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Abstract
The radical reforms of Peter the Great of Russia (1672–1725) transformed the whole country. Among his educational reforms, the establishment in 1714 of the first public museum as a tool for public education had no precedents in Russian history. Its functions were formulated as ‘teaching and enlarging knowledge of nature, dead and alive, and of artistic human creations’. It was opened for all classes of the public, regardless of their wealth or social position. Its name ‘Kunstkamera’ – a chamber of arts and curiosities – was coined in Europe as early as the Renaissance period, but free admission, a logically arranged display, guided tours and free access to the museum library made it more of a modern museum than a princely ‘cabinet of curiosities’. Along with the Ashmolean and the British Museum, the Kunstkamera was one of the most important European educational and academic centres of the eighteenth century.
Notes
1 Oleg Neverov, ‘“His Majesty’s Cabinet” and Peter I’s Kunstkammer’, in The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe, eds O. Impey and A. MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 54–61.
2 R.E. Kistemaker, N. K. Kopeneva, D.J. Meijers and G.V. Vilinbakhov, eds, The Paper Museum of the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg c.1725–1760: Introduction and Interpretation. (Edita – History of Science and Scholarship in the Netherlands, 2005).
3 Available from: http://www.answers.com/kunstkamera (accessed July 24, 2007); http://www.nevsky-prospekt.com/kikin.html (accessed July 24, 2007).
4 Anthony Anemone, ‘The Monsters of Peter the Great: The Culture of St. Petersburg Kunstkamera In The Eighteenth Century’, Slavic and Eastern European Journal 44, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 583–602.
5 The Historical Development of the Ashmolean Museum, http://www.ashmolean.org/about/historyandfuture/ (accessed July 24, 2007).
6 The King’s Kunstkammer, http://www.kunstkammer.dk/GBindex.shtml (accessed July 24, 2007).
7 Markku Roinila, Leibniz and the Great Mission: Russia, http://www.helsinki.fi/∼mroinila/russia (accessed July 24, 2007).
8 Elena Bobrova, Biblioteka Petra I. Ukazatel’‐spravochnik [Peter the Great’s Library. Index Directory; in Russian] (Leningrad: BAN, 1978), 99.
9 Ibid., 98.
10 Ibid, 147. Originally from the Palais du Luxembourg, the cycle is today on display at the Louvre.
11 Monplaisir: The Eastern Lusthaus and the Eastern Gallery, http://www.peterhof.org/english/museums/monpl (accessed July 25, 2007).
12 Roinila, Leibniz and the Great Mission.
13 History of the First Russian Museum, http://www.kunstkamera.ru (accessed July 24, 2007).
14 Ibid.
15 Mikhail Bogoslovskii, Petr Pervyi [Peter the Great; in Russian]. Vol. 2 (Leningrad, 1941), 119.
17 Bogoslovskii, Petr Pervyi, Vol. 2, 390.
16 Tim Huisman, Theatre For Anatomy: The Leiden Theatrum Anatomicum 1594–1821 (Leiden, 2002). The anatomical theatre was recently re‐created at the Boerhaave Museum, Leiden. It gives a very good visual idea of the original display.
18 History of the First Russian Museum, http://www.kunstkamera.ru
19 Ibid.
20 W.H. Quarrell and W.J.C., Quarrell, eds, Oxford in 1710: From the Travels of Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1928).
21 Bobrova, Biblioteka Petra Pervogo, 99–100, 157.
22 Collections of Peter’s Kunstkammer: Natur‐Cabinet, http://www.kunstkamera.ru/en/history/encyclopedia_of_peters_kunstkammer/collections_of_peters_kunstkammer_/natur–cabinet/ (accessed July 24, 2007).
23 A.T. Hazen, ‘Johnson’s Life of Frederick Ruysch’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 7(1939): 324–34.
