Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Republican Baroque: a Yhunderclap, a City hall and two Executions
- 2 The Dramatic Potential in History: Rome and the Republic – Grevius, Vondel, Knüpfer, and Job
- 3 The Cruel Death of Worlds and Political Incompatibility – the Brothers De Witt
- 4 A Happy Split of Worlds or the Comedic Sublime – Frans Hals
- 5 The Seas or the World as Scene – Focquenbroch and Grotius
- 6 Not a Frame but a lens: the Touch of knowledge – Rumphius, Vossius, Spinoza
- 7 Public Theater, Collective Drama and the new – Van den Enden and Huygens
- 8 Interrupting Time for the Sake of Division: History and the Tableau vivant – Rembrandt (Abraham and Isaac), Quast, Vondel, and Vos
- List of illustrations
- Bibliography
- Index
- Index of names
6 - Not a Frame but a lens: the Touch of knowledge – Rumphius, Vossius, Spinoza
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Republican Baroque: a Yhunderclap, a City hall and two Executions
- 2 The Dramatic Potential in History: Rome and the Republic – Grevius, Vondel, Knüpfer, and Job
- 3 The Cruel Death of Worlds and Political Incompatibility – the Brothers De Witt
- 4 A Happy Split of Worlds or the Comedic Sublime – Frans Hals
- 5 The Seas or the World as Scene – Focquenbroch and Grotius
- 6 Not a Frame but a lens: the Touch of knowledge – Rumphius, Vossius, Spinoza
- 7 Public Theater, Collective Drama and the new – Van den Enden and Huygens
- 8 Interrupting Time for the Sake of Division: History and the Tableau vivant – Rembrandt (Abraham and Isaac), Quast, Vondel, and Vos
- List of illustrations
- Bibliography
- Index
- Index of names
Summary
Spectacle or theater: Rumphius as knowledge-trader
Having survived the horrors of the Thirty Years War that had marked his youth in Germany, Gerhard Everhard Rumphius set out upon a Dutch ship sailing for the East Indies in 1652. Soon after Christmas he left as a low ranking soldier on the ship Muyden, having been more or less tricked into service. Later, by establishing himself in the Moluccas first as a soldier, then a tradesman, he would become one of the most remarkable and innovative scholars of his times, up until the very moment of his death on the island of Ambon in 1702. He would prove to be a pivotal figure in a shift from the theatrum sapientiae to a new theatrical regime that could no longer be understood in strictly theatrical terms. This shift was partly announced in a change from the so-called ‘wonder rooms’ or ‘curiosity cabinets’ to what would grow to be, much later, museums of natural history. Yet, in Rumphius’ case, the republican-baroque nature of his work consisted in a material connection with the world and a willingness to open up his form of science to indigenous forms of knowledge.
Eric Jorink describes Rumphius’ role as follows in a study entitled The ‘Book of Nature’: Dutch scientists and the wonders of God's creation:
Primary Dutch collectors like Witsen, Seba and Vincent thanked the presence of naturalia from the East in considerable ways to Georg Everhard Rumphius, the famous blind ‘Pliny of Ambon’. In his posthumously published Amboinsche Rariteitenkamer (1705) the voc-servant provided a wealth of information about naturalia in the East Indies, but also, almost in passing, a sketch of Dutch collection culture. In images and text Rumphius presented innumerable previously unknown sorts of shells, and mentioned moreover in which collections these were in patria […]. On page 160 Rumphius described a remarkable shell, called ‘the Polish hammer, or, because of its appearance, an Indian kris’. Rumphius mentions how the shell was formerly called ‘Cross-doublet’, ‘because it showed a straight cross on which the chimera of a body showed itself’. This shell was held to be ‘wonder’ in earlier times and collectors would easily pay ‘a hundred ducats’; ‘yet her curiosity is now lost, since one knows now that it is a genital organ’.
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- Information
- A Dutch Republican BaroqueTheatricality, Dramatization, Moment and Event, pp. 125 - 148Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2017