The Legacy of European Art and Curiosity Cabinets

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James Cuno: Hello, I’m Jim Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust. Welcome to Art + Ideas, a podcast in which I speak to artists, conservators, authors, and scholars about their work.

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann: Schlosser could be described as the least-known famous art historian. We can call him that.

Cuno: In this episode, I speak with art historian Thomas DaCosta Kauffmann about Julius von Schlosser’s influential 1908 text, Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance.

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Julius von Schlosser’s Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance, published in 1908, was the first study to interpret 16th- and 17th-century cabinets of wonder as precursors to the modern museum. Schlosser was born in 1866. His provocative and landmark text was concerned with princely collections in central Europe that contained such artifacts as goldsmithery, ivories, clocks, and cut-stone vessels together with jewels, sculpture, paintings, and books. Animal skins, shells, and other natural specimens sat alongside scientific instruments and items of popular culture from lands far from Europe.

Schlosser’s text on these collections was recently published by the Getty Research Institute in an English translation for the first time. To mark this occasion, I sat down with the volume’s editor, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, the Frederick Marquand Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, to discuss the character and importance of this distinguished and provocative text.

Thank you, Tom, for speaking with me on this podcast episode. Now, Julius von Schlosser’s text, Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance, was first published in 1908. Tell us the circumstances of its initial publication and why the Getty Research Institute is publishing it now in a new translation.

Kaufmann: Well, I think that it was published out of Schlosser’s involvement with the collections in Vienna, which were then the imperial and royal collections of the all-highest imperial house. Which gives you some flavor of the time. And he was the curator of the collection of what was called sculpture and applied arts. And that collection was the first one in which the words Kunst- und Wunderkammern, they were used. So I think he was probably stimulated by his work in the collections and his general intellectual voracity, to take on the fascinating topic of these peculiar kinds of collections that he did, and then he developed it into a much larger work.

Now, why the Getty should be publishing it now in a new translation, I think that there’s a huge boom in interest in the history of collecting, and [in] particular, in part, inspired by the republication of Schlosser’s book, a huge interest in this topic itself, the Kunstkammern. There’re like 900 publications that have been written on it since the second edition of 1978. It started this whole boom. It started this whole field, in a way, of history of collecting and museology. It’s the initial work, in many ways, and for many other topics.

Cuno: Well, tell us about Schlosser. Tell us about his background, where he studied, and how he got to the position he ultimately got to, to produce this book.

Kaufmann: Well, Schlosser is—What shall we say? He could be described as the least-known famous art historian. We can call him that.

He is born and he spent his entire life in Vienna. He studied—Initially he did philosophy, and then took up archaeology and art history in the University of Vienna. And he had sort of a parallel career in the museum and in the university. And the work in the museum, where he was the head of this sculpture and decorative arts collection, led him into contact with the history of the Hapsburg collections, because at the time, the imperial collections were just that. Like, the thing that’s most familiar to people now would be the queen’s collections, you know, that’s in Buckingham Palace and in Windsor Castle and so forth.

And they were concentrated in a public museum which was made for them. The art history museum, as it’s called, which had recently opened. Schlosser went there more or less the year the museum was opened, and he was a curator there and he rose to be director, and then he was lured away to the university. He felt it was his duty to take over the university.

But this book came out of his work in the museum. It’s a book that involves objects and intense study of the objects, and familiarity with them. And then, particularly considering that this was published in 1908, an extraordinary knowledge of sources. Not only published sources, but he knew about unpublished documents. Or he knew about rare works.

And that is characteristic of his scholarship, that he’s someone who both worked on individual objects, but he is responsible for the still-unequalled guide to the literature of art, which has gone through three editions. Not available, unfortunately, in English, but it’s still, you know, the best sort of general introduction to the literature of art, as he called it.

