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Fellow during the summer term 2019
Project: Oceans in Bavaria:
Global Networks and Maritime Material Culture in the Munich Kunstkammer
During the sixteenth century the Munich Kunstkammer formed one of the largest and most important collections of art and material culture world-wide. As a comprehensive collector's guide recommends and extant inventories from 1598 reveal, foreign objects were displayed alongside antique artworks and natural objects with Bavarian provenance. Among all collectibles that had been supplied through global networks or derived from German sources, samples of maritime material culture were particularly rich in symbolic meanings.
Drawing on Kunstkammer inventories, correspondence between collectors and art agents, trade records and other archival documents, "Oceans in Bavaria" argues that Munich's indirect over-land and river-based connections to global waters through the Baltic ports and the harbors of Lübeck, Hamburg, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Genoa, Livorno, Lisbon, Cádiz, La Rochelle, Bayonne and Marseille are reflected in the material culture of the Munich Kunstkammer in two ways: first, through the acknowledgment of object provenances in extant inventories and second, through systems of ordering and storing which place artifacts from similarly foreign origins in collective clusters.
Although the ocean remained a space associated with mythological monsters and fantastic foreigners it became tangible in Munich's Kunstkammer where the complex ecologies and interconnected spaces of global waters could be experienced first-hand by the Wittelsbacher dukes and their visitors through interaction with material culture - letters and treatises, artifacts and natural objects.