Thirteenth-century Richard de Fournival discusses his "garden" of manuscripts in La biblionomia. This catalog shows the rows of his plantings: about three hundred manuscripts entered the founding collection of the Sorbonne of which forty of Fournival's have survived. The duke of Berry, most famous for his manuscript of the calendar months, utilized the insignia of vegetative &…
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, collectors arranged a diversity of natural and crafted objects within decorative furniture cabinets, as well as within rooms that served as cabinets of curiosity. When one enters Isabella d'Este's grotto in Corte Vecchia, one feels that one is inside an elaborate jewelry box. Ornate marquetry woodwork decorates the doors to the cabinets tha…
Providing a portrait, even if fictional, of the key authors of one's set of manuscripts helped individualize the books and encouraged the illusion that those select guests invited to the room were conversing amid the authorities. The pairs of portraits on the upper walls of the duke's studiolo in the Palazzo Ducale, Urbino—somewhat representative as in Petrarch, Dante, and con…
To collect imperial coins or busts and to organize one's objects in the categories of Suetonius's twelve emperors suggests an appearance of imperial activity. Many Renaissance collections of ancient Roman imperial coins are displayed in room two of the Archaeological Museum, Venice, and busts of the emperors are displayed in the Room of the Emperors in the Palazzo Borghese. A common …
Piero de' Medici, father of Lorenzo the Magnificent, used color-coding in his catalog of books and in his book bindings in his studiolo in the Medici Palace, Florence. Many of these hand-illuminated works are in good condition in the Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence. The main room designed by Michelangelo opened in 1571; the subject names still survive on the sides of the lecterns where the…
Great book collections, as well as large museums, have absorbed within them previous collections. The Vatican Library took pride in its role as a preserver of and successor to previous cultures. Sixtus V (r. 1585–1590) commemorated that tradition by commissioning fictive fresco images of some of the libraries contained within his collecting project. The graphical design shows the arrangemen…
In the Renaissance, the sphere and the circle were viewed as perfect forms. The medical school in Padua, in initiating one of the earliest and most famous botanical gardens, chose a circular arrangement. Plants from the Americas were transplanted there. Reading rooms imitating the ancient Roman Pantheon dome became an engineering feat and architectural possibility in the mid-nineteenth century. In…
During the Italian Renaissance, Venice was a good location for studying ancient Greek culture. La Libreria Sansoviniana in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana is on the second floor of a columned building across from the ducal palace and basilica of Venice. Built by architect Jacopo Sansovino in 1591, it is especially famous for its ceiling painting by Titian of
New York's Metropolitan Mus…
In the basement of the Louvre, one can still observe the walls of the tower wherein King Charles V set his library. An M. C.
British Museum reading room. Nineteenth-century engraving. Constructed in the domed style of ancient Roman architecture, the reading room at the British Museum served as the main reading room for the British Library until 1997. © BETTMANN/CORBIS
Escher–influ…
Béguin, Sylvie, ed. Le studiolo d'Isabelle d'Este: Catalogue. Paris: Edition des Musées Nationaux, 1975. Besson, Alain. Medieval Classification and Cataloguing from the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries. Biggleswade, U.K.: Clover, 1980. Chartier, Roger . The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Translated by…
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