And so that combination led to the creation of this book. Plus, he had a huge, broad, as I said, voracious intellectual appetite, so he knew about a large number of fields and subjects. And he drops names and ideas all over the place in these works. In the first pages of interest, he’s referring to literature, psychology, philosophy, music, and so forth. And in many languages. So all of that goes together into the composition of this book, which appropriately, is dealing with universal collections. So it’s a kind of—one of the last universal scholars, shall we say, dealing with this.

Cuno: So what was art history like then, and who were his art history peers?

Kaufmann: Well, this is one of the—what shall we say—the first golden age of art history, the beginning of art history? Many of the art history departments in Europe were established from the 1860s and 1870s on. That is, particularly in Central Europe. And it’s really the serious generation that gets going around 1900. And many of the famous people who listeners may have heard of, were his peers. And those include Heinrich Wölfflin, Alois Riegl, Wilhelm Worringer, Max Dvořák, Max Friedländer, and in museums, Wilhelm von Bode, and of course, Aby Warburg. And Schlosser knew many of them, either had studied with them or friendly with them, as he was with Warburg, or [changes pronunciation] Warburg. And certainly with Dvořák. And his teacher was Franz Wickoff, who was one of the so-called founders of the so-called Vienna School.

Now, what art history was like was very much in the making. And the direction that one can say is represented by Schlosser is a kind of clarity of thinking about things, and philological. That is to say, the use of languages and the critique of documents and texts, as well as the study of objects. And all of that empirically. And all of that was being put together. And that was put together not only by him, but by many of these people, into broader or more general theories, and broader views of the history of art, so that these things were not separate, art theory or art criticism and practice.

Cuno: You mentioned the Vienna School, and [we] don’t wanna give the people listening to the podcast the impression that there was a particular school. I mean, that is, a building associated with this; but there’s a way of doing art history that distinguished Viennese efforts from those of—in Italy or those in France or those in Britain or those in the United States. Why was there such a distinguished, distinctive group of art historians pursuing art history differently than others?

Kaufmann: Well, that’s an interesting question. And of course, it’s Schlosser himself who coined this term, the Vienna School, in a famous article.

And I think what he meant by school was people who were educated in Vienna. So there are many aspects to this so-called school. But one could say that there is this combination of a kind of empirical side to it and the theoretical side. And that even applies to Schlosser’s antagonist and someone he doesn’t mention, Josef Strzygowski.

And basically, the Vienna School—They had two chairs that were set up because Schlosser and Strzygowski were antagonistic. The whole field of art history, in one way or another, grew out of what these people did, including interest in other areas of the world into which art history is now practiced, has expanded. So the Vienna School just means, really, according to Schlosser, those people who were educated at the University of Vienna in art history, because he traces it from the beginnings to his students. And the last students, or the last students but two, are someone who was very famous, Ernst Gombrich and Otto Kurz.

Cuno: So you mention Gombrich, and you were a student of Gombrich. So are you therefore in the Vienna School?

Kaufmann: No. Except indirectly. Although I do say in the beginning that I feel somewhat indebted to this, that I regard Schlosser as a kind of grandfather, because I was interested in him from the time when—I was only two years with Gombrich, in doing a master’s. But it was a very important time at the Warburg for me. And I do have a lot of respect for Schlosser, and particularly for what Gombrich respected him for, which was his tremendous erudition. There’re other things that I don’t share with him.

And there’s a difference between, you know, the early people, the second group, and then the third group, which goes on[?], so—And now in Vienna, you know, they probably would want to think of themselves as carrying on this great tradition. But I, although I did my dissertation in Vienna, and I certainly attended classes of historiography, I never particularly, let’s say, got on with or, you know, agreed with the idea of people like Otto Pächt, who was then teaching.

Cuno: Yeah, let’s get to the text, Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance. You say that the text’s temporal focus on the Late Renaissance was in keeping with the interest at the time in late styles. Why the interest in late styles? What do you mean by late styles? And was it just simply the matter of the fact that that was the turn of a century that changed the way one thought about things? Or was there something more profound than that?

