Wondertooneel der Nature

Early modern Europe saw a rise in the creation by wealthy individuals of collections of items from nature (naturalia) and manmade objects (artificialia). This book’s detailed depiction and inventory of one of seventeenth-century Holland’s most significant collections is an important resource for understanding the form, content, and purpose of such collections around the turn of the eighteenth century.


Textile merchant, Levinus Vincent and his wife Joanna van Breda amassed a significant collection of naturalia and art in the late seventeenth century. Vincent received the collection in 1698 from Joanna’s brother, and over several years expanded it. The collection was publicly accessible in Amsterdam from 1698 to 1706, before being moved outside the city[1]. Vincent coordinated the publication of two books, bound together in the Met’s copy, to document and further increase the visibility of his collection.


The first foldout, which opens the second volume depicts a grand hall that is likely imagined. The objects shown within the space are likely real, giving us a sense of the breadth of Vincent’s collection. As in many early modern collections, naturalia — fossils, corals, shells, insects, birds, minerals — reside next to manmade artefacts — printed books, albums of drawings, and what appears to be featherworks, baskets, and other creations from the Americas. Many of the items were exotic, brought to the Netherlands through systems of global trade and colonialism that expanded over the seventeenth century.


Vincent took pride not only in the contents of his collection but also in their ordering and artful arrangement. The text of the volume details the dimensions and arrangement of the boxes and the cabinets that housed the collection and the sumptuously etched foldouts, with which the volume concludes, depict these containers and the placement of naturalia within them. Shells, insects, and other objects were often laid in drawers in elaborately orchestrated patterns. On plate 6 we see the most elaborate of these arrangements: butterflies arranged in intricate patterns and sewn into their boxes by Joanna van Breda.


Olivia Dill 8/20/24


[1] Jorink, Eric. Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575-1715. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History; v. 191. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010, 337–341.