24 Ibid.
25 Bobrova, Biblioteka Petra Pervogo, 99, 110, 129.
26 Jozien Tsar Driessen, Petr I i Ego Gollandskie Druzia [Peter the Great and His Dutch Friends; in Russian] (St Petersburg: Obrazovanie‐Kultura, 1996), 73.
27 Ibid., 127.
28 M. Lemire, ‘Representation of the human body: the coloured wax anatomic models of the 18th and 19th centuries in the revival of medical instruction’, Surgical and Radiologic Anatomy 14, no. 4 (December 1992): 283–91.
29 Debra Gulea, Working Wax: The Paradox of Mechanical Wax Dolls, http://www.debrasdolls.com/articles/study2.html (accessed July 24, 2007).
30 Robert Collis, ‘Alchemical Interests at the Petrine Court’, http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeVII/Russianalchemy.htm (accessed July 24, 2007).
31 Ibid.
32 History of the First Russian Museum, http://www.kunstkamera.ru
33 Bobrova, Biblioteka Petra Pervogo. 820, 1368–1371.
34 Valentin Boss, Newton and Russia: The Early Influences. 1698–1798 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 45.
35 Ibid.
36 Elena Savelieva, ‘Scottish Book Collections at the Russian Academy of Sciences Library’, in The Philosophical Age, Almanakh 15: Scotland and Russia in the Enlightenment, eds T. Artemieva and M. Mikeshin (St Petersburg: St Petersburg Center for History of Ideas, 2001), http://ideashistory.org.ru/almanacs.html (accessed July 24, 2007).
37 History of the First Russian Museum, http://www.kunstkamera.ru
38 Desmond King‐Hele, Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement (London: Giles de la Mare Publishers, 1999), 3–4.
39 Peter Bruce, ‘Iz Memuarov…’, in Peterburg Petra Pervogo v Inostrannykh Opisaniiakh [Petersburg of Peter the Great in Foreign Descriptions; in Russian], ed. Y.Bespyatykh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991), 183.
40 Liba Taub, The Circulation of Ideas (The Universeum Project), http://www.universeum.de/intro/index.html (accessed July 24, 2007).
41 Kratkoe Opisanie Goroda Peterburga i Prebyvaniia v Nem Pol’skogo Posolstva v 1720 Godu [A Short Description of the City of Petersburg and the Presence There of the Polish Embassy in 1720; in Russian], in Bespyatykh, ed., Peterburg Petra Pervogo, 143–4.
42 Ibid.
43 Carl Reinhold Berch, ‘Putevye Zametki o Rossii’, in Peterburg Anny Ioannovny v Inostrannykch Opisaniiakh [Petersburg of Anna Ioannovna in Foreign Descriptions; in Russian], ed. Y. Bespyatykh (St Petersburg: BLIZ, 1997), 194.
44 Ibid.
45 Anemone, ‘The Monsters of Peter the Great’.
46 Ibid.
47 The History of Kunstkammer, http://www.kunstkamera.ru/en/history/the_history_of_kunstkammer/ (accessed July 24, 2007).
48 Rudolph Its, Kunstkamera [The Kunstkammer; in Russian] (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1974), 34–5.
49 Anemone, ‘The Monsters of Peter the Great’.
50 Rachel Holmes, The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007).
51 Berch, ‘Putevye Zametki o Rossii’, 196.
52 Christine Thomas, ‘Sir Hans Sloane and the Russian Academy of Sciences’, British Library Journal 14 (1988): 21–34.
53 Ibid.
54 Hans Sloane, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 50, 248.
55 Translated into English by Olga Baird.
56 Kunstkammer of Georg Laue, http://www.kunstkammer.com/swf_e (accessed July 24, 2007).
57 Johann Bakmeister, Opyt o biblioteke i kabinete redkostei i istorii natural’noi Sanktpeterburgskoi Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk [Description of the Library and of the Cabinet of Curiosities and Natural History at the St Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences; in Russian] (St Petersburg, 1779), 108–9.