Albertus Seba > Quotes

“When a collector or naturalist commissioned an artist to draw specimens of interest to him, ... the plant or animal in question underwent considerable abstraction and distillation on its way to becoming a scientific illustration. Just as a specimen was regarded as representative of its species, so its appearance was systematized. Individual traits not typical of its kind were minimized and the scientifically significant ones were accentuated. ... This pictorial abstraction may also be understood as one way of taming the multifariousness of nature.”
― Albertus Seba, Cabinet of Natural Curiosities: The Complete Plates in Colour, 1734-1765

“In a world becoming ever more complex with each new geographic and scientific discovery, the ideal cabinet of curiosities constituted an attempt to produce an overall picture of this world, the cosmos. Within its limited space, the cabinet represented a microcosm, reproducing the general picture, the macrocosm, on a reduced scale. The early cabinets of curiosities thereby spotlighted areas on the fringes of the known world.”
― Albertus Seba, Cabinet of Natural Curiosities: The Complete Plates in Colour, 1734-1765

“The arrangement of various objects in a room -- some laid out on tabletops -- gave the viewer the opportunity to relate individual objects to one another visually and to draw connections between them. A given natural specimen, a piece of coral for instance ... thereby acquired different meanings. ... What today seems the very heterogeneous organization of cabinets of curiosities was grounded in this network of meanings, and arose out of correlations with religion and alchemy as well as out of the classification of objects by their specific material properties.”
― Albertus Seba, Cabinet of Natural Curiosities: The Complete Plates in Colour, 1734-1765

“The aim was to bring together -- at least in representative form -- the most complete collection possible of all things knowable and worth knowing.”
― Albertus Seba, Cabinet of Natural Curiosities: The Complete Plates in Colour, 1734-1765