2
It won’t come as news to many of the readers of this magazine that collecting often
is far more than a hobby or a pastime, but rather a vocation or occasionally an
obsession, healthy or otherwise. One of the earliest documents we have attesting to
serious art collecting is the inventory of the estate of Lorenzo de’ Medici after his
death in April of 1492. As Richard Stapleford notes in his fascinating translation of
this document in his book Lorenzo de’ Medici at Home, creating such an inventory
was a common practice at the time when dealing with important estates, but what
emerged from the Palazzo Medici is something different. The breadth of what is
described in this inventory is more than just one of the great art collections of the
time. It is an early iteration of what would come to be known as a wunderkammer,
or cabinet of curiosities, a wide-ranging collection of art, artifacts, natural history
specimens, scientifi c instruments, books, maps, and just about anything else the
owner cared to accumulate, which was an expression of the collector’s worldliness,
sophistication, and, usually, although not always, his humanist perspective.
While most of these collections have been dispersed, a sense of what one looked
like can be experienced in Room 1 of the British Museum, the Enlightenment Gallery,
which, though a modern didactic interpretation, gives some sense of the dizzying array
of materials that were involved. These early collections eventually formed the foundations
for many museums that are familiar to us today. The Ashmolean, for example,
is based in part on the seventeenth-century Tradescant Collection (which will be the
subject of an upcoming article in this magazine), while the newly reopened and rebranded Weltmuseum Wien—
formerly the Völkerkundemuseum in Vienna—has its roots in the vast collection formed in the sixteenth century
by Archduke Ferdinand II, which was originally installed in Schloss Ambras in Innsbruck, Austria. Much of it,
including Ferdinand’s bizarre collection of paintings of “miraculous humans” (a.k.a., people with horrifying deformities
or injuries), remains at the castle, making it the world’s oldest museum. As Tamara Schild’s fi ne article
in this issue about the Weltmuseum describes, a 1596 inventory of the Ambras collection notes Afro-Portuguese
ivories and featherwork objects from the New World. One of these, the frequently misnamed “Montezuma’s
Headdress,” appears on the cover of this issue. More information about this remarkable object can be found
in another article, “The Feather Headdress from Ancient Mexico in Vienna,” by the museum’s former director,
Christian Feest, which appeared in the winter 2011 edition of this publication.
Another notable name in collecting is that of Gustav Conrau, who is the subject of a defi nitive article in
this issue by Bettina von Lintig. Conrau was a collector by profession rather than by passion and was responsible
for around 150 sculptures and other artworks from Cameroon that he acquired in situ and sent to
the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin in 1898 and 1899. Prominent among these is the so-called Bangwa
Queen, which was traded out of the Berlin collection and passed through the hands of Arthur Speyer, Helena
Rubinstein, and Harry Franklin before being bought by the Foundation Dapper, where it resides today.
While some, most vocally the missionary Paul Gebauer (himself responsible for collecting much of the Cameroon
collection now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), have attributed Conrau’s dramatic demise in
1899 to the anger of the inhabitants of the Bangwa region sparked by his acquisition of their sacred objects,
his letters to Berlin curator Felix von Luschan indicate that he was careful to obtain appropriate permission
to gather these artworks and that, in any case, they were little regarded. His death appears to have been the
result of a far less noble kind of collecting activity.
The acknowledged artistic masterpieces of the world are easily available in books and online, but for a true
collector, they cannot match the visceral thrill that comes from holding an object that has been discovered
and then acquired, especially at great sacrifi ce. But I’m pretty sure most of you know that already.
Jonathan Fogel
EDITORIAL
Our cover shows the Aztec feather headdress
known as “penacho” (plume), created in
Central Mexico in the early 16th century.
Feathers of the resplendent quetzal, cotinga, roseate spoonbill,
squirrel cuckoo, kingfi sher; wood, fi ber, paper, cotton, leather,
gold, gilded bronze. H: 116 cm.
Ex Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck, Austria.
Weltmuseum Wien, inv. 10.402.