The birth of the museum in the Nordic countries. Kunstkammer museology and museography
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5617/nm.6395Keywords:
Ole Worm, Olaus Rudbeck the Elder, Johann Daniel Major, The Gottorf Kunstkammer, the Copenhagen Kunstkammer, Queen Christina’s Kunstkammer, classification, method of questioning, commonplacing, topicsAbstract
The article positions early modern collecting in relation to wider culturesof knowledge production by using perspectives from the history of knowledge,
memory studies, and recent studies of Kunstkammern. Some twenty-five years
after the reawakened interest in early modern collections the author revisits the
question if the museum in the Nordic countries was born in the mid-seventeenth
century and asks if collections became museums and a museum culture was
established with the appearance of, one, museography, theories and methods of
classification and display, two, museology, a science or profession of museum
organisation and management, and, three, designated, purpose-built architecture
and furniture.
The first part brings into play exemplary scholarly and monarchical collectors
that contributed to the development of museography and museology. The second
part addresses seventeenth-century museography by introducing two acts of
knowledge production and retention in the Kunstkammern – asking questions
and selecting and ordering. Finally, the author discusses the findings in relation to
arguments for placing the museum’s birth in the decades around 1800.
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