Visual Order to Organizing Collections

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.