PEMcast Episode 038: Wunderkammer, My Wunderkammer

MUSIC

Dinah tape : Step right up, folks. Step right up. Come try to pronounce this word this morning for us. …How would you say it?

Female Participant: Oh, let me see it again. It depends on how my knowledge of the umlauts work.

Dinah: Welcome to the PEMcast, conversations and stories for the culturally curious. I’m your host, Dinah Cardin.

Dinah tape: How would you say this word?

Female Participant: Wunderkammer.

Dinah tape: Nice.

Female Participant: Have I nailed it?

Dinah: In this episode, we’re cracking open the idea of the wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities, treasured objects from around the globe. In German, “wunder” means “wonder” and “kammer” means “chamber”. A chamber of wonders. It harkens back to the origin story of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, dating back to 1799, when mariners circumnavigated the globe from Salem, in search of trade and treasure.

Dinah: We start by simply asking members of our staff to try to say the word.

Male Participant: Wunderkammer? Is that how you say it?

Male Participant: Wunderkammer.

Dinah tape: How would you say this word, especially if you hadn't worked at the Peabody Essex Museum for a very long time as you have?

Male Participant: Wunderkammer.

Female Participant: Well done.

Dinah: Did you take German?

Male Participant: Yes.

Female Participant: I'd probably say Wunderkammer.

Dinah tape: Oh, that's really good.

Karina: Schadenfreude.

[laughter]

Female Participant: Wunderkammer.

Dinah tape : Did you have any German instruction as a young person?

Female Participant: No, but my daughter was just doing a German Duolingo.

Female Participant: Wunderkammer.

Male Participant: I also have a Wunderkammer in my house [laughs] Taxidermies, skeletons, oddities…

Female parcipiant: Oh, wunderkammer.

Female Participant:: … I'll say it...Wunderkammer. Seventh grade German. I can count too. [German]

Dinah tape: Nice: Have you had to say the word a lot while working on this exhibition?

Female Participant: Yes. Very much so.…We also have many deviations we've been using, everything is wunderous and wunderful.

Renaissance MUSIC

Karina: This last subsection of Pursuit of Wonder is our reconstruction of a 17th century Flemish Wunderkammer.

Dinah: This is a staff tour of an exhibition called Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools, 300 years of Flemish Masterworks. It’s led by PEM curator Karina Corrigan.

Renaissance music

Karina: As you can imagine, there's a lot of spectacular Asian export art here.

Dinah: Karina is PEM’s associate director of Collections, and our HA Crosby Forbes curator of Asian Export Art.
Karina : Some wonderful Chinese export porcelain, Japanese export lacquer, an Indian cabinet made of tortoiseshell and ebony, brand new acquisitions from Mr. and Mrs. Honeywell of mounted coconut cups. This is an exhibition that was co-organized by the Denver Art Museum and The Phoebus Foundation, based in Antwerp, Belgium. Over the last 15 years, The Phoebus Foundation has assembled a truly extraordinary collection of 15th to 17th century Flemish art. We are so lucky to be able to highlight 125 works made in Flanders during the late Renaissance and Baroque period.

Dinah: The invention and widespread use of oil painting came out of this period in Flanders, making those glossy, luminous still life paintings of flowers and fruit that you want to sink your teeth into.

Karina: Here is a Kunstkammer.

Dinah: Now is the chance to impress your friends with yet another German word! Kunstkammer. “Kunst meaing “art” and “kammer” meaning “chamber”. The painting Karina is pointing to shows a room, featuring wealthy Europeans standing among their paintings and prized possessions.

Karina: A very self satisfied couple in their great hall filled with all the paintings in their collection. This really speaks to the diversity of the genre of paintings. We have a lot of religious paintings. We have portraiture. We have landscapes. We have seascapes. We have views of churches. We have allegorical paintings. Really, all manner of paintings that I think speak to what's going on with this new art market in Flanders during this period.

Dinah: The exhibition also includes a favorite object in PEM’s collection, a boxwood prayer bead, that the Boston Globe called “among the most confounding, mesmerizing objects in the history of human achievement.” The article goes on to point out tiny human figures that are meticulously carved mere millimeters on a locket-shaped bead the size of a walnut.

[Gallery background sounds]

Dinah: Karina takes us to a room filled with beautiful large cabinetry, made by our exhibition team. They contain wonders from around the world, the fun to pronounce wunderkammer.

Karina: I thought that the Wunderkammer could be more "vunderful." I'm sure you are all aware we have extraordinary things…This is just a fraction…It was unbelievable to go mining the collection. Also, the truly wonderful aspect of this are the incredible natural history selections that we have added to this.

Dinah: Collectors would pair natural finds with man-made objects of beauty.

Karina: I do particularly want to point out this wonderful double case with these birds with their iridescent feathers. This diminutive porpoise skeleton and giant clam shells, turtles, birds of paradise. I particularly love this pairing of the armadillo and an unpolished nautilus shell. Then a whole bunch of 17th century Chinese porcelain figures from the collection of Pamela Cunningham Copeland. This phenomenon of bringing the wonders of the world in microcosm in your own home. There's definitely a flex to this about showing your access to all the wonder.