Kaufmann: The interest, I would say quite specific. We might think of the book Late Roman Art Industries by Riegl. The idea of Late Roman or Late Medieval. Those were ideas which were coined at the time. And Late Renaissance is another one of them. Late Renaissance then became Mannerist, or even Baroque. And Late Antique then became an idea of Late Antiquity.

Cuno: Is there something that characterizes something as late, in late style in appearance?

Kaufmann: What happens, I think, is that if one thinks about art history as biological metaphors or development, and it grows and then it flourishes and then it decays and dies. I think it was the idea of decay and deterioration and decadence that—Well, you see that in hindsight because all of Europe, the old Europe, died. It was ended by the horrors of the First World War.

And great empires like the Russian Empire or Austria-Hungary in this instance, or even the German Empire cease to exist. And the new nation states took their place. So it’s a period in which things passed away. And in a way, the culture before the First World War also left, because there were so many people, you know, so many men who died in the First World War. And there’s that notion that’s attached to it.

But the idea that this was decadent, there was an effort, I think—and we’ve seen this repeatedly in scholarship—to recover something which has been discarded or regarded as inferior or decadent, degenerate by looking at it in another way. And that often has happened in studies, which has made possible for new things to be considered. Otherwise, you know, you wouldn’t have pictures in the Getty Museum, for instance, by Pontormo and Bronzino, who were regarded as, you know, inferior and decadent. Or for that matter, by Bernini, you know, that’s decadent and late. You know, it’s Late Renaissance, it’s Baroque, it’s something that’s not good. So I think there’s an effort to recuperate that was also going on.

Cuno: Now, tell us about the book’s title and the words art and curiosity cabinets, or the distinction between art and curiosity cabinets. Who formulated the term curiosity cabinets, and why are they distinct from art?

Kaufmann: Well, that is actually something that we had to use to make it something that was understood by English readers, because the idea of art collections, if you’re an English speaker, you can understand and you know about the idea of the old curiosity cabinet.

And a curiosity cabinet in England or a cabinet de curiosités, would approximate, but not be the same thing as what Schlosser’s actual title is, which is Kunst- und Wunderkammern, Art and Wonder Chambers. And the term for Schlosser’s book, he took from really a almost unique use ever in any language, which appears in two references that are applied to the collections of Archduke Ferdinand of the Tyrol, whose collections were in Ambras, near Innsbruck, in Austria now. And that refer to Kunst- und Wunderkammern.

And Schlosser knew these collections intimately. He had just installed them in the museum in Vienna. He had cataloged them; he’d written a guide to them. He was very familiar with these inventories, I think, and he picked up this term, which had been used previously. Kunstkammer is frequently used, Wunderkammer is frequently used; but Kunst- und Wunderkammer not.

Now, what is a Kunst- und Wunderkammer? It includes both what we would call art and both, for want of a better word, we would talk about as curiosities. But curiosities—or Wunder—it means natural wonders. But as Schlosser points out, it includes much more, because there are also scientific instruments, globes, even paintings, books, manuscripts, and objects also which were regarded as curiosities or wonders, which came from other parts of the world. At the time, regarded as curiosities in Europe.

But you know, these are some of the first collections, for instance, of African and there’re Southeast Asian, Chinese. The earliest Chinese paintings that we know that survive in Europe on scrolls were actually in the Ambras collection. So that kind of thing. Porcelain, Japanese art, and so forth. And not to mention from the whole Islamic world, of course, because there was direct contact the Austrians had with that part of the world. And also armor. I forgot the works of armor.

All those things that now would be separated out into any number of different collections were all together and there’re these extraordinary what you could call omnium-gatherum, these potpourri or whatever you want to say, olla podrida, of all kinds of objects and works of art. And some famous collections separated out paintings collections, paintings per se or sculpture per se. But paintings and sculpture were also in these things.

But there’s, as these collections themselves demonstrate, there’s no firm dividing between a work of nature and a work of art, because the works of art can incorporate shells or coconut or ostrich eggs, and put a gold mount around them and make them into what we would then consider a work of art.

