You marvel that this matter, shuffled pell-mell at the whim of Chance, could have made a man, seeing that so much was needed for the construction of his being. But you must realize that a hundred million times this matter, on the way to human shape, has been stopped to form now a stone, now lead, now coral, now a flower, now a comet; and all because of more or fewer elements that were or were not necessary for designing a man. Little wonder if, within an infinite quantity of matter that ceaselessly changes and stirrs, the few animals, vegetables, and minerals we see should happen to be made; no more wonder than getting a royal pair in a hundred casts of the dice. Indeed it is equally impossible for all this stirring not to lead to something; and yet this something will always be wondered at by some blockhead who will never realize how small a change would have made it into something else.
Cyrano de Bergerac, Voyage dans la lune1
It was a magnificent flotilla that landed in Genoa in 1571. The banner of the Habsburgs was flying from its masts, and the cargo being transferred carefully on to the pier of the busy harbour consisted of travel chests full of gifts, weapons, books and precious clothes, and of two princes with their entire entourage of advisers, armed guards, servants and dignitaries. The commander of the ships, Don Juan of Austria, had just defeated the Ottoman fleet in the celebrated Battle of Lepanto; he now oversaw a gentler, peaceful mission. One of the passengers under his care was by all accounts a rather severe young man, who was on his way home from Philip II’s court in Madrid, where he had been sent by his parents to spend his formative years. He was Prince Rudolf of Habsburg (1552–1612), soon to become Holy Roman Emperor.
Rudolf had been sent to his uncle’s court at the age of eleven, together with his brother, Ernst, one year his junior. His mother, Maria of Spain (the daughter of Charles V), who was also his aunt once removed, had insisted on his going there, in order to take the boy away from the corrupting influence of the Protestant faction at the Viennese court. She was an ardent Catholic, keen on separating the precocious Rudolf from his father, Emperor Maximilian, whose sympathies for the Protestant cause made him unreliable in her eyes, suspicions reinforced by his interest in science and patronage of scholars. Maximilian supported the printing of many books and gave stipends to astronomers and others engaged in the natural sciences, while his diplomats were under instruction to bring him specimens of unknown plants from their postings in foreign countries. It was through Maximilian’s ambassador in Turkey, Ghislain de Busbecq, that the first tulips were brought to Europe in 1562, as well as other plants, which were planted in the emperor’s gardens in Vienna and Prague. Busbecq, himself a keen amateur scholar and antiquarian, was to become Rudolf’s teacher.
These were the influences from which Maria had sought to shield her son. There was no love lost between her and her husband, and the tension between them was mirrored by the constant feuding of papist and Protestant sympathizers at the Vienna court. To have her sons travel to her own country, to Spain, and into her brother’s sphere, was a personal triumph for Maria.
Though a staunch Catholic, Philip II was nothing like the religious fanatic of popular myth but rather a worldly king and a skilful politician who did much to open Spain up to new artistic and intellectual movements. The legacy of madness in his family, presumably a result of centuries of inbreeding also evident in the famously protruding Habsburg chin, was to haunt him as well as his nephew Rudolf. Philip’s grandmother, Joanna the Mad, had died insane and he himself was given to bouts of melancholy during which he would not receive even his closest advisers.2 This curse of insanity within the family produced one of the great tragedies of Philip’s life, an episode that was seized by Romantic souls like Schiller and Verdi, who reshaped it in their own image.
Don Carlos, the king’s only surviving son, was being groomed for government and was due to be sent to cut his teeth in Flanders. A usually gentle and intelligent young man, he had always been beset by episodes of rage, and even by the standards of the time his cruelty to animals caused some concern at court. Misshapen from birth, a hunchback with legs of unequal length and an asymmetrical face, he had difficulties speaking properly and had what was perceived as an unhealthy attachment to the queen, his stepmother, for whom he bought expensive jewels and other presents more suited to a mistress than a mother. When the State Council decided not to send him to Flanders after he had ridden a horse to death, Don Carlos became enraged. He threatened, or, according to some accounts actually tried, to kill the Duke of Alba, the Governor of Flanders, and later threatened to murder his father. He wrote letters to various grandees asking for their support against the king and rapidly became a political liability.
On midnight of 18 January 1567, after consulting with his council, Philip donned his harness and helmet and went to his son’s rooms accompanied by a handful of reliable noblemen. They entered silently and seized all weapons and heavy objects in the room. The prince woke up and asked into the darkness, ‘Who is it?’ to which he received the reply, ‘The Council of State.’ ‘Has Your Majesty come to kill me?’ the prince inquired, now fully awake, but was reassured that he was safe. The windows of his room were nailed shut and Philip left his stunned son telling him that he would treat him as a father ought but as a king should. Don Carlos remained a prisoner in his own room, which drove him to distraction. He tried to commit suicide by starving himself to death, swallowing a ring in the belief that diamonds are poisonous, and by putting ice into his bed. Eventually he succeeded. He died on 24 July 1568. The king himself was reported to be terribly shaken by the episode and after Carlos’s death he was said to have wept for three days and nights. It is possible that he wept not so much for his son, to whom he had not been as close as to some of his daughters, but for the future of his realm.
