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1 the Power of Nature and the Agency of Art the Unicorn Cup of Jan Vermeyen

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1 the Power of Nature and the Agency of Art the Unicorn Cup of Jan Vermeyen 1 The Power of Nature and the Agency of Art The Unicorn Cup of Jan Vermeyen Andrew Morrall Recent scholarship has revealed the sixteenth-century Kunst-und-Wunderkammer to be a world pulsating with objects, natural and manmade, whose exotic materials and strangeness of forms on the one hand, and technical virtuosities and inventiveness of design on the other, collectively proposed mute lessons and encouraged active reflec- tions in fields well beyond the aesthetic, including the various branches of natural philosophy, geography, ethnography, history, and ethics. Behind the fascination with natural materials, especially the newly discovered fauna of exotic lands and their by- products – shells, horns, bezoar stones, feathers – or with rare gemstones and metals lay a belief in matter as an active, living agent in the world, possessed of intrinsic powers and virtues. The following article investigates a category of artwork that was fashioned from such exotic natural materials, made primarily for the Kunstkammer. The focus will be upon the unicorn horn, a material regarded by contemporaries as the most precious of all such natural objects and deemed so rare and so powerful as to be able to significantly affect its ambient environment. More than any other ani- mal, largely because of its obscure origins and the consequent mystique, prestige and enormous financial worth of its only concretely known part, the horn, the unicorn was the object of intense scrutiny and study. Numerous dedicated published accounts drew upon a range of ancient and medieval literature and a wealth of shared human- ist speculation and debate on the subject. Andrea Bacci, a Florentine physician and man of letters, who wrote such a treatise in 1573 for Francesco, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was not exaggerating when he called the unicorn the ‘epitome of Nature’s secrets’ and claimed that no previous age had displayed such a fascination with this rare animal as did his own epoch.1 The following article seeks to explain the sources of the unicorn horn’s power as it was understood at a particular historical moment and under particular cultural conditions – between about 1550 and 1650 – and how that power was consciously harnessed and manipulated by the craftsmen who fashioned them: the ‘power of nature and the agency of art’ of the title.2 Finally, it will suggest how habits of study, encouraged and in a sense structured by the categories of collect- ing fostered by the Kunstkammer – epitomized in Bacci’s search for ‘Nature’s secrets’ quoted above – led to the gradual dismantling of the centuries-old body of knowledge that surrounded this fabled creature.3 The particular object of scrutiny in this article is a goblet made from unicorn horn, today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Figure 1.1).4 Rudolf Distelberger convinc- ingly attributed the cup to Jan Vermeyen (before 1559–1608), the most important and gifted goldsmith to work for Rudolf II. Born in Brussels and trained in Antwerp, the son of the painter Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen, he was in Frankfurt in 1589 where already 18 The Power of Nature and the Agency of Art Figure 1.1 Jan Vermeyen and Ottavio Miseroni, Unicorn Horn Cup, narwhal horn, diamonds, rubies, gold and enamel work. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Kunstkammer, inv. no. KK 1113. by 1596 he was in contact with the Emperor. On 1 October 1597 he was taken on as Kammergoldschmied with a monthly salary of 10 gulden. The high worth Rudolf accorded him is shown by the fact that Rudolf gave him an additional 100 gulden per year by November and in 1602 doubled his salary again. Though none of his surviv- ing works are signed, the key work through which his style is known is the imperial crown of Rudolf II, completed in 1602. On the basis of comparison with the crown, Distelberger dated the cup to between 1600 and 1605.5 The unicorn horn is set in a mount made up of a variety of extremely expensive materials: refined gold and enamel work set with rubies and diamonds and surmounted by a double cameo carved in agate. This latter is attributed to the lapidary artist, Ottavio Miseroni (1567–1624), another highly esteemed craftsman of Rudolf’s court, with whom Vermeyen collaborated on a number of works. 