And similarly, what we would consider scientific objects can be extremely beautiful and well-crafted. Not to mention clocks. Very complicated clocks and things. And I’m not just talking about the mounts, but the whole way that it’s displayed and the rest. And the mounts, as well. Things on which the clocks stand or armillary spheres and other kinds of astronomical objects. So it’s all together.

Cuno: Now, tell us about the patrons for this. Who were they and where were they?

Kaufmann: Well, the use of German also applies, because this is a largely Central European, Germanic phenomenon. It’s not that similar collections were not present elsewhere; they were. As I mentioned, curiosity cabinets were present in England. Cabinets of curiosity, cabinet de curiosités in France; even in Poland and so forth. And in Italy, the equivalent of this is the so-called studiolo. And in Italy and in France and in England, sometimes you would have noblemen; but often, there’d be scholars and scientists, or just generally wealthy people, who might have such a collection. And that’s also true in Central Europe.

But the difference is in Central Europe that the major princes in the empire, the major rulers from the emperor down, had such collections. So it really became something that everyone of importance did or had to do. And this is actually articulated at the time. Not only was there you could call proto-theories of collecting, but there also are actually stated in treatises, about how you should rule, that it’s necessary for a prince, for his reputation—and it is he we’re talking about, generally—that to have such a collection, to have a Kunst- und Wunderkammern quite specifically stated.

Cuno: Well, tell us about Schlosser’s text and about the structure of the text.

Kaufmann: The structure of the text, I think basically, the word Kunst, I think, is important to emphasize, art, because I believe that Schlosser, he had trouble—and he would admit this himself—ever defining specifically what art might be.

You’ve been a museum director; you’d know well that this is very hard always to say what art is. Particularly since we have so many different examples of what art is in museums, and particularly in the contemporary field. Anything that can be taken in, it’s thought, that has a symbolic or an intentional aspect to it, or involves a certain artifactual element made with skill in certain—or even not made with skill, just made with some thought behind it or an image or something like that.

So he had immense trouble defining what art was. But I think the book is about the definition of art through the history of art collecting, so that he starts with what he thought were the earliest evidences of collecting—and very acute, with animals, and then goes to early humans. But he picks up with the ancient Egypt or ancient Greece. Again, some of the Egyptian collections, the Mesopotamian ones hadn’t been discovered quite yet. Like the great discoveries at Ur or King Tut hadn’t been made yet.

And then he goes up to the present. And it’s a kind of tripartite division. One is a kind of prehistory of art. The second stage is that of the Kunst- und Wunderkammern, which is the Late Renaissance, or the Renaissance and then the Late Renaissance development. And then the development into the modern museum, which is just a light addition at the end of the book. And that’s, I think, the basic structure of the book.

Cuno: Now, we’ve talked a little bit about the Vienna School—that is, a group of other art historians at the time in the same general location; that is, in Vienna. Was he alone, though, in pursuing this particular kind of phenomena as the subject of his study?

Kaufmann: I think that there are other people, definitely, who picked up on this. And certainly, collecting as an interest was something that other people in other countries were also interested in at this time. So Schlosser and his students were certainly interested. I think that some of the other people like Riegl were; to a degree, Dvořák. And then the other great people around the museum certainly wrote about collecting in Vienna.

Now, there’s been a tremendous, in the last 50 years or a little under 50 years, tremendous growth of interest in this topic. But it was not very well researched, outside of this pioneering work by Schlosser.

Cuno: Now, the book is published in 1908. What was its impact then? And was it a delayed impact? Because it has such an impact now. But was it delayed or was it impactful at the time?

Kaufmann: Well, the other person interested in this, who published it in a series, was Jean-Louis Sponsel, who was the director, or became director, of the Green Vaults, Grünes Gewölbe, in Dresden. So that people certainly were concerned. The whole way of displaying the collections according to their historical development was, I think, picked up. And so within museums, I believe that there was some of this that was happening. But in scholarship, much delayed. And then probably among his students, people certainly read this book or knew about it. And I think it was broadly disseminated. But you know, this was sort of a small niche area of interest, shall we say, until later, until very much later.

