The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine

The history of art encompasses all aspects of human creativity throughout the annals of recorded human history. Horst Bredekamp (Professor of Art History at Humbolt University, Berlin) presents The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art, and Technology, a close examination of the baroque Kunstkammer - a display of art and unusual discoveries assembled by wealthy Europeans in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. These proto-museums, meant to illuminate the mechanistic order of all things, featured exhibits from minerals to exotic plants, animals, statues, and machines. The baroque Kunstkammer was not only a celebration of the human potential for creativity, argues Bredekamp, but was also the nascent progenitor of the modern-day exchange of ideas and thought within cyberspace. A handful of black-and-white photographs illustrate this thoughtful treatise, fluidly translated from the original German by Allison Brown.

"Bredekamp's achievement goes well beyond bringing peculiar collections of obtuse constructions and ambitious alchemy to the attention of art historians. By explaining the sources of the pictures of the baroque era, he also succeeds in making plausible a world of ideas in which the museum was not yet a locus of highbrow diversion, but a means of gaining insight into the essence of the world. A superb essay." -Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung "Horst Bredekamp's elegant, erudite book sheds a flood of new light on the relations between art, science and scholarship in early modern Europe. Deftly using a vast array of visual and textual sources, Bredekamp establishes the forgotten connections between enthusiasm for the antique and the discovery of nature, classical erudition and technical innovation." -Anthony T. Grafton "Intriguing . . . offers real rewards." -Publishers Weekly