All the universe in a book: Giles Waterfield welcomes the publication of a study of the remarkable 'Paper Museum' created at the request of Peter the Great to record in drawings the extraordinarily diverse collections of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences

Apollo, May, 2006 by Giles Waterfield

The Paper Museum of the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg c. 1725-1760: Introduction & Interpretation

RENEE KISTEMAKER, NATALYA KOPANEVA, DEBORA J. MEIJERS AND GEORGY V. VILINBAKOU

Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 69 [euro]

ISBN 90 6984 424 9 (DVD: ISBN 90 6984 425 7)

Part of the programme of reform and westernisation introduced by Peter the Great in his new capital of St Petersburg was the formation of a Kunstkamera, which was eventually housed in a (surviving) building in a prominent position on the Neva. As with other similar collections, it was intended to illustrate the variety of the universe and to permit intensive study of history and archaeology (particularly of Russia), the natural sciences, and the familiar and the distant world, through specimens, scientific instruments, coins, medals and a range of other objects.

The Kunstkamera was incorporated into the Imperial Academy of Sciences (also established by Peter) and in 1730 a systematic process of depicting all the objects in the collection was instituted, a process which, in spite of turbulence on the larger political stage and within the academy after Peter's death, was to continue into the 1760s. In charge of the programme, responsible for both making drawings and training young draughtsmen, was the Dutch artist Mafia Dorothea Gsell (typically, it was a foreigner who was employed for this important position). She was also responsible for the disposition of the rooms. The paper museum that was formed eventually consisted of around 4,000 drawings. Of these, around half survive, and it is hoped that missing elements may be rediscovered as a result of the attention applied to this previously little-explored subject by the current publication.

Peter the Great bought many of the objects in his Kunstkamera in the Netherlands, notably from the scientific collectors Frederick Ruysch and Albertus Seba, and was inspired by the use of collections for practical purposes by the Dutch. This Russian-Dutch link, which has already inspired an exhibition and publications on the subject, has now led to the publication by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (in their series 'History of Science and Scholarship in the Netherlands) of this handsome study of the drawings, as well as a DVD illustrating the collection in detail. The book is the result of an extended collaboration between Dutch and Russian scholars, and includes essays on the Paper Museum as a genre, the making of the drawings of the Kunstkamera and the purpose of this particular Paper Museum, as well as an illustrated thematic summary of the objects within the collection, which includes engravings of 1741 showing the interiors of the cabinets. One of the most engaging elements of this impressive work is the humility of the scholars involved, at pains to point out that this publication is primarily a way of inspiring further research and knowledge of this collection.

The history of paper museums is discussed here in an excellent essay by the Dutch historian of museums Debora Meijers. This particular example differs from that of Cassiano dal Pozzo, perhaps the most famous extant example, in that it records the actual objects in the collection, rather than objects of interest that the patron wished to bring together in paper form but did not own (and often could not hope to own), as in the case of Cassiano. The precise purpose of the Russian drawings is not clear: they may have been intended as an inventory, as the basis for a printed and illustrated catalogue (although such a volume effectively never came into being), as a celebration of the empire in the manner of Louis XIV's triumphalist Cabinet du Roi, or as educational material for the imperial family and in a broader context. The drawings could also be used as an element in the creation of an encyclopaedia, a type of publication that Leibniz was assiduous in urging on the Tsar in the 1690s.

Meijers suggests that the drawings may have been intended to fulfil a variety of these functions but that they were probably not intended to be published in full. This genre of museum, recording the full contents of a collection (as seems to have been the intention) belongs to a tradition going back in theoretical terms to a treatise by Samuel Quiccheberg of 1655, which stated that the objects in a collection should be accompanied by images, which would serve as dynastic and territorial documents, as records of the objects and as works in their own right. The first collection actually to carry out these ideas in an organised way was that of Emperor Rudolf II: two albums of around 1600, The Museum of Rudolf II, (Osterreichische National-Bibliothek, Vienna) depict many of the objects he owned. As Meijers puts it, 'we are here first confronted with the phenomenon of a collector's very deliberately wanting to represent his collection as a collection.' A century later, Peter the Great and the leading figures at the Academy of Science seem to have been inspired by similar motives.