Egypt in Early Collections: Natural or Not?

In seventeenth-century Verona, the ‘‘cabinet of curiosities’’ of Lodovico Moscardo was popular enough for him to describe it in a printed catalogue, neatly divided into three categories - antiquities; stones, minerals, and earths; and corals, shells, animals, and fruit. Moscardo’s collection revealed his interest in objects that had mysterious associations, such as magical gems and amulets, Hieroglyphics, and a mummy, the last mentioned ofwhich he classed with ‘‘corals, shells, animals, and fruit’’ (Pomian 1990: 74-8). Moscardo was typical of the scholarly collector of his day. A near-contemporary in France, a medical doctor named Pierre Borel, published a description ofhis museum which, he could boast, contained ‘‘every single rare thing’’ from the natural and artificial world, including pieces of a mummy (Pomian 1990: 45-8). It was this

Aristotelian distinction between artificialia (made by man) and naturalia (made by God, or nature) that informed private collecting in early modern Europe, and the availability of preserved human and animal remains, which were imported for use as mummia in pharmaceutical preparations and pigments, contributed to the tendency for Egyptian material to qualify as nature, rather than artifice. Stuffed or mummified crocodiles were also popular specimens, and shabti figures were perhaps the most common cultural artefact from Ancient Egypt, easily imported through trading contacts. Several are visible on the shelves of a Bolognese collection belonging to courtier Ferdinando Cospi in a 1677 engraving of his purpose-built display (Moser 2006: 26, fig. 1.6).

Whatever made Egypt mysterious and fascinating shared those traits with the natural products of the earth and sea as well as man-made marvels. Unlike the royal and princely Wunderkammern that focused on collecting for courtly prestige, collections like Moscardo’s were explicitly centered on acquiring, organizing, and imparting knowledge, which was done in part by the creation of display rooms and cabinets. The physical space occupied by the collections became ever grander and more impressive: crocodiles were suspended from the ceiling, and every available wall space, from floor to ceiling, was filled with the ‘‘curiosities,’’ whose close, almost chaotic, proximity expressed a sense of marvel at the diversity of cultural and natural forms. Owning and displaying such a collection was an expression of status and discernment, and the flora, fauna, and antiquities of Egypt contributed to the aura of exotica and rarity that such collections required (Moser 2006: 11-32; see also MacGregor 2007).

In England the best-known collection of ‘‘curiosities’’ belonged to the botanists John and John Tradescant, father and son, whose collection led to the founding of the first public museum in 1683, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University. The founding of the British Museum in 1753 was also indebted to earlier ‘‘cabinets of curiosities,’’ acquired by the physician Sir Hans Sloane, who had collected natural history specimens since his youth in the 1680s and absorbed many other private collections into his own through purchases and gifts. His estate sold his vast array of scientific instruments, natural-history specimens, books and manuscripts, coins and medals, and ethnographic and ancient artefacts to the British Government, as a result of which an Act of Parliament established the British Museum, funded by the public purse. When it opened in Montagu House, Bloomsbury, in January 1759, small groups of visitors on guided tours could view a quantity of Egyptian antiquities on display for the first time - including a Twenty-sixth Dynasty coffin and mummy donated by the family of Colonel William Lethieullier (Bierbrier 1988). An aristocratic palace rather than a purpose-built structure, Montagu House displayed objects both free-standing and in display cases, in an arrangement based on their visual appeal, perceived significance, or shared donation. Only two of fourteen rooms included antiquities, and each room combined material in a fashion reminiscent of the private cabinets. In the first-floor vestibule, for instance, the Letheiullier mummy was displayed upright, its coffin was in a separate case, and natural history filled the rest of the space. Egyptian material occupied prime space in the vestibule and first exhibition room, but not in a coherent way. Although the Lethieullier mummy was in the sightline of visitors mounting the grand staircase, the next room, devoted to antiquities, had ten cases of Classical objects and one of Egyptian (Moser 2006: 46-51). The Egyptian objects remained primarily curiosities, with the potential to surprise and entertain, but not to enlighten the eighteenth-century viewer. Recognized as a highlight of the Montagu House displays, Ancient Egypt was not yet a subject fit for academic study or public education; for Ancient Egypt had yet to be ‘‘discovered.’’