Close personal relations generally played an important part in Philip’s life. He had had several mistresses and it was on his initiative that women were allowed to act on stage in Madrid. After two political marriages, to María of Portugal and Mary Tudor, both of whom did not live long, he found companionship in his union with Elizabeth of Valois, and true and deep affection in his marriage to his niece, Anna of Austria. In later life, Philip was a devoted husband known to behave in distinctly unregal fashion. When Elizabeth was in labour in 1566, the king insisted on being present. ‘During the night of birth-pains and the birth itself, he never left off grasping one of her hands, comforting her and encouraging her the best that he knew or could,’3 the French ambassador reported with obvious surprise.
It is important to emphasize this aspect of Philip’s character in order to understand the environment in which the young Rudolf found himself. The king was very fond of his nephews and regarded the young princes as possible successors to his throne, as the suitability of his own son, Don Carlos, was already doubtful. Rudolf especially delighted the king, as the boy took a deep interest in his abiding passion: the building of a great collection and of several palaces. These palaces were given the king’s attention in every detail. In the accounts and plans for their building and upkeep there are frequent notes in the margins by the king’s own inelegant hand, making sure that the plants are watered properly, the gardeners trustworthy (‘men who will not steal the birds’ nests or the eggs’), and the vegetation chosen with the greatest care and planted at exactly the right time.
The palace that was to express his vision most perfectly was the monastery of San Lorenzo near the village of Escorial, part royal residence and part ecclesiastical complex, and designed to embody the unity and hierarchy of government, learning and faith. It was a theatro totale, part monastery and royal residence, part hospital and university, a microcosm of the Christian world. This was to be the setting for a great library, endowed with a royal donation to the monastery of some 4,000 books from the king’s own collection, for the relic collection and, in the residence itself, for Philip’s paintings.
The king’s relics were the most astounding accumulation of such items in Christendom. After the death of his beloved wife, Anna, in 1580, Philip had increasingly sought comfort in religion. He had seen the death of many people close to him, among them his sister, with whom he had a lifelong warm relationship, four wives and three children (though the greatest blow, the death of Catalina, his favourite daughter – a loss more shattering to him than either the death of Elizabeth of Valois or the sinking of the Armada – was still to come). Even before 1580, relics had fascinated him. He had been impressed by the reliquaries he had seen in Cologne and had sent out agents to bring him every relic they could find. At the end of his life the collection amounted to some 7,000 items, including ten whole bodies, 144 heads, 306 arms and legs, thousands of bones, body parts and secondary relics, as well as the usual fragments of the True Cross, the Crown of Thorns, etc., most of which were encased in rich golden settings.
In 1598, when he lay on his deathbed, Philip turned to his relics for relief from his agony. Racked by gout and fever, his terrible pain made it impossible to move him from his bed, even to change his sheets, for five weeks, and the once-magnificent monarch lay dying in his own excrement. His bedroom was filled with holy images and crucifixes and he sent for the arm of St Vincent and a knee of St Sebastian to help soothe his inflamed joints. They did not help him, and he died miserably. Four hundred years later another Spanish ruler, General Franco, was to end his life clutching the arm of St Theresa of Avila, which he had taken with him everywhere he went.
While turning to the heavens when close to death, Philip II was very susceptible to earthly beauty. His galleries boasted masterworks by Italians such as Titian and Frederigo Zuccaro, and Flemish masters such as Rogier van der Weyden and Jan Gossaert, hung side by side with German canvases, and those by his favourite painter, Hieronymous Bosch, whose bizarre visions appealed to Philip’s view of the afterlife and eternal damnation. An odd and striking absence from the galleries of the Escorial was the work of the Spanish painter El Greco, whose paintings the king had once admired, at least up until 1582, when he rejected one of them and thereafter ignored the artist altogether.
Back in Vienna, after years of intrigue and feuding at court, Maximilian had finally won the battle, and Rudolf and his brother, Ernst, could return from their Spanish exile. On their way from Genoa to the capital, the young princes and their entourage most probably visited the palace of their uncle the Archduke Ferdinand in Innsbruck. Rudolf would have made a point of staying here, for the Archduke of Styria possessed a famous collection of his own, one of the best north of the Alps. He would have found his uncle inspiring but strangely unfamiliar: unlike his brother the emperor, Archduke Ferdinand II had married beneath himself and was content with his first and only wife, happy to be in Innsbruck and to play no part in high politics. The collection was his great passion, especially his hall of armour, in which he assembled suits of armour worn by famous men, together with their portraits; a martial reliquary, which he called his ‘ehrliche gesellschaft’, or ‘honest company’. In addition to this, he also had an extensive cabinet of curiosities, comprising, as was the custom of the time, naturalia and artificialia. The collection was later to move to Ambras Castle, where parts of it can still be seen today.
