Collaborative Craftsmanship and Chimeric Creation in Seventeenth-Century Antwerp Art Cabinets1

CHAPTER 10 Collaborative Craftsmanship and Chimeric Creation in Seventeenth-Century Antwerp Art Cabinets1 Nadia Baadj In 1565 Samuel Quiccheberg, the Antwerp-born physician and curator of the Munich Kunstkammer, published the Inscriptiones vel Tituli Theatri Amplissimi (Inscriptions or Titles of the Most Ample Theatre), a treatise and guide for princely collectors.2 In it, he devotes significant attention to the wide variety of cabinets, caskets, chests, and boxes in the ducal collection. He illuminates the broad range of materials and formats represented in cabinets that featured the virtuoso craftsmanship of woodworkers, blacksmiths, braziers, stoneworkers, embroiderers, glassblowers, turners, and sculptors.3 In addition to discussing the practical functions and strategic design features of containers tailored to encase specific objects, Quiccheberg (1529–1567) also emphasizes their value as objects worthy of study and contemplation. His vivid descriptions of cabinets suggest that, like early modern collections, they functioned as practical sites for generating knowledge about art, materials, and technology. Quiccheberg’s notion of the cabinet as a dynamic site for knowledge production was later taken up elsewhere in southern Germany. In the first three decades of the 1600s, the Augsburg merchant and diplomat Philipp Hainhofer (1578–1647) spearheaded the design and manufacture of customized luxury cabinets that incorporated exquisite craftsmanship, precious objects, and naturalia and mirrored, on a miniature scale, the composition and organization 1 This chapter is part of ongoing research for a larger project on early modern Netherlandish cabinets. I wish to thank Ellen Konowitz for organizing the original Historians of Netherlandish Art conference panel out of which this text grew. I am also grateful to the editors and the other contributors to this volume who provided insightful comments and feedback on earlier drafts. 2 For an English translation and critical introduction to Quiccheberg’s text, see Meadow M.A. – Robertson B., The First Treatise on Museums: Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones, 1565 (Los Angeles, CA: 2013). Another thoughtful analysis of Quiccheberg’s conception of the Kunstkammer can be found in Pilaski K.A., The Munich Kunstkammer: Art, Nature, and the Representation of Knowledge in Courtly Contexts (Tübingen: 2013), esp. chapter 2. 3 Meadow – Robertson, The First Treatise 80, 89–90. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/97890043�5760_0�� Collaborative Craftsmanship and Chimeric Creation 271 of princely Kunstkammern, such as those in Munich, Prague, and Vienna.4 The success of Hainhofer’s so-called Schreibtische was short-lived, however, due to contracting demand for these opulent, esoteric objects intended for the noble elite and to the decreased production in Augsburg of all types of cabinets following the Thirty Years’ War.5 Ultimately, it was not in southern Germany, but in Quiccheberg’s native Antwerp that the art cabinet reached its greatest potential as both a catalyst for artistic, material, and technical knowledge intended for a wide range of audiences and as a composite object that embodied multiple different spaces and their respective functions (collection, art gallery, and laboratory). By the end of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, a novel kind of multi-authored, multimedia cabinet containing small oil paintings emerged as one of Antwerp’s signature art forms and export goods, propelling the city to become the leading centre for cabinet production in Europe [Fig. 10.1].6 Unlike Hainhofer’s custom-made cabinets for the nobility, which were intended pri- marily as diplomatic gifts, most Antwerp art cabinets were produced without a specific patron or client in mind and instead were delivered to art dealers undecorated so that materials and cost could be adapted to different clients and markets, thus greatly expanding the range of sizes, styles, and price cat- egories. In seventeenth-century probate inventories and sales records, these cabinets are referred to by many different, and often interchangeable or ambiguous, terms including ‘cabinet’, ‘cantoor’, ‘tresor’, and ‘schribaen’, among others.7 The relatively modern term kunstkast (art cabinet) has been used by Ria Fabri and other scholars to distinguish Antwerp art cabinets decorated with paintings and costly materials from more ordinary types of furniture.8 Along with providing a more consistent and comprehensive way of describing 4 On Hainhofer’s involvement in cabinet production, see especially Emmendörfer C. (ed.), Wunderwelt: Der Pommersche Kunstschrank (Berlin: 2014); Mundt B., Der Pommersche Kunstschrank des Augsburger Unternehmers Philipp Hainhofer für Herzog Philipp II. von Pommern (Munich: 2009). 5 On the emergence, apex, and decline of Augsburg cabinet production, see Baarsen R., 17th- Century Cabinets (Amsterdam – Zwolle: 2000) 2–23. 6 For an overview of seventeenth-century Antwerp art cabinets, see Fabri R., De 17de-eeuwse Antwerpse kunstkast: Typologische en historische aspecten (Brussels: 1991); Fabri R., De 17de-euwse Antwerpse kunstkast: Kunsthistorische aspecten (Brussels: 1993); Dupré S., “Trading Luxury Glass, Picturing Collections and Consuming Objects of Knowledge in Early Seventeenth-Century Antwerp”, Intellectual History Review 20 (2010) 53–78. 7 On the terminology of seventeenth-century cabinets produced both in and outside of the Netherlands, see Fabri, Typologische en historische aspecten 19–25. 8 Fabri, Typologische en historische aspecten 25..

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