Audience Member: That was awesome. Thank you. [laughs]

Karina gallery: Oh, thanks. Thanks for coming.

[Gallery background conversations]

Audience Member: Can we stay in the exhibit?

Karina: Sure, sure.

Karina: You're welcome to just linger and look at whatever is your favorite thing in this.

[applause]

Karina: The creation of these Wunderkammer is a phenomenon that we're seeing all over Europe in the late 16th and early 17th century.

Dinah: We sat down with Karina to get a little history, to learn WHY people collected and assembled these things.

Karina: This is an incredibly vibrant time in Europe. It's also a period of a lot of conflict, a lot of changing boundaries politically, but it's also a moment of tremendous economic prosperity. Antwerp is one of the major ports in Europe in this early modern period. There are ships coming in and out of Antwerp going all over the world.

Dinah: Much like Salem’s busy port in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Karina: There's a tremendous amount of wealth that is generated through that trade. …and there are many more people interested in buying works of art. [3:49] It's a flowering of art and culture musically, from a painting perspective, from a literary perspective. It's an incredibly exciting time in Flanders during the 15th to 17th century.

Dinah: This time in Flanders mirrors the federal period in Salem when the East India Marine Society–PEM’s predecessor organization–was formed and they began collecting objects that became our museum’s foundation.

Karina: Salem was the wealthiest city per capita in the United States. In that sense, we have that in common with Antwerp. These Salem mariners were also exploring the wider world in a totally new way, and they were bringing back objects from all over the world. I'm not necessarily sure that I would say there were Wunderkammer or Kunstkammer in people's homes, but many people's homes in Salem were filled with extraordinary objects from all over the world. Lots of Chinese porcelain, lots of Japanese lacquer, all kinds of wonderful things.

Dinah: But the scale of wealth was far greater in Flanders.

Karina: But a Flemish man is the person who first writes a treatise on this. It's almost the first treatise on museums. He talks about assembling these cabinets of natural and artificial curiosities together for display in your home.

Dinah: I just had to ask, as a curator, what might Karina collect?

MUSIC

Karina: I certainly have always been a collector from very early childhood. At this point, I feel like I am exercising my collecting muscle for the Peabody Essex Museum, not for myself, just because my taste has gotten way too expensive for myself.

Dinah: But what about her own personal wunderkammer?

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Karina: I would say the assemblage that comes closest to a Wunderkammer or a cabinet of curiosities is a small collection of shells and stones from lots of places all over the world. Every time I hold them, they remind me of being on the Zambezi, or in France, or in Gloucester. I also have been collecting oyster shells for a very long time, oysters I have eaten and enjoyed. That too takes me to a hike in Scotland or a wonderful meal right here in Salem. I would say that is my Wunderkammer, is our tangible links to experiences that I've had in the world in the past.

Dinah: Speaking of experiences, what do we hope visitors take away from this exhibition?

Karina: Fundamentally, I hope they just really enjoy having the chance to get up close, look carefully at some really extraordinary works of art. I hope they get a better sense of this region and the incredible diversity of kinds of art that were being made during this period. One of the things that particularly struck me about this exhibition was this concept of the Wunderkammer and its emergence in Flanders during this period. The reason that resonated for me is that when we think about the origins of the Peabody Essex Museum, the East India Marine Society, that is, in many ways, a Wunderkammer. It felt like a very natural tie to our historic collections. Our founders sought to collect what they called natural and artificial curiosities from beyond the capes. To bring the world into a microcosm. In our case, it's East India Marine Hall, and we're looking forward to the installation of works from our own historic collections later in 2025.

MUSIC

Dinah: Karina is talking about an installation that opens at PEM in December. This year, 2025, marks the 200th anniversary of PEM’s East India Marine Hall. From its inception, this space and the objects in it have elicited empathy, curiosity and wonder and transported visitors to places around the world. Visitors will explore several hundred fascinating objects that were displayed in this historic hall in the early years of the oldest continuously operating museum in the US. Join us for the next episode, as we talk with Curator Dan Finamore, who heads up PEM’s collection of maritime art and history. Dan takes us through museum storage, sharing behind the scenes stories of these fascinating objects and will reflect on the global perspective that has made Salem such a distinctive city.

Beginning of theme song

Dan: It's civic pride in its way, and it's well warranted. I am just like any member of the museum or any other person in Salem who's proud of the museum. I didn't grow up here. One day, I walked into the museum and it changed my life.

Theme song gets louder

Dinah: Saints and Sinners, Lovers and Fools: 300 Years of Flemish Masterworks is on view until May 4, 2025. To learn more, go to pem.org. The PEMcast is produced by me, Dinah Cardin. This episode was edited and mixed by Marc Patenaude. The theme song is by Forrest James. Join us soon for the next episode as we take you around the world without ever leaving museum storage. Thanks for listening.

Song Continues