At court in Vienna, Rudolf soon found himself dealing with intractable religious and national conflicts when he was effectively made envoy between his father and the nobles of the troublesome region of Bohemia. As a diplomatic compromise between them and their emperor, Rudolf was elected King of Bohemia, and crowned with the crown of St Wenceslas on 22 September 1575 in St Vitus’s Cathedral in Prague. His residence remained in Vienna.
The new king was twenty-four years old, and his Spanish education had given him little to prepare him for a job that required not so much a monarch as an accomplished diplomat, skilled above all in the art of negotiation. He had some considerable accomplishments, he spoke and wrote German, Spanish, French, Latin, Italian and even a little Czech. His knowledge of courtly life, military strategy and art were excellent, but his distant, Spanish manner did little to endear him to his new subjects. Trying to steer a course between Protestants and Catholics, he ended up pleasing neither. For the former he remained a Spaniard and a Papist; the latter, his mother among them, regarded his conciliatory stance with great suspicion.
It was not until he had fallen seriously ill and had almost been given up for dead that he decided to go his own way. Rudolf recovered and in 1583 moved his court to Prague and threw himself into solving his subjects’ practical concerns, such as the reorganization of the faltering mining industry and the stabilization of prices. In the more fundamental political questions, though, his style of rulership embodied the age-old Habsburg virtues of procrastination and avoiding conflict by delaying decisions whenever possible.
Rudolf was crowned emperor in 1575. As the affairs of state kept grinding on, with factional fights between Bohemian and Austrian nobles, Protestants and Catholics, he increasingly involved himself in extra-political activities. He especially devoted himself to adding to the already considerable collection of the Habsburg family, which his father had augmented greatly. As emperor, Rudolf had the means to indulge himself more freely than before. He invited artists and scientists to his court. The castle on the Hradčany Hill and the streets hugging the slopes around it were transformed into a colony of gold- and silversmiths, stone-cutters, watch- and instrument-makers, painters and engravers, astronomers and alchemists. Johannes Kepler worked there alongside the ageing painter Giuseppe Archimboldo, and Giordano Bruno found sanctuary here before going back to Italy (where he was burned at the stake). All of artistic and intellectual Europe was represented in these narrow lanes.
Inside the castle something altogether extraordinary was growing: a collection of such splendour, quality and sheer size that it became the envy of crowned heads throughout the continent. The artists working for the king were granted special dispensation and found almost ideal working conditions, provided they were content to see their patron’s cavernous halls gobble everything they could produce as well as the works of art and other objects Rudolf’s agents sent back to Prague from all over the world. In artistic terms, the collection was a black hole, sucking in everything that was precious and rare, never to release it.
A collection of mere natural curiosities seemed inadequate to Rudolf and those who thought like him. The ‘chamber of artifice’, the Kunstkammer, too, with its gems, coins and antiquities, was no longer able to contain this new feeling of boundless possibility, and the accompanying threat of disintegration of the limits of the known world that it brought with it. It required a more complex, more sophisticated response, and the sheer multiplicity of objects and ideas streaming in from abroad necessitated the search for a unifying idea or substance at the centre of it all. The ‘chamber of miracles’, the Wunderkammer, was the physical manifestation of this newly emerging mentality, which found its apotheosis in Rudolf’s palace and its myth in the abiding legend of the melancholy prince, not ruling, but ruled by dark, Saturnine powers.4
Illustrations of these cabinets of wonders display rooms transformed into images of the riches and the strangeness of the world. They were conceived as effusions of the cabinets they had evolved from: small, often richly decorated cupboards with doors, drawers and a multitude of compartments designed to hold cameos, coins, small statues, precious stones.
One of the most famous cabinets of its time was commissioned by the Augsburg merchant and collector Philip Hainhofer and later given to Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, one of several monarchs and aristocrats to visit the merchant’s patrician house. Gustavus Adolphus himself never saw his Kunstschrank at his Swedish palace; it was delivered there only after his death. His daughter, the remarkable Queen Christina, made it part of her own collection, though. Today it stands in the chancellor’s room at Uppsala University, emptied of the miracles it once contained.
Even without them it is an awe-inspiring work of ingenuity and craftsmanship. The objects in the drawers were arranged as an elaborate allegory to represent the animal, plant and mineral world, the four continents, and the range of human activities, and the front was adorned with hundreds of miniature paintings illustrating the triumph of Art and Science over Nature, and the primacy of Religion over all. Venus crowns the entire creation, but death is never out of sight, depicted in several vanitas scenes. The cabinet itself is simple in form despite the ornateness of the ideas underlying its construction. Two central doors on a massive pedestal open to reveal a variety of drawers and compartments fronted by cameos, columns and pilasters. On top of the entire piece is an arrangement of crystals, coral and shells out of which rises a coco-de-mer (or Seychelles nut) set in gold and ship-like in form, carried by an Atlas figure and supporting the statuette of Venus crouching and looking into an imaginary distance.
