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University Art Museum Exhibition: World of Wonders - A Renaissance Cabinet |
Location: University Art Museum
Time:
12:00 PM - 5:00 PM10/17/07 to 10/17/20
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Why did the first European museums—cabinets of curiosity or Wunderkammern in German—display masterpieces of Renaissance art together with marvels of nature and science, and treasures from across the globe? What did visitors to these early museums experience? The University Art Museum addresses these and other issues in a lively new installation which juxtaposes its Renaissance collections with diverse items from other campus holdings, from fossils and gemstones to stuffed animals and musical instruments.
The historical cabinet of curiosities sought to represent the world at large within the confines of a single room. In a curiosity cabinet, works of art mingled with natural specimens, tools and instruments, ethnographic materials and technological marvels. The entire world of what was knowable was represented, and it was the ambition of the collector and the viewer to understand the world through examining these varied objects.
World of Wonders: A Renaissance Cabinet offers visitors the chance to see the world through Renaissance eyes. The enormous range of objects and materials densely installed in the small space of the gallery creates sometimes startling and sometimes sublime juxtapositions and oppositions. Just like visitors to the Renaissance cabinet, UAM’s viewers are free to navigate the space by following open-ended chains of association forged by these comparisons. Arranged by theme, each gallery wall presents a new set of ideas to the viewer, including: the vast range of materials out of which the artifacts are made; the relationship of art and nature; portraiture and identity; ordering schemes like the four elements, the four seasons, and the five senses; local and exotic; telling religious and secular stories; and the nature of miracles, marvels, and monsters.
For this Renaissance Wunderkammer, the UAM has drawn its inspiration specifically from its modern setting on a university campus. As curator Mark Meadow notes, “Renaissance collections of this type were sites of active learning and research, just like the modern university. The remarkable diversity of their contents closely matches the range of materials found in the university today, for similar reasons.” With objects loaned from across the whole spectrum of disciplines and research fields, the installation reminds us that the modern university is one of the last institutions that matches the curiosity cabinet in its aspiration to encompass universal knowledge. Objects on view in the gallery have been borrowed from UC Santa Barbara’s Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration, The Henry Eichheim Collection of Musical Instruments the Special Collections of the Davidson Library, the Charles Douglas Woodhouse Mineral Collection, among others. Several works from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art augment the University holdings. At the heart of the World of Wonders, however, is the UAM’s own worldclass Renaissance holdings, The Sedgwick Collection of oil paintings and the Sigmund Morgenroth Collection of Medals and Plaquettes.
The exhibition is the outcome of a collaboration of among art history faculty, graduate students and museum staff, under the curatorial leadership of Professor. Mark Meadow, Department of the History of Art and Architecture. World of Wonders: A Renaissance Cabinet is generously supported by the Kress Foundation and the College of Letters and Sciences at UC Santa Barbara.
contact: http://www.uam.ucsb.edu/
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