Anke te Heesen

Boxes in nature

Abstract Historians have usually connected the presentation of nature as a part of natural history with the natural cabinet or the natural history museum. A closer look at travel and field work, however, shows that display of nature as a spatial concept and set of material conditions begins already in the first moment of collecting objects, specimens and economic information about a region. In 1720 Tsar Peter I of Russia sent the German physician Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt to Siberia to explore this hitherto terra incognita . During his travels Messerschmidt established two main instruments for collecting data and things, which I shall describe as organizing, material principles for his field work: written lists and notes, and boxes and cases. An analysis of these material objects and their specific uses reveals the intellectual and practical traditions in which learned activities and strategies took place at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

The Unending Quantity of Objects: An Observation on Museums and Their Presentation Modes

Like archives and libraries, the museum has been treated as a central agent of knowledge, attempting to bring order to an “unending quantity” of objects through their preservation and arrangement. However, new technologies of exhibition and museological display go a step further and find a different solution. They categorize this quantity, but present it to the gaze of the viewer as an endless row without hierarchy. They represent the quantity itself. I will argue that the most recent installations of numerous museums evoke the amazement, reverence, and fascination of earlier collection displays. But, at the same time, and different from systematizers of the eighteenth century, we are no longer confronted with a classification behind the order, but with the mass of objects alone.

Elektrisieren und Heilen: Vier verschiedene Betrachtungen zu einem Kupferstich der Aufklärungszeit

This text describes a single engraving of the picture encyclopediaBilder-Akademie für die Jugend published from 1780 to 1784. It consisted of 52 picture tableaus, each with nine images that were connected through the biblical topic. The particular image under examination, the “Table 38”, shows the healing wonders of Christ, the electrifying maschine, a healing physician and the structure of ear and eye. Goal of this text will be to describe the different connections and meanings of these depicted scenes, as in the same time I will argue, that pictures can not only be interpreted by understanding how people looked at them, but also to take into question what people did with them.

Naturgeschichte in curru et via: die Aufzeichnungspraxis eines Forschungsreisenden im frühen 18. Jahrhundert

The presentation of nature as part of natural history is usually connected with a natural cabinet or natural history museum. A closer look at travel and field work, however, shows that display of nature as a spatial concept and material conditions begins already in the first moment of collecting objects, specimens, and economis news about a region to be investigated. In the year 1720 the German physician Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt was sent to Siberia by the Tsar Peter I of Russia to explore this hithero terra incognita. During his travels Messerschmidt established two main instruments for collecting data and things, which I shall describe as organizing, material principles for his field work: written lists and notes, and boxes and cases. An analysis of these material objects and their specific uses reveals the intellectual and practical traditions in which learned activities and strategies took place in the beginning of the eighteenth century.