This outlandish piece of furniture was used, probably by Christina, as a dressing table. The Seychelles nut was not only one of the most valuable objects belonging to the cabinet (the only two islands producing them were not discovered by Europeans until 1768), but was also designed to hold a quart of wine and was thought to possess strong antidotal qualities, while coral was supposed to have the ability to ward off the evil eye. Inside the cabinet was a bezoar, also believed to be a powerful antidote to poison. Bezoars were highly popular and immensely expensive, the property of the very rich. Often set in gold and shaped like cannonballs, they are calcareous concretions formed in the stomachs of Capra aegagrus, a Persian goat. Initially extremely rare as their formation depended on the diet of their host, it was later possible to cultivate them like pearls inside furry oysters. Nothing was supposed to be as effective against poison as a bezoar, and no prince of great station would travel without at least one of them in his luggage. Other antidotes and aphrodisiacs contained in the cabinet included powerful and obscure substances such as a musk pouch, cups of lignum Guaiacum (a West Indian wood used for medical purposes) and a bowl and mug of terra sigillata (a fine clay thought to have magical properties).
Apart from mysterious substances and ancient coins and gems, the drawers also contained objects ‘for vexation’ such as a pair of gloves without an opening, a cup that one could not drink from and artificial fruit that could fool the hungry. There were anamorphoses, distorted pictures that could be viewed in proportion only when reflected in specially constructed mirrors, and mirrors that would distort the viewer’s face. A beautiful pair of portrait pictures, a man and a woman, turned into grinning skulls when turned upside down, thus reinforcing the message that all pleasures and experiences afforded by the Kunstschrank were nothing but transient whispers in God’s world to be used by the wise as insights into his wisdom and by the foolish as diversions from his laws. There were also four pictures of heads composed out of fruit and other matter, and, hidden among the crystals crowning the cabinet, an automaton re-enacting an episode from the tenth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which the hunter Cyparissus is transformed into a tree after shooting a stag. As if this was not enough to dazzle the curious, a virginal concealed in the upper compartment would play one of three tunes when the cabinet was opened, or it would spring into motion every full hour the internal clockwork struck. Those disinclined to leave the automaton to making all the music by itself could take out the virginal and play melodies of their own invention.
Hainhofer’s Kunstschrank was not just a container of the curious and the precious, it was also an encyclopaedia in objects, a programme of the world in microcosm, a theatrum memoriae, in which the individual parts illustrated their place in the great drama of God’s mind. Less a piece of furniture than a metaphysical manifesto, it spoke eloquently of a world view dominated by the ideas of metamorphosis and hidden meanings. Artificialia and naturalia were demonstrated to be two aspects of the same, just as life and death could be seen to change in front of the beholder’s eye. A hunter could be transformed into a tree just as a beautiful face could become a skull; ornaments were far from being pleasant only for the eye: they also served a deeper purpose by exerting healing powers and by functioning as allegories. The artist’s craft could deceive the eye with enamel fruit and silver beetles, just as what seemed like vegetables in loose arrangement could reveal a portrait – nothing is as it seems, but a hidden order underlies it all.
While the intricate chests from which these new cabinets derived their names were allegories of the natural world and of the principles at work in it, the collection that took their names from them followed a similar programme. An illustration (1622) of the Museum of Francesco Calceolari in Verona displays a scene that is in turns grotesque and highly organized and allows the observer to step through centuries into the museum itself and into the mind that created it.
Stuffed animals are dangling from the ceiling: a porcupine seems to pounce on the visitor, a small leopard, snakes, moonfish, various sharks, a severed, misshapen human head and a crocodile all silently menace the guest from the roof beams above. Below them, perching on a precipice formed by the top of the ornate shelving running round the room, are stuffed birds, among them a pelican, gulls and a penguin, as well as several animals, starfish and corals. The shelves themselves with their scrolling decoration are filled with shells, beakers and chalices and other precious containers, as well as various animal parts, such as the saw of a sawfish, antlers and snail houses. In the middle of the walls to either side are two statues set in niches, one of Atlas, the other of Minerva with full armour, helmet and shield. At the centre of the far wall, directly opposite the door, is a cabinet built into the wall, containing four rows of small compartments. Doric columns and a simple tympanum frame this inner sanctum. Two small obelisks and a mounted figure are standing on either side. A number of vases, other vessels and books are sorted near to the floor, and the shelves are intersected horizontally by a band of drawers containing cameos.