6 From at least 1619, the date of the earliest surviving documentary reference, the unicorn cup was kept within the imperial treasury.7 This was an especial repository of the Kunstkammer that housed the most costly of Emperor Rudolf’s possessions, including the imperial insignia: the crown, the orb, the apple and scepter, all of which Andrew Morrall 19 share a certain stylistic affinity with the unicorn goblet. A 1605 report of the collection by the Duke of Savoy’s ambassador, Carlo Francesco Manfredi, recorded these impe- rial objects and marked out as the two most valuable and inalienable possessions of the entire Habsburg collection a large bowl, carved from agate, believed to have belonged to the Emperor Constantine, whose natural veining spelt out the word ‘Xristo’ in nature’s hand, and an extraordinary unicorn horn, six feet in length, exhibited on a simple mount but otherwise unadorned.8 As is clear from Manfredi’s awed report, possession of such extraordinarily rare natural creations, in which God’s hand was palpable, was an important source of political agency. For the Habsburg emperors, the ownership and guardianship of these precious rarities reinforced their claim to worldly imperium as a divinely ordained right. The source of the unicorn horn’s quasi-divine aura lay in a tradition going back at least to the Greek Physiologus, compiled between the second and fifth centuries CE, and known continuously throughout the medieval and Renaissance period.9 This text was the first to invest the unicorn with Christological associations and was the source of various stories associated with the unicorn later taken up in medieval literature and art: the creature’s virtues of strength and gentleness, which were explicitly equated with Christ; the belief that the unicorn could be tamed only by sitting in the lap of a virgin; as well as the Hunt for this rare and beautiful beast, which came to symbol- ize Christ’s passion. Such associations endowed the unicorn horn with both a noble and a sacred character, its numinous qualities appropriate for the insignia of office, such as the staff of bishops or the scepters of emperors.10 This long-standing and all- pervasive symbolic understanding arose in part from the Physiologus’s account of the following myth: In the places where [the unicorn] dwells there is a great lake, and to this lake all beasts resort to drink. But before they assemble themselves, there comes the snake, and casts her poison on the water. And the beasts when they observe the poison dare not drink, but stand aside and wait for the Unicorn. He arrives and goes straight into the lake, and marks the sign of the Cross with his horn; and there- upon the poison becomes harmless, and all those beasts drink.11 In the light of this myth, the unicorn, supreme among animals, stood symbolically as an exemplar of the qualities of responsible rulership and its horn, therefore, as an appropriate possession of princes. Management of such rare specimens thus assumed important social and political overtones. Such wonders contained in the Prague Kunstkammer of the Emperor Rudolf II were displayed only very sparingly to high- ranking visitors such as Manfredi, for the wondrous was intertwined with secrecy, and secrecy was the province of princes. Besides the horn itself, the other constituent parts of Vermeyen’s unicorn cup also spoke to kingly virtues. The diamonds and rubies imparted by their own rarity, quality and sheer monetary value a dignity that matched the uniqueness of the unicorn they adorned. In the 1617 inventory, the cup was valued at 4,500 gulden. Collectively, the value of the gold enamel work and precious stones was established as 2,809 gulden, making the horn the most expensive element at 1,691 gulden.12 The importance Rudolf accorded the choice of jewels for such works and the degree of thought that went into their design can be seen in the parallel efforts he took to 20 The Power of Nature and the Agency of Art acquire the stones for Vermeyen’s imperial crown. In 1601, under a seal of secrecy, he undertook a search across Europe for suitable diamonds. The imperial Ambassador Johann van Khevenhueller in Spain had lead casts of rough diamonds made and sent with their weight and price back to Prague. The largest stone that appears in the cor- respondence stood at 186 carats. The prices went into the tens of thousands of ducats. In the same year Rudolf sent the gem polisher and jeweler David von Brussel to Rome where he bought a large diamond from the Jesuits for 30,000 ducats.13 In addition to their monetary worth, these gemstones possessed intrinsic virtues which could endow their owners with, or strengthen, particular attributes of char- acter. Such beliefs were handed down within the lapidary tradition inherited from the Middle Ages.14 Standing at the apex of a well-established hierarchy of stones, the diamond, which derived its name from the Greek adamas (‘unvanquished’), possessed above all the quality of insuperable hardness. It was considered the jewel of rulers and was thought to endow the wearer with superior strength, fortitude and courage.15 The ruby, too, possessed royal virtues. It was specifically coupled with the unicorn horn in medieval German literature. In the twelfth-century Alexanderlied by Lamprecht ‘der Pfaffe’, for example, Queen Candace presents Alexander with a unicorn valued not so much for itself as for the precious stone growing at the base of its horn: I had from the this rich queen A beast of proud and noble mien That bears in his brow the ruby-stone.16 Renaissance lapidary writers ascribed similar virtues to the agate, of which the cam- eos of the cup’s finial are made, specifically strength and prudence.17 The cameos are elaborately carved on one side with two helmeted heads, one male, one female, superimposed in classical profile (Figure 1.2(a)); the other is a profile bust of a tumbling-haired, loosely clothed female (Figure 1.2(b)).
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