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WORM, Ole (1588-1654)
Museum Wormianum. Seu historia rerum rariorum, tam naturalium, quam artificialium, tam domesticarum, quam exoticarum, quae Hafniae Danorum in aedibus Authoris servantur
Leiden: ex Officina Elzeviriorum, 1655. Folio (14 x 8 3/4 inches). Title with woodcut vignette, 1 double-page engraved interior view of the museum by G. Wingendorp, engraved portrait of the author by G. Wingendorp after Carl van Mander, 11 engraved illustrations (2 full-page, two showing 2 'figures' on a single plate), 139 woodcut illustrations. (Light old worming to upper blank margins of title, the double-page view and the two following leaves). Late 18th-century Italian half marbled sheep over marbled paper-covered boards, spine in six compartments with raised bands, brown morocco lettering-piece in the second compartment, repeat decoration of roll tools above and below a central tool showing a pair of birds on the rim of a vase, speckled edges.
An excellent untouched copy of the first edition of this fascinating and well-illustrated description of the contents of Danish physician Ole Worm's "Wunderkammer" - the most famous northern European proto-museum of the 17th century.
Wunderkammers (also known as cabinets of curiosities or wonder-rooms) were collections of types of objects we now regard as quite separate, but whose boundaries were in the Renaissance yet to be defined. They included specimens we would now categorize as belonging to natural history .... geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art, including cabinet paintings, and antiquities. Some belonged to rulers, aristocrats or merchants, others [as here] to early practitioners of science in Europe, and were precursors to museums of different sorts.
The term cabinet originally described a room rather than a piece of furniture. Two of the most famously described 17th century cabinets were those of Ole Worm (also known as Olaus Wormius) (1588-1654), and Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680). These 17th-century cabinets were filled with preserved animals, horns, tusks, skeletons, minerals, and other types of objects. Often they would contain a mix of fact and fiction, including apparently mythical creatures. Worm's collection contained, for example, what he thought was a Scythian Lamb, a wooly fern thought to be a plant/sheep fabulous creature ... The specimens displayed were often collected during exploring expeditions and trading voyages.
Worm was a great believer in the value of studying the objects themselves rather than just relying on the descriptions of others: "Let us take off the spectacles that show us the shadows of things instead of the things themselves". "A gifted polymath, Worm collected many types of objects, especially those of natural history and man-made artifacts, which he carefully arranged and classified, following a rigorous method ... His museum, which became one of the great attractions in Copenhagen, included the skull of a narwhal properly described; previously narwhal tusks had been supposed to be the horns of unicorns" (DSB). Worm was professor of Medicine at the University of Copenhagen for much of the period during which he was collecting the items in his museum. This work was published in the year after he died and includes a dedication/preface by Worms' son. In effect, it served as both a monument to the great collector, and also a record of the collection as it stood shortly before he died. After his death it passed to King Frederick III of Denmark, and was installed in the old castle at Copenhagen.
Aside from the important text, a number of the images are particularly fine and valuable. The double-page image of the interior of the museum is an apparent eye-witness record of how Worms had arranged his collection. It "shows the actual arrangement of the specimens on open shelves with boxes and trays of shells, minerals, stones, rare earths and animal bones, the larger specimens on higher shelves mixed up with bronzes, antiquities and ethnographic objects, racks of spears and utensils, horns and antlers and stuffed animals hang on the walls and from the ceiling are suspended large fish, a polar bear and a Greenland kayak" (Paul Grinke From Wunderkammer to museum). There is also an insightful portrait of the author aged sixty-six from an original by Carl van Mander (1580-c.1665) which was painted in 1664. The engraved illustrations also include a number of striking images: the first illustration of a Great Auk (a flightless and now-extinct sea-bird); a finely-observed and surprisingly modern looking full-page image of a Great Northern Diver or the Common Loon, a bird that is a North American native; and the final engraving - a full-page illustration of an intricately-carved hunting horn.
Cobres p.98, n.2; Eales 456; Nissen ZBI 4473; Willems 772.
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#19521 $18,000.00 
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© 2002-2005 Donald A. Heald
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