Calceolari’s collection was close to the ideal of a cabinet of art and miracles, combining beauty with strangeness, classical form with riotous excess, scholarship with sheer curiosity. It is a repository of all that is bizarre and exotic (the sharks and crocodiles, the deformed head), all that is venerable (the vases and cameos), and of great and secret knowledge (the books stored below the central ‘temple’). The statues and the structure on the middle wall demonstrate that there is order in this chaos, a mind pervading this precocious flourishing of strange forms: Atlas, the carrier of the world, symbolizes the very ambition of the collection to be a microcosm of everything knowable, everything he is supporting on his shoulder, while Minerva, goddess of wisdom, vouches for the fact that the intellect can and will rule over even those alien things and lands that the human mind is only just beginning to grasp. The wealth of the universe and the mind controlling it come together in the central temple and its resonances of ancient knowledge and harmony: the architecture of ancient Greece, and the obelisks, reminding the educated visitor of Egypt, an even more ancient civilization believed to have been in possession of the key to the wisdom of Hermetic philosophy, named after Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary Egyptian priest and teacher of Moses. Here scientific inquiry and the search for truth in alchemy and mysticism went hand in hand. What the scientific method, still in its infancy, could yield was to be used as material for an inquiry into the deeper nature of the universe, into the mind of God.
If Rudolf’s collection was such a microcosm, it was so on an infinitely more ambitious scale. In order to contain the ever-growing possessions, the castle was expanded and transformed into a building site for much of his reign. Before taking up residence in Prague the emperor had already ordered the renovation of the living quarters, and then the construction of a summer palace, which he held to be more in keeping with his courtly life. In 1589, the castle was extended by the Gangbau, a two-storey gallery set against the old fortifications. New stables and a second large gallery, the Spanish Gallery, were also constructed, linked to the castle by the Gangbau. Meanwhile, in 1600, the emperor had taken up a new residence, a palazzo on Hradčany Square, which he had confiscated from Prince Lobkowitz. When it became evident that even this would not be sufficient to contain the collections, yet another building was started, containing stables and more galleries, most importantly, three vaulted rooms or Gewölbe. Here the emperor finally established his Kunstkammer, the main home of his treasures.
This was not a collection assembled for display. Some of its best and most spectacular pieces were locked up in cupboards and hidden from view by gilt leather boxes. The Kunstkammer was a very private universe, containing, among other precious things, a large gallery of paintings, drawings and prints; several Seychelles nuts; ivories and works in gold and silver; carved rhinoceros horns; numerous cups and beakers in precious stone and rock crystal as well as in glass; landscapes inlaid in agate and jasper; glass engraved with great personages and allegorical scenes; medals; exotic arms and armour, among them Japanese and Arabic pieces; works in wax; Islamic art and Mughal miniatures; Chinese porcelain; games and puzzles; bezoars and other items thought to possess magical qualities; globes, sextants, telescopes, compasses, planetaria, astronomical compendia and sundials, clocks, automata and other mechanical devices; books on architecture, astronomy and astrology; printed music and musical instruments that kept coming in from all corners of the Habsburg empire, and filling up every last corner and every inch of free space in the depth of Rudolf’s vaults.
While he was an avid collector of antiquities, his great love in the arts was Mannerism, a style which favoured sophisticated posture and allegory over natural representation (Hainhofer’s Kunstschrank is a Mannerist masterwork). His commissions to artists like Hans von Aachen, Bartholomäus Spranger and Giuseppe Archimboldo often reflect not only his taste in art, but also his legendary fondness for the pleasures of the flesh. Religious contemporaries condemned many of his paintings as immoral: Cupid and Psyche, Neptune and Caenis, Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, Mars and Venus, Apollo and Venus, Satyrs and Nymphs, Bacchus, Ceres and Cupid, The Rape of the Sabine Women, The Rape of Ganymede, Two Satyrs and a Nymph, The Suicide of Lucretia, Venus and Adonis, Hercules and Omphale, Leda and the Swan (the latter attempting to make anatomic sense of legend especially energetically and in many versions) – all good humanistic excuses for titillation and very close encounters.
Rudolf reflected his predilections for erotic themes in his private life. While obstinately refusing to make the advantageous marriage his court was pressing for on account of his belief that there were no women noble enough to be worthy of him (both the Infanta Isabella of Spain, the daughter of Philip II, and Maria de’ Medici eventually despaired of his procrastination and accepted other suitors), his sexual exploits were famous, and according to rumour he did actually marry his mistress of long standing, Katharina Strada, in a secret ceremony. He had various illegitimate children from these relationships, but none of them rose to any distinction. Katharina alone bore Rudolf six children, three boys and three girls. Of the latter, one, Carolina of Austria, was recognized by him and was able to marry well. Two others were tucked away in nunneries. Two of his three sons died early, one in childhood and one in battle. The third, Rudolf’s beloved Don Juan of Austria, had inherited the Habsburg madness. His sexual excesses, megalomania and Caesarist illusions made him a liability and, despite Rudolf’s plans to give him a high office, he was eventually exiled to the imposing Krumlov Castle in southern Bohemia, where he killed a young girl and disfigured her corpse with his hunting knife. It cannot have been lost on Rudolf that he had been forced to act exactly like his uncle Philip had had to with his own son Don Carlos.
