Conchophilia

Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe

Marisa Anne Bass, Anne Goldgar, Hanneke Grootenboer, Claudia Swan

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691220246
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

A captivating historical look at the cultural and artistic significance of shells in early modern Europe Among nature's most artful creations, shells have long inspired the curiosity and passion of artisans, artists, collectors, and thinkers. Conchophilia delves into the intimate relationship between shells and people, offering an unprecedented account of the early modern era, when the influx of exotic shells to Europe fueled their study and representation as never before. From elaborate nautilus cups and shell-encrusted grottoes to delicate miniatures, this richly illustrated book reveals how the love of shells intersected not only with the rise of natural history and global trade but also with philosophical inquiry, issues of race and gender, and the ascent of art-historical connoisseurship.Shells circulated at the nexus of commerce and intellectual pursuit, suggesting new ways of thinking about relationships between Europe and the rest of the world. The authors focus on northern Europe, where the interest and trade in shells had its greatest impact on the visual arts. They consider how shells were perceived as exotic objects, the role of shells in courtly collections, their place in still-life tableaus, and the connections between their forms and those of the human body. They examine how artists gilded, carved, etched, and inked shells to evoke the permeable boundary between art and nature. These interactions with shells shaped the ways that early modern individuals perceived their relation to the natural world, and their endeavors in art and the acquisition of knowledge.Spanning painting and print to architecture and the decorative arts, Conchophilia uncovers the fascinating ways that shells were circulated, depicted, collected, and valued during a time of remarkable global change.

Part I

SURFACE
MATTERS

Why this lattice ornament? Why these fluted scales, these lumpy nodes?
Ignorance was, in the end, and in so many ways, a privilege:
to find a shell, to feel it, to understand only on some unspeakable level
why it bothered to be so lovely.
What joy he found in that, what utter mystery.

—Arthur Doerr, “The Shell Collector”

Claudia Swan

Chapter 1

The Nature of Exotic Shells

HANDLING SHELLS

Shell collectors of all ages and levels of expertise share the joy that Arthur Doerr’s blind malacologist experiences searching out and handling shells: taking them in hand, we encounter the mysteries of their forms. This chapter is about handling shells, through the lens of early modern shell collecting. Its focus, however, is on onerous forms of handling shells—catching, preparing, maneuvering these fluted and lumpy wonders.

FIG. 6. Abraham Bloemaert, Tronie of a Black Man with a Conch, 1620. Pen and brown ink, 35.2 × 26.7 cm. Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Braunschweig, Kunstmuseum des Landes Niedersachsen [inv. no. Z.1816].

Often, where the handling of shells is articulated in pictures, it is to express possession of and identification with the objects at hand. Early modern portraits emphasize collectors’ and naturalists’ attachment to their spiny, variegated, nacreous specimens; and shells and marine creatures serve as attributes to identify nymphs, Nereids, and the god of the seas, Neptune. In c. 1620–25 the Dutch artist Abraham Bloemaert drew a Tronie of a Black Man with a Conch, a figure he repeated in other media (fig. 6).¹ The sitter is not identified, and the presentation of the black-skinned man, headgear, and Turbo marmoratus (marbled turban shell) suggest that the image is an allegory of the other as seen through European eyes. The foreign shell, the source of mother-of-pearl, seems an emblem of the figure’s exoticism. He wears a cotton turban typical of Melanesian Muslims and may thus present a shell from the region whence he came, but this image appears to be a study of foreign forms as such without regard to specific points of origin. The artist’s handling of the man and his mollusk objectifies them both.²

In ways this chapter will address, Black bodies and exotic shells share a history. Bloemaert’s Black man handles a shell typical of those that were highly prized, avidly collected, and widely studied in the early modern era. Generally, when we speak of exotic shells depicted in painted still lifes, drawings, and scientific publications, we focus on such forms of labor as the artist’s touch and the natural historian’s classificatory zeal—labor that eclipses the work of procuring the shells in the first place. It is the latter form of labor, performed in the early modern era by Black bodies, that I aim to bring into view.

