Albertus Seba: Cabinet of Natural Curiosities
Text by Irmgard Musch,
Rainer Willmann and Jes Rust
Taschen 587 pages, $150.
Before these were museums, in many palaces, estates and elegant city townhouses of nobles and wealthy merchants in 17th and 18th Century Europe there were cupboards and whole rooms set aside as curiosity cabinets. Collecting was the rage among men of means in that age of discovery and awakening intellect. Depending on their interests, collectors gathered art, weapons, coins, artifacts of ancient civilizations or specimens of plant and animal life. Often the motivation for collecting was snobbery, to display objects so amazing that the collector’s home would be a “must-see” place for wealthy or powerful visitors to one’s town.
Two of the most famous collections, legendary in their own time, were amassed by Albertus Seba (1665-1736), an Amsterdam apothecary. For decades Seba haunted the docks of Amsterdam, a global crossroad thanks to the Dutch East India trading company. He ingratiated himself with crews going to and coming from Asia, Africa and the Americas, giving away his medicines and medical treatment in trade for specimens of exotic animals, plants and minerals the sailors brought home. Seba collected the specimens not out of vanity but to investigate them for possible new pharmacological material.
The best specimens went into a room Seba set aside in his home as his curiosity cabinet. Both the pharmaceuticals he developed and his collection became famous throughout Europe. In 1717, after having Seba’s medicines sent to him in Russia for years, Czar Peter the Great went to Amsterdam to see the collection. Impressed, he bought it and had it shipped to Russia.
Seba immediately set about building up a second, larger collection. Specimens flowed in from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Greenland, Virginia and Latin America. By 1731 it was so impressive, Seba commissioned 13 artists to draw every specimen he owned. At enormous personal expense, he had the drawings transferred to large, folio-page copper plates for printing and contracted two printing firms to publish a catalog of the collection (he called it a thesaurus) in four volumes.
The catalog was sold by subscription, and probably fewer than 200 full sets of it were ever printed. Nobody knows how many sets survive, but today the catalog is regarded as a priceless historic document, both as an artistic tour de force and an important step in the evolution of the natural sciences. A private buyer paid more than $500,000 for one four-volume set a year ago. At least 35 sets are prized possessions locked in rare-book vaults of libraries around the world. (The Chicago Public Library, the Field Museum and the University of Chicago each owns a set.)
Best known to the cognoscenti of art and science history, Seba’s catalog could gain a larger audience now that Taschen, the art-book publishing house, has sumptuously reproduced it. “Albertus Seba: Cabinet of Natural Curiosities,” printed on folio-size pages, leaves out nothing of the original in its single, exquisite, 17-pound volume, copied from a richly colored original, hand-tinted edition in the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague.
Despite–or perhaps because of–some misconceived and exaggerated renderings by the 18th Century artists (including fantasy animals like dragons and seven-headed monsters), the catalog is a powerful testament to nature’s beauty and diversity.
The artists had to draw carcasses of animals that weren’t always in the best state of preservation. They had been shipped from foreign lands in jars of alcohol, but sometimes the alcohol evaporated during the voyage, or it was filched by sailors looking for a snort of strong spirits. Even when the animals were well-preserved, artists sometimes had difficulty imagining how the limp, pickled corpses looked as living creatures, putting spiraling tails on crocodiles and coiling snakes into odd pretzel loops.
Nonetheless, curiosity cabinets like Seba’s are credited now as being the first baby steps of such disciplines as botany and anthropology. The keepers of those early, crude collections, by virtue of constantly reassessing and rearranging their contents, were careful observers who began to see important patterns in nature itself. Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), the Swedish botanist who devised the universal taxonomic system of classifying plants and animals, cited Seba’s catalog often as a source for his seminal work. As a medical student in Amsterdam in 1735, Linnaeus frequently visited Seba to study his curiosity cabinet.
When Seba died in 1736, only two of the four volumes of his catalog had been published. His family had to sell his collection to publish the last two volumes. Some of Seba’s specimens survive in collections at St. Petersburg’s Zoological Institute, the Natural History Museum of Stockholm, the Zoological Museum in Amsterdam and the British Museum in London.