While Bartholomäus Spranger and Hans von Aachen were chief purveyors of Mannerist depictions of dubious mythological scenes and of portraits glorifying Rudolf in various heroic poses, the painter Archimboldo had a special place both at court and in the collection. During his stay at Prague, the Venetian artist was in charge not only of a large workshop turning out the grotesque images that made him famous, but he also planned and oversaw large-scale spectacles and celebrations drawing on the entire repertoire of courtly life: lavish banquets, large allegorical processions, painted backdrops, triumphal arches, live animals and fireworks. The emperor was always at the centre of the iconography, cast as a great ruler in the tradition of the Caesars and the great rulers of the Holy Roman Empire.
Archimboldo’s paintings have survived, and are a testament to the spirit and the programme of Mannerism. The famous composite heads, symbolizing the four seasons or the four elements by taking objects associated with them and assembling them into an arrangement resembling a portrait, are more than just witty virtuoso pieces. They, too, state that nothing is as it appears, that changing perspectives can transform the random into the purposeful, the unknown into the familiar, a face into a bowl of fruit, that art could be nature and nature art. As in Hainhofer’s Kunstschrank, the eye was easily deceived while the subtle and occult harmony of the universe stood revealed by the artist’s hand. The artist’s poetic insight bared the disegno interno underlying the divine creation, and this divinity itself was revealed to be an artist. The grotesque and the totality of excess were only the flipside of the simplicity of the eternal truth. The items in Rudolf’s Kunstkammer bore witness to this conviction: somewhere in their staggering multiplicity and diversity lay hidden that kernel of eternal truth which the alchemists called the Philosopher’s Stone. To find it would be to grasp the beating heart of creation itself. The collection itself became an instrument: the greatest alchemistic laboratory the world had ever seen.
For all the dazzling exoticism of the collection, Rudolf was no naïve lover of everything strange. He insisted that the bodies of birds of paradise (thought to be forever airborne as most specimens reached Europe without feet), be drawn and painted with legs, so that the fiction around the object was contrasted with the imagined reality. This scientific bent, though, did not prevent him from collecting magical objects, such as the Paracelsian zenexton, an amulet enclosed by a bejewelled gold case and containing a cake made of toads, virginal menstrual blood, white arsenic, orpiment, dittany, roots, pearls, coral and Eastern emeralds, the recipe for which appeared under imperial privilege in Basilica chymica (1609).
Rudolf was especially proud of his unicorns’ horns, mandrakes and dragons, which so much impressed the court physician de Broodt that he made a drawing of one of them, adding ‘this is the figure of a Dragon which the Emperor Rudolf II has; dried it is this exact size, where it is preserved’. The relics held in the vaults were characteristically not Christian but classical in orientation and included nails from Noah’s ark, and the jaw of one of the sirens that Odysseus had encountered.
Among the books in Rudolf’s library, symbolic knowledge figured prominently in works on Egyptian hieroglyphs, alchemical, magical and Rosicrucian tracts and other works investigating symbols, magical seals and emblems. It appears that the emperor was well read in this neo-Platonist literature. Other magical texts and books by Jewish Talmudic and cabbalistic scholars added to the library. Rudolf’s interest in the magical arts went further than just inviting its practitioners to his court, for he himself was actively involved. In 1609, the Tuscan ambassador sniffed disdainfully, ‘for he himself tries alchemical experiments and he himself is busily engaged in making clocks, which is against the decorum of a prince. He has transferred his seat from the imperial throne to the workshop stool’.5
Attracted by the emperor’s reputation, the English occult scholar John Dee arrived in Prague in 1584. He had been adviser and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, had had an influential post at court and was in a good position to pursue his main ambition: to regain the perfect, primeval knowledge that Adam had had, which humankind had lost with the fall, and thus to understand the cryptic correspondences between all things and the universal core of truth contained in them. His hopes of achieving this goal were bound up in a mystic emblem, the Monas hieroglyphica, designed to elevate spirits through meditation of its mystical, geometrical and theological connotations. He quickly gained an audience with Rudolf, which lasted for a full hour. Dee outlined his method of gaining arcane knowledge and also told him, according to his own handwritten protocols:
It pleased God to send me his Light; and his holy Angels, for these two years and a half, have used to inform me: yea, they have brought me a Stone of that value that no earthly Kingdom is of that worthiness as to be compared to the vertue and dignity thereof, etc.
The Angel of the Lord hath appeared to me, and rebuketh you for your sins. If you will hear me, and believe me, you shall Triumph: if you will not hear me, The Lord, the God that made Heaven and Hearth, putteth his foot against your breast, and will throw you headlong down from your seat.
