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

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 means of Peter the Great in his of recent origin capital of St Petersburg was the formation of a Kunstkamera, which was eventually housed in a (surviving) building in a prominent position upon the Neva. As with other similar collections, it was intended to illustrate the variety of the universe and to permit intensive close attention of history and archaeology (particularly of Russia), the natural sciences, and the familiar and the distant world, [i]or[/i] part of to the other specimens, scientific instruments, coins, medals and a range of other objects

The Kunstkamera was incorporated into the Imperial Academy of Sciences (also established by means of Peter) and in 1730 a systematic proces of depicting all the thing perceiveds in the collection was instituted, a proces which, in spite of tumultuousness on the larger political stage and within the academy after Peter's death, was to continue into the 1760 In charge of the programme, responsible for the pair making drawings and training young draughtsmen, was the Dutch artist Mafia Dorothea Gsell (typically, it was a foreigner who was engrossed for this important position). She was also responsible for the disposition of the latitudes The paper museum that was formed eventually consisted of around 4000 drawings. Of these, around half survive, and it is spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed that missing elements may be rediscovered as a spring of the attention applied to this previously little-explored make subordinate by the current publication.

Peter the Great bought many of the percepts in his Kunstkamera in the Netherlands, notably from the scientific collectors Frederick Ruysch and Albertus Seba, and was inspired by means of the use of collections for practical intents by the Dutch. This Russian-Dutch link, which has already inspired an exhibition and publications upon the subject, has now l to the publication by the agency of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (in their series 'History of Science and Scholarship in the Netherlands) of this handsome research of the drawings, as well as a DVD illustrating the collection in detail. The work is the result of an stretch outed collaboration between Dutch and Russian scholars, and includes essays upon the Paper Museum as a genre the making of the drawings of the Kunstkamera and the final cause of this particular Paper Museum, as well as an illustrated thematic summary of the things within the collection, which includes engravings of 1741 showing the interiors of the cabinets. individual of the most engaging simple bodys of this impressive work is the humility of the scholars involved, at pains to point on the outside 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 crack essay by the Dutch historian of museums Debora Meijers. This particular example differs from that of Cassiano dal Pozzo perhaps the greatest in quantity famous extant example, in that it records the actual realitys in the collection, rather than things of interest that the patron wished to bring together in paper form on the contrary did not own (and oftentimes could not hope to own) as in the case of Cassiano. The precise drift 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 of that kind 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 words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following The drawings could also be used as an uncompounded body in the creation of an encyclopaedia, a emblem of publication that Leibniz was assiduous in urging upon the Tsar in the 1690s

Meijers hints that the drawings may have been intended to fulfil a variety of these functions on the other hand that they were probably not intended to be published in replete This genre of museum, recording the filled contents of a collection (as looks to have been the intention) belongs to a tradition going back in theoretical confines to a treatise by Samuel Quiccheberg of 1655 which stated that the realitys in a collection should be accompanied by the agency of images, which would serve as dynastic and territorial documents, as records of the external realitys and as works in their have right. The first collection actually to carry without these ideas in an organised way was that of Emperor Rudolf II: sum of two units albums of around 1600, The Museum of Rudolf II, (Osterreichische National-Bibliothek, Vienna) depict many of the percepts he owned. As Meijers lays it, 'we are here first stand in front ofed with the phenomenon of a collector's actual deliberately wanting to represent his collection as a collection.' A hundred later, Peter the Great and the leading figures at the Academy of Science appear to be to have been inspired through similar motives.