Cuno: Now, why was the book not translated into English until now? And was it translated in other languages from the German before English?

Kaufmann: Yes. That’s a good question. It’s been translated into Spanish, Italian, and French, I believe. And why not into English? Again, the topic didn’t become fashionable until ’70s, ’80s. Why not translated earlier? Schlosser was not a favored art historian when the other people who were writing in German around the same time became favored. That is, by the time when Riegl and others were regarded as the critical historians of art—Riegl and Wölfflin and so forth—Schlosser was not picked up. And there may be various reasons for that.

But it also, I think, has to do with a general reluctance to translate things, which, so long as people were capable of reading German—It’s only that German, general familiarity within art history, or a general ability of people to read it has gone out. It’s very surprising, but you know, German was widely studied in the United States. Then the First World War did one blow to it; and the Second World War, rightly, the second, for the knowledge of the language. And also, why would you want to read something that was this old anyway? So those were some impediments.

And then I would say that the difficulty of the text may have impeded putting some of it into English. That is, because Schlosser writes in a language which is difficult on its own. He writes in sentences which are often as many as 10 printed lines. He writes in a German which is highly inflected by Viennese or Austrian dialect.

And really, if you haven’t lived there, it’s hard to understand sometimes what he’s talking about. And then in addition to that, there’s the abundance of references that he uses. And he drops phrases without translating them. He has Greek and Latin and Italian and French and English all interspersed in this text. So it’s hard to translate. So those are all kinds of things.

Now, why wasn’t he picked up? Why did he remain the least-known famous art historian? Although, as I would suggest, there is a theoretical arc to his writing, the empirical aspect, the philological aspect, and also the avoidance of a kind of way of saying, well, what art specifically is. And the strongly based historical empirical aspect were not in favor, and have not been in favor, in the terms of the tendencies of what we could identify as the intellectual trends that called attention to the earlier Germanic writings to begin with. And I mean by that the kind of theoretical or critical concerns. It did not seem to people immediately that Schlosser was so much involved in that.

Cuno: Now, you conclude the introduction to the text by raising the question of Schlosser’s anachronism in relationship to his scholarship and politics. What did you mean by that, by the term and using the term anachronism in this context?

Kaufmann: Schlosser was regarded very much as a man out of his own time. And first of all, he was described as an old-fashioned polymath, as someone who knew everything, who learned about everything. So a figure out of the late 17th or 18th century. And people regarded him as that, as someone out of the 18th century. Both, I think, in the manner in which he talked, apparently, but in terms of his interests, and also in a way, his respect both for the kind of scientific tradition as it communicates through empiricism and, as expressed very much in this book, in his belief in science and the Enlightenment and logic, and his kind of opposition to the spookery, as he would’ve called it—you know, the witches’ brew, as it were—that he saw represented by the Kunstkammer.

In other words, he wasn’t entirely enthusiastic about these collections. He thought that they impeded, you know, the development of art and a clarity of vision which he associated with the Greeks and with art and with the High Renaissance. So that they were things that were not present here. He was anachronistic in that regard, and also anachronistic in that he really was what one could say a true Austro-Hungarian. That is, he was somebody who had gained his position through work in the imperial collections. And that was very anachronistic also, in a way, particularly after 1918, ’19, when the dual monarchy ceased to exist.

He’s listed in the accounts of the court servants, you know, along with the ladies in waiting. As a curator, you were regarded that way. His honors had been in that collection; his work had been on the imperial collections. And he’d grown up—in effect, more than two thirds of his life—in the realm of Franz Josef, the old Kaiser and König of Hungary, the emperor, the King of Hungary. And then his son, Karl, who’s the last of the Austrian emperors.