Moreover, the Lord hath made his covenant with me … If you will forsake your wickednesse, and turn unto him, your Seat shall be the greatest that ever was: and the Devil shall become your prisoner: Which Devil, I did conjecture, to be the Great Turk. This my Comission, is from God.6
The emperor was horrified by this message, and sceptical about the messenger, about the Great Turk and Dee’s more personal motives for seeking to take charge of Rudolf’s salvation. Dee was never again allowed to appear in front of the emperor and was banned from the Habsburg territories two years later.
As an intellectual approach to the mysteries of the universe, alchemy and magic were seen to be right at the cutting edge of a scientific method which had as yet no way of distinguishing between phenomena such as magnetism and other presumed ‘sympathies’ between substances, between the existence of iguanas and sea snakes already discovered and the lore of dragons that might still be awaiting discovery in lands as yet unreached. Natural magic, the pursuit of the prisca theologica, the first knowledge revealed to Adam and handed down in a hermetic tradition to Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras and later magi, assumed that the key to the understanding of the world lay in deciphering the alphabet in which the universe was written at its creation. There are strong echoes of this in our modern preoccupation with the genetic code and the creative, indeed demiurgical, possibilities raised in understanding and controlling it. It is in itself no less strange than the assumption that all elements were constructed according to an occult ‘genetic’ code, and that unravelling and changing it would allow initiates to change mud into gold.
To the alchemists and the magicians of the sixteenth century, the dividing line between the natural and the occult was simply that natural phenomena were those that occurred most of the time, according to the ‘habits of nature’, and manifestly to the senses. Occult phenomena were those that differed from the norm, or those that were hidden from sensory perception. In accordance with this conception, gravity, magnetism and acoustic resonance were all counted among the occult phenomena, together with the pneuma, the spirit realm governing the object world, and with the symbols presumed capable of unlocking its secrets. In investigating these, the alchemists were scientists.7
The central notion in the alchemical conception of the world was the idea of pneuma or spiritus mundi, the invisible fluid medium world spirit that linked all elements and entities in the universe whose existence was accepted by scientists and thinkers as different from one another as the author of the Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton, who described it as a ‘most subtle vapour, which is expressed from the Blood and the instrument of the Soul, to perform all his Actions, a common type of medium, betwixt the Body and the soule,’8 and Isaac Newton, who assumed the existence of an aether linking the sublunar realm to the cosmos. The spiritus mundi was everywhere, and it is indeed far from vanished from contemporary thinking. It has survived, though transformed, in the political and philosophical traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the shape of Hegel’s Weltgeist, the World Spirit realizing itself in history through the dialectic process; an idea taken up and developed not only by Marx, but also by other thinkers in the Hegelian tradition. Nationalism, the idea that the essence or destiny of a nation can be realized only if uncontaminated by foreign influences and allowed to flourish, is one aspect of Hegel’s national spirits through which the World Spirit, the destiny of history, works its mysteries.
Collecting as a philosophical project, as an attempt to make sense of the multiplicity and chaos of the world, and perhaps even to find in it a hidden meaning, has also survived to our day, and we find echoes of Rudolf’s elaborate alchemy in every attempt to capture the wonder and magnitude of everything around in the realm of personal possession. A record collector seeking the essence of genius in hundreds of recordings of the same concert or of the same artist continues this tradition in the same way as someone trying to capture beauty itself in everything that is ‘rich and strange’9 – a phrase, incidentally, from Rudolf’s day. This practical alchemy is at work whenever a collection reaches beyond appreciating objects and becomes a quest for meaning, for the heart of the matter, a hope to be able to see a grammar if only enough words and phrases are brought together.
Rudolf’s Mannerist universe complemented the course taken by Ulisse Aldrovandi and his fellow naturalists. And while, in the age-old opposition of all philosophy, the latter cast himself as a new Aristotle, the mystical orientation of Mannerists followed Platonic ideas. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola summed up this project in one phrase: ‘Nam si homo est parvus mundus, utrique mundus est magnus homo’10 (‘For as man is a small world, the world, by turns, is a large man’).
Both the mystical and the critical method of collecting were responses to the challenge of recent discoveries and new horizons. The analytical, Aristotelian rhetoric of the high Renaissance seemed to provide the answer to some, while others found it wanting. They turned to the traditions of Hermetic knowledge promising the single, occult key to a multiplicity of problems. Among the opponents of such neo-Platonist collections, Sir Francis Bacon was particularly trenchant in his critique of the mystical hotchpotch of ideas and correspondences:
There is such a multitude and host as it were of particular objects, and lying so widely dispersed, as to distract and confuse the understanding; and we can therefore hope for no advantage from its skirmishing, and quick movements and incursions, unless we put its forces in due order and array by means of proper, and well arranged, and as it were living tables of discovery of these matters which are the subject of investigation, and the mind then apply itself to the ready prepared and digested aid which such tables afford.