FIG. 7. J. de Later after Paulus Augustus Rumphius, Portrait of Georgius Eberhard Rumphius at the Age of 68. In Georgius Eberhard Rumphius, D’Amboinsche rariteitkamer, 1705. Etching and engraving, 34.7 × 22 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam [RP-P-1937-1064].

This chapter opens and concludes with observations on a signal early modern publication on shells by the German-born naturalist Georgius Eberhard Rumphius (1627–1702), D’Amboinsche rariteitkamer (The Ambonese curiosity cabinet). Rumphius, a longtime functionary in the Dutch East India Company (VOC), lived out his life on the island of Ambon in present-day Indonesia. His aim as an author was to write a natural history of the Moluccas. Rumphius, who suffered serial tragedies in Ambon, including the loss of his eyesight, was known even in his time as the “Pliny of the Indies” (fig. 7). His publications—D’Amboinsche rariteitkamer and an herbal, Het Amboinsche kruidboek (The Ambonese herbal)—convey information about morphology, ecology, biology, and local knowledge of Moluccan specimens that continues to be cited.³

Both of Rumphius’s publications, which appeared posthumously, were intended for an audience of European collectors.⁴ The very title of The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet places the book in dialogue with collections of the time, whose curious contents redounded to the social, epistemological, and political credit of their owners. Rumphius gave the volume its title, he explains in the introduction, “because it describes those things, both from living and lifeless creatures, that, on account of their unusual shape, or because they are rare, are collected by liefhebbers as rarities.”⁵ Appreciation for rarities was expressed in a variety of ways in the early modern period, when sensual and philosophical wonder readily overlapped.

The elaborate frontispiece of The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet depicts the sort of collection that informed Rumphius’s efforts and where his book was to be consulted (fig. 8). Crabs, crayfish, sea urchins, shells, and whelks are strewn in the foreground, where two seminaked figures, whose skin is colored black in the hand-colored impression illustrated here, gather them in a large vessel. While these figures do not enter the chambers within, the things they are handling do. Transported by a white-skinned intermediary carrying a basket and a box, they reach the European men gathered around a table, surrounded by cabinets, examining shells. While the frontispiece alludes to the labor of gathering and shipping shells, it omits any specific reference to their provenience or the labor of procuring them. The European collectors, shown sorting and discussing their exotic objects, perform rituals of natural historical and, perhaps, aesthetic discernment without evident regard for where or how they were found. The respective modes of handling shells enacted by the figures trace the passage from exotic beaches and waters to European spaces of collecting, appreciation, and scientific observation, and labor is subsumed under the aegis of devotion to rarities. Sociable interactions among those inside the cabinet, built on the labor of others, undergird natural history and the culture of curiosity.⁶

FIG. 8. J. de Later after Jan Goeree, Frontispiece. In Georgius Eberhard Rumphius, D’Amboinsche rariteitkamer, 1705. Hand-colored engraving, 39.5 × 25.7 cm. Universiteit van Amsterdam.

FIG. 9. Nautilus major sive crassus and its snail, Plate XVII. In Georgius Eberhard Rumphius, D’Amboinsche rariteitkamer, 1705. Hand-colored engraving. Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Rumphius’s Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet is divided into three books of which the second, on hard shellfish, is “the true cabinet of liefhebberij.”⁷ The publisher’s preface—intended for an audience of Dutch collectors—lavishes attention on book 2, enjoining the reader to enter “the innermost chambers of this eastern cabinet of nature, in which so many and various sorts of whelks and shells, painted with the most variegated colors, are presented to you, that you will have reason to be gratified and amazed by them.”⁸ Rumphius’s text regularly declares shells “beautiful,” “finely painted,” and “curious,” and the publisher’s preface to the reader describes the contents of the book as “the wonders the sea brings forth from her womb.” But these natural wonders did not present themselves directly to their admirers, nor were they at their most beautiful when discovered, as they were often inhabited by the mollusks that produced them and likely to be slimy, mossy, covered in a sort of fleece (periostracum), or scratched by sea grit. Procuring shells required labor, without which the descriptive and taxonomic efforts of authors and collectors would have been stranded, and on which their pleasure depended.

