The one I visited was a travelling Wunderkammer that stayed in Florence for several weeks. As soon as I read in an article that the exhibition included a mummified siren, I knew I had to go. Yes, I was perfectly aware that the siren was fake. Even so, someone had taken the trouble to create a siren.
I was living in Rome back then, a student and young writer with more dreams than skills, exquisitely broke. A round trip to Florence, a ticket to the show: the sad truth was, it was an expensive undertaking. I counted my lire and found very few. After some accounting, I realized that if I dialled my social life down to zero for a while, I could make it. Drinks or sirens? It was a no-brainer.
On a November morning I packed my lunch, got on a train, and travelled all the way to Florence. The journey, although not a long one, felt interminable: it had not been possible to book a ticket over the phone (online bookings lay some way in the future), so I fretted I would find the show sold out for the day and would never get to see it.
After taking one or two wrong turns, thanks to my non-existent sense of direction (smartphones too were yet to come), I managed to locate the little building that hosted the Wunderkammer. I was immensely relieved to discover that the show hadn’t sold out. I bought my ticket and, at last, was admitted into the holy place.
It was not at all what I had expected.
There were all the right exhibits, the ones I had read about. Odd plants, check. Stuffed animals, check. There were shamanic masks and mysterious etchings, and the pièce de résistance, the mummified siren. It was brown, and wrinkly, and looked passably siren-like if you weren’t too strict about mythology (it was half-woman and half-fish, but originally the sirens were supposed to be half-woman and half-bird). It was okay.
Only okay.
I realized with horror that I was getting bored. I dragged out the visit, hoping against hope that something would strike my eye, grab my heart, and squeeze out a tiny drop of wonder. I was eager to be amazed, willing to be bewildered. I took another look at the siren. Maybe I had missed something, and if I tried a little harder, I would be left astounded by…
It just didn’t happen. Finally, I had to give up, admit that I had wasted my money, and trudge back to the station, defeated. I couldn’t even afford to buy a consoling glass of wine.
I have visited other Wunderkammern since then. I enjoyed them all the more for lowering my expectations. They didn’t fill me with wonder, but then again, they weren’t trying to. They aimed to entertain, and to make people smile. They were never going to inspire a real sense of wonder. And nor could they, because even though they are offering us more or less the same selection of items as the Wunderkammern of past centuries, we, the spectators, have changed beyond recognition.
A Wunderkammer was a model of the world; it was, in a sense, the world. Lost in its sweeping collection of marvels, visitors participated at a visceral level in the cultural revolution that was going on. Between shelves and cabinets, they would discover the miracles of the natural world, and understand that there were more things in heaven and earth, way, way more, than in anybody’s philosophy. Yes, griffins could be real, and sirens too, and it was possible to build automata, and to stuff birds of paradise. And if that was feasible, what else might be? The Wunderkammer opened up a world of possibilities, of unanswered questions.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – the era of the Scientific Revolution – science was asking a whole lot of new questions no one had ever thought of asking before. It was revealing the world to be a Wunderkammer. Were the stars fixed in their positions, as everybody had believed for centuries without number, or did they perhaps move? Why do apples fall? The questioning of the old certainties was creating a climate of doubt, which found its expression in the Wunderkammern.
That climate is long gone. I told myself that knowing that the siren was a fake wouldn’t make any difference, but of course it did. I knew that in all likelihood sirens do not exist, and I also knew that making a mummified one does not require a huge amount of skill. I knew that a mandrake root looked like a person only because of a perceptual phenomenon called pareidolia, by which we see familiar patterns where none exist. Rather than astonishing me, the accumulation of oddities in that modern-day Florentine Wunderkammer made me feel that oddities were cheap and easy to come by.
Overwhelmed by scientific information, at times we might feel the same. A new star was discovered yesterday, but a new star was discovered last month as well. That’s what new stars do, they get discovered. If a sense of wonder is connected to a sense of the mysterious, then science, which has no patience with the mysterious, seems bound to kill wonder. We might be led to believe that science – humanity’s adulthood – has sanitized the world, making of it not a Wunderkammer but, at best, a museum with a gaudy gift shop attached. John Keats, in his poem ‘Lamia’, asked, ‘Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy?’
It is a good question.
*
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, painted in the 1760s by Joseph Wright of Derby, is a splendid work of art. I discovered it during my first visit to London, towards the end of a hard day’s sightseeing. After trekking around town since morning, I had reached a point of saturation in which all the sights I had seen merged into a psychedelic kaleidoscope of shapes and colours. The only reason I stopped in front of Wright’s painting, in the National Gallery, was that there was a wizard in it, and even in a state of exhaustion I could never say no to a wizard.
I moved a little closer, and realized it was not a wizard I was looking at.
The painting represents a scientist performing an experiment for a rapt audience. He is a severe man with a mane of white hair, clad in a red robe with black hemming that would be the pride of any wizard. He takes centre stage, light coming from below, his robe a fiery column in a dark room. The scene is candlelit, which adds to the impression that magic is afoot. With one hand the wizard-scientist is beckoning to us, inviting us into his world, while with the other he lightly touches a crank handle on the top of an exquisitely shaped glass jar, which in turn sits on a wooden pillar. In the jar is a bird.
The bird is going to die.
The glass jar and the pillar form an ‘air pump’, a mechanical contrivance invented by the German scientist Otto von Guericke in the seventeenth century. In a moment, the scientist, or ‘natural philosopher’ as he would have been called in 1768 when the painting was executed, will create a vacuum within the sealed jar, and the bird, with no air left, will convulse, and die.
Calling this an ‘experiment’ is generous: the natural philosopher knows perfectly well that the bird is going to die. It would be more honest to say that he is performing a trick.
The audience forms a circle around him. A young woman shields her eyes, while a little girl courageously looks at the bird, upset, but still prepared to watch. A patronizing older man explains the goings-on to both of them. Another man is lost in contemplation, while a younger one looks on attentively. There are other characters; they are all expecting something to happen, something unusual but not mysterious. They know as well as the scientist does that the bird is doomed, and they know – or are learning – why. This is the opposite of the ‘mystery’ we have learned from magicians and witches, and of the ‘negative capability’ praised by Keats, the ability not to ask questions. In this painting, everyone is asking questions, to receive robust, no-nonsense answers.