When we have thus properly and regularly placed before the eyes a collection of particulars we must not immediately proceed to the investigation and discovery of new particulars or effects, or, at least, if we do so, must not rest satisfied therewith.11
Bacon was on the winning side. The scientists and philosophers, the pan-sophists, eirenists, Hermetists, neo-Stoics and neo-Platonists, Paracelseans and chiliasts were soon dismissed when rationalism began to provide more powerful and verifiable answers to many of the problems that had been exercising European thinkers. Rudolf’s policies of balance and indecision, later distorted by paranoid wilfulness, were arguably an illustration of the powerlessness of these ideas to provide solutions to problems in the prosaic realm of human lives. For a brief period, however, the return to neo-Platonism and the search for the great idea seemed to contain the answer that found its expression in the most splendid collection of the period. Only in the twentieth century would the search for the Big Idea be taken up again, and again with catastrophic results.
As his collections, forever unable to satisfy his appetite, grew to legendary size, Rudolf the politician became an increasingly embattled and disputed figure. He had always been a complex man, oscillating between conscientious government and obsessive pursuit of his ideas, great moderation and phenomenal excess, between kindness and fits of rage, approachability and total withdrawal, generosity and paranoia.
During the later stages of his life conjecture and rumour abounded in the streets of Prague and at the courts of Europe as to the contents of the famous Kunstkammer, and about its owner’s state of mind. As his passion had become known, princes had made it a point of honour, and of policy, to search their own palaces for the finest pieces to be sent to Rudolf. The ambassador from the Duke of Savoy, Carlo Francesco Manfredi, reported with delight that Rudolf had spent ‘two and a half hours sitting motionless, looking at the painting of fruit and fish markets sent by Your Highness’.12 The ambassador was not always so lucky with the emperor’s changeable moods. During his second visit, he was made to wait a full nine months before being granted an audience and being allowed to present his gifts of friendship: ‘an Indian dagger’, a rhinoceros horn encrusted with rubies, three bezoars, ‘a large silver ship that contained inside it half of an Indian nut, larger than a man’s head’, and a crown. This time, however, the bearer of gifts was treated to a tour around the collections, which was conducted by two servants (the emperor himself only showed round other crowned heads). He was especially impressed by a polished stone ‘and in the vein of the stone “Christ” was written by nature’s hand in big letters’, he reported. Nature had spoken to the emperor through the stone.
Rudolf’s collection and his widely reported ‘ailment of melancholy’ increasingly interfered with the business of state, sometimes making it well nigh impossible. Around the change of the century, just after the death of his uncle Philip II in 1598, a crisis occurred. The emperor’s mood swings worsened. When he heard that Isabella of Spain, tired by twenty years of fruitless negotiations, had decided to marry one of his brothers, he exploded in a fit of rage. Soon afterwards he dismissed two of his most trusted administrators, Wolf Rumpf and Paulus Sixt von Troutson. He also seems to have attempted committing suicide with curtain cords and splinters of glass. The emperor was confused and distrustful to the point of paranoia, refused to see petitioners, ministers and ambassadors, and relied for everything on a small group of lackeys and minor aristocrats of dubious stature who effectively constituted his government and held in their hands enormous power. Even the once highly trusted Spanish ambassador San Clemente, Rudolf’s link to the court of his childhood and youth, could not gain an audience and was unable to catch a glimpse of the emperor for two years.
By 1600, Rudolf was a changed man and it was commonly believed that he had been bewitched by his enemies, but he could still impress foreign emissaries with his dignity, intellect and charm. The Venetian envoy Soranzo met the emperor in 1607. Rudolf, he said, was
… rather small in figure, of quite pleasing stature and relatively quick movements. His pale face, nobly formed forehead, fine wavy hair and beard and large eyes looking around with a certain forbearance, made a deep impression on all who met him. The Habsburg family likeness was evident in their largish lips which curled towards the right. There was nothing haughty in his comportment: he behaved rather shyly, avoided all noisy society and took no part in the usual amusements; jokes pleased him not, and only rarely was he seen to laugh.13
Despite being able to summon his old qualities at times, Rudolf was increasingly beleaguered by religious and political problems, and his days as an even remotely effective ruler were now numbered. His politics had long been hostage to his indecision and to the hatred he felt for Matthias, his ambitious brother who had forged strong alliances with Protestant and Hungarian nobles. Soon, brother stood against brother, and Matthias swiftly consolidated his advantage by marching into Prague. In an effort to avert his downfall Rudolf, no longer in command of the political situation and manipulated by his entourage, put his fate in the hands of his 23-year-old nephew, Leopold, who was charged with opposing Matthias. Prague was in a state of civil war, with plundering troops ravaging the Old Town and the Jewish Quarter. At the critical moment, when Matthias approached with his own forces, Leopold’s mercenaries abandoned the town and left Rudolf to see his brother crowned King of Bohemia, while he himself was granted an annuity and the ceremonial title of emperor. Having lost all power, he finally had the solitude he craved. But this last period of his life lasted for less than two years, and he died on 20 January 1612. His grand experiment of collecting as practical alchemy had come to an end once and for all.
