Quest for knowledge
Celina Fox
Princely Splendour: The Dresden Court 1580–1620 Gilbert Collection, Somerset House, until 23 October Sponsored by Hubert Burda Media, the Schroder Family and WestLB AG.
In the sober grey vaults of Somerset House, trunk-loads of treasures from the state art collections of Saxony shimmer and sparkle. While the reconstruction of their home in the Grünes Gewölbe of the Residenzschloss in Dresden is being completed, these works have travelled to Hamburg, New York and now, thanks to Lord Rothschild’s inspired coup, the Gilbert Collection.
The show is more than an opportunity to gawp at glitter, an ostentatious display of toys and trinkets designed for the conspicuous consumption of bored princes. By focusing on the period 1580–1620, it reveals the original motives behind the formation of the Kunstkammer: no less than to represent the cosmos in microcosm by encompassing naturalia and artificialia in a single cabinet. While nature moved in mysterious ways, works of art fashioned from its materials helped to make its properties manifest and thus were worthy of study and reflection.
That may sound a little rarefied for a museum mission statement, but the Saxon Electors’ quest for knowledge extended beyond visual contemplation to experiencing the effects of nature first-hand through interactive participation in the processes of production. Francis Bacon made the acquisition of this maker’s knowledge the cornerstone of a new philosophy, one that was already being practised before 1600 by the imperial courts of Vienna and Prague and by several German principalities. In Dresden, Elector August’s mechanical bent was so strong that he amassed over 7,000 tools relating to different trades and evidently used them, as well as lending them out to Saxon craftsmen. Here we see a choice selection: a miner’s axe and grappling hook, naturally, for the wealth of the state was based on its rich mineral deposits, saws, hammers, shears, jacks, planes, augers for making bungholes and a handy pocket case from which an assortment of knives, drills, files, etc. fan out, like a superior Swiss Army penknife.
Lovingly carved and decoratively etched, some of the signed works were originally submitted as masterpieces to Nuremberg guilds. But the simpler gardening implements belonging to August and his Danish wife Anna are perhaps the most evocative, the pearwood handles artfully turned to include stylised buds, which represent those to be found on branches in nature. The brass seeder shaped like a long inverted trumpet was especially useful, enabling the electoral couple to drop seeds into the dibbled holes without endangering their caste or backs by stooping.
Elector August was keen to stimulate the health and welfare, agriculture and economy of his land by example, accumulating surgical instruments, making geodesic surveys and even producing a booklet on fruit cultivation. In the 16th century, Saxony was twice the size it is today and the most powerful German Protestant principality, with a key Electoral vote. But while the population of Paris was 300,000 in 1575 and London 180,000, Dresden’s was only 10,000. Lacking a coastline, fleet or lucrative voyages of discovery, the Electors must have been all the more anxious to acquire exotica — ostrich eggs and coconuts converted by goldsmiths into spectacular display cups; turban shells fashioned into nereids and tritons, unicorns and sea horses; coral transformed into stag antlers, for one figure as part of Actaeon’s metamorphosis; mother-of-pearl parrots and partridges, basins and flagons — thereby demonstrating they, too, were au courant with the wider world.
Above all, such treasures were key pieces in an international chess game of power and diplomacy. When August visited Prague in 1581, he received from the Emperor Rudolf II a fabulous emeraldencrusted stone, supposedly a natural wonder freshly mined in Colombia (in fact, a chunk of iron ore with emeralds cemented in), which long served to symbolise Saxony’s alliance with the Imperial House. For his first visit to Prague in 1607, Elector Christian II enjoyed the extraordinary privilege of being taken round the Kunstkammer by the Emperor. He returned home laden with splendid gifts, including a bronze portrait bust of himself by the Imperial court sculptor, Adriaen de Vries. Three Giambologna bronzes were sent by Francesco I, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Nor were souvenirs from Saxony to be sniffed at. While August bullied the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria into parting with Georg Wecker, one of their most gifted turners in ivory, Christian II sent him bearing examples of his elegant handiwork on to Prague. Turned vessels of serpentine, a Saxon stone speckled like a snake, were no doubt especially welcomed at the courts of Italy for they were believed to possess the magical property of protecting the drinker from poison.
Francis Bacon warned that the trouble with such dazzling displays of artistic virtuosity was that they might stun the intellect into believing there was nothing more to be discovered. As I marvelled at an exquisite bowl in the form of a shell balancing on a dolphin, cut and ground out of rock crystal and delicately engraved with fronds of seaweed, I could not help thinking that he might have had a point.
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