And I also think that the anachronism comes up against the fact that if one thinks about this in regard to his political stance, well, think of what’s happening at the end of his life. That is, that the Nazis, the fascists, Franco in Spain. These people do not respect scholarship, except when it’s in the service of their own particular interests—namely, racial scholarship or whatever it might be. And instead, as we know, they believe in the big lie. That is, that you repeat it; you lie and you repeat it enough, and it becomes, you know, a fact.

So it’s very much outside of his time. And he, you know, in his reactions at first to the Nazis was saying, “oh, it’s a disgrace of his time,” when Kurz was beaten up in the halls of the university by Nazis. And he did not understand, I think, what was going on, entirely.

Cuno: Well, was he a member of the party?

Kaufmann: Well, that’s not entirely clear, but he may have become one at the end of his life. And that is problematic and worrisome to me. I mean, because I respect him. And that’s why I also said, you know, well, there’re faults here.

Because as I see it, he wasn’t a nationalist and they’re called the German National Socialist Party. He certainly wasn’t a socialist, which the National Socialist Workers Party. And he certainly wasn’t somebody who was sympathetic with the workers. And nor was he a member of the Austro-Fascist Party, who he had nothing but scorn for, or the Nationalists. And what, after all, distinguishes the Nazis from others is that he was not anti-Semitic. There’s no evidence of that.

In fact, he had attracted, as it were, Jewish students, and many of his best students were either Jewish by confession or the Nazis would’ve considered them Jewish because their grandfathers had been. Someone like Gombrich, who was actually Lutheran. But the Nazis would’ve done away with him anyway, unfortunately. So you know, he protected them. He sent Gombrich to England; he got Pächt a job in Germany, which he thought at the time was less anti-Semitic than Austria. I don’t know if he tried to send Kurz out.

So you know, why did he become a Nazi? Maybe because he was naïve, as I’m suggesting. Maybe because he was just being a dutiful citizen. But I also believe that he did not believe in what was left of Austria. Austria was what they would’ve called a rump state. And that’s partly what led to this nationalist thing. They’d lost their empire. But that’s why I think he might’ve turned into a Nazi.

Some of his students, like Sedelmeier, became Nazis and were Nazis for their entire career, and Nazis ’cause they were anti-Semitic, also. And Martin Heidegger was regarded as a great philosopher and as the, you know, really the source of many of these newer tendencies in contemporary thinking, was also, as we know, through-and-through, a Nazi. His anti-Semitism and his Nazism affects his philosophy. These things can now not be denied.

So despite the fact that Schlosser decried the irrationality that was expressed within German tradition, and certainly praised reason and order and logic, in this book, the Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance, he, as it were, went along with—while we don’t know how much he actually believed in it—may have joined the Nazi Party. And we also—I also think it needs to be said that he died soon after he joined the party. I don’t know—You know, it’s hard to say what his physical or mental state was in the lasts months of his life, since he did die in the same year.

Cuno: He dies in ’38, yeah.

Kaufmann: ’38, which is the year in which the Nazis took over Austria.

Cuno: So he died 30 years after the publication of the book.

Kaufmann: That’s right. And of course, it occurred, ironically, right across the street from where he’d spent the happy years of his life; namely, the art historical—the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Cuno: Well, it’s an extraordinary project, Tom, and we’re grateful at the Getty to have a chance to work with you on this project and to make possible the publication of this book in English, its text in English. So thanks for giving us your time and attention on this podcast episode.

Kaufmann: Thank you.

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Cuno: This episode was produced by Zoe Goldman, with audio production by Gideon Brower and mixing by Mike Dodge Weiskopf. Our theme music comes from the “The Dharma at Big Sur” composed by John Adams, for the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in 2003, and is licensed with permission from Hendon Music. Look for new episodes of Art + Ideas every other Wednesday, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast platforms. For photos, transcripts, and more resources, visit getty.edu/podcasts or if you have a question, or an idea for an upcoming episode, write to us at podcasts at getty.edu. Thanks for listening.

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