The first necessary step in the process of collecting shells is to find and gather them. The most highly prized shells in early modern Europe were gathered at a very distant remove from the cabinets in which they were arranged by their European owners. The formidable Turbo marmoratus and the chambered nautilus shell or Nautilus pompilius (pearly nautilus), for instance, are native to foreign seas—the Indian and Pacific Oceans (fig. 9). Such shells had changed hands several times by the time they were appreciated by artists and collectors in Europe, and it is doubtful that the conditions of their discovery would have been known to their European owners or admirers. Someone gathered the shells, scrubbed them, and cleaned out their original inhabitants, and someone may have polished and even carved them, before they were shipped halfway around the globe and bought and sold in Europe, where they were studied, classified, and attentively portrayed.

In a plaintive chapter of The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, Rumphius writes of the “expenditure of time and effort (tyd en moeite) needed, if one wants to put a set of rarities together,” declaring that “I know whereof I speak, for I have devoted a great deal of my free time to such things.”⁹ It cost Rumphius over twenty-five years to assemble a collection of 360 sorts of whelks and shells from the Moluccan region, with multiple examples of several sorts, that he sold to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo III de’ Medici (1642–1723) in 1682.¹⁰ Cosimo passed those shells on to Ferdinando Cospi (1606–86) for the collection of naturalia, artificialia, and exotica he kept in Bologna, to which Cosimo made serial gifts of exotica.¹¹ Noting that he omitted to send Cosimo “common and vile” items, Rumphius stated in a letter that accompanied the shipment of his collection that he doubted whether “anything so rare, novel or strange has been seen by so many illustrious, learned, and excellent men in Italy.”¹² “Time and effort” were converted, by the sale of Rumphius’s shells, into economic value. And when Cospi arranged the shells in a decorative manner, they lost all relation to Rumphius’s scientific considerations, as well as to the shells’ origins in the Moluccas.

Rumphius’s “time and effort” were surely not his alone. Rumphius lost his eyesight in 1670, more than a decade prior to the date of the sale of his collection to the Tuscan noble, so it is reasonable to assume that he had significant assistance in his labors.¹³ An otherwise playful exchange with the retired governor-general of the East Indies who supported Rumphius in his endeavors, Johannes Camphuijs (1634–95), attests to who actually hunted specimens. Camphuijs, who lived in Batavia and had a small house on the tiny island of Edam, given to him by the VOC, wrote in the year he died to Rumphius of his penchant for searching for shells, whelks, and other sea creatures, which he said he had discovered during his stay on Edam the prior year. Whether Camphuijs himself combed the beaches, though, is highly doubtful. He was old and ill at the time. His letter states that his slaves, both boys and girls (lyfeygenen, zoo jongens als meyden) had found, on Edam and on the small island named after another Dutch city, Alkmaar, shells more beautiful and more curious than any to be found on Ambon. Rumphius responded that he doubted Batavian shells could outshine those local to Ambon and the Moluccas, and sent one hundred kinds to vie with Camphuijs’s shells and defend the honor of the “Ambonese monarchy” over marine curiosities. In his letter, Rumphius does not credit Camphuijs, but his servants (dienaers), with discovering such things.¹⁴

WONDERS OF NATURE, PRODUCTS OF HANDLING

Shells have long been celebrated as wonders of nature; these ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Introduction: For the Love of Shells Anne Goldgar
• Part I: Surface Matters
• Part II: Microworlds of Thought
• Part III: The Multiple Experienced
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index
• Illustration Credits