Title: "Die Natur und Kunst zu betrachten": Carlo Farina's Capriccio stravagante (1627) and the Cultures of Collecting at the Court of Saxony
Abstract: Like many noblemen of his time, Johann Georg I, Elector of Saxony from 1611 to 1656, was a collector. Official court records, together with accounts left by curious visitors, attest to the variety and richness of the collections that he inherited, enhanced, and expanded: individual rooms were devoted to books, live animals, stuffed animals, wine, armor, costumes, and hunting gear. The Saxon collections focused especially on practical tools rendered in artistic fashions, from rakes and picks to surgical instruments, optical instruments, and naturally, musical instruments. At the heart of the collections at the Saxon court in Dresden was the Kunstkammer. Translated literally, the title denotes merely a room of art. But in the Dresden court and other German courts in the late Renaissance and early modern era, the meanings of the Kunstkammer for the practice and knowledge of the arts, humanities, and sciences were much more far-reaching. The Electoral Kunstkammer did indeed contain paintings that hung on walls, but it also housed a vast array of artifacts, novelties, and curiosities—some exhibiting distinctly Saxon origins and characters and others imported from exotic places abroad—that bore witness to human interaction with and mastery over nature.1 Philipp Hainhofer—an adviser to the court of Augsburg and himself a theorist and practitioner of the art of collecting—left two substantial descriptions of the Dresden collections in his travel diaries of 1617 and 1629;2 a statement in his diary of 1617 suggests that the exploration of the relationship between man and the world around him was one of the primary focal points of the Kunstkammer. Apparently frustrated at the brevity of his visit to the collection, he wrote that “There are in this Kunstkammer, on all the tables, in all the chests, and on all the walls so many small and large, ugly and elegant tools and items that one would need several days to see everything one wanted and needed to see, and to observe nature and art [die Natur und Kunst zu betrachten].”3