Collecting among the middle classes

At the same time as Ferdinand of Tyrol and Rudolf II, other European princes were also establishing encyclopaedic collections. These provided the model for similar institutions created by the nobility, patrician class and scholars. Monasteries also had similar collections. All these ‘museums’ became centres of attraction for scholarly travellers. The collections assembled by individuals from the middle classes often came about for practical reasons – apothecaries and physicians collected plants and minerals in order to investigate their effects.

It is also this latter type that has shaped our image of what these collections looked like. In contrast to their princely counterparts, they were accessible to a broader range of people, and their organization and contents were published in catalogues and treatises. Most princely Kunstkammer can only be reconstructed from inventories or – as at Ambras – from the rooms and furniture in which they were once displayed.

The Kunstkammer of Rudolf II were not conceived with visitors in mind, the objects being stored in cupboards, chests and caskets, some of the paintings even wrapped in cloth; the rooms in which they were kept seemed more like storerooms, according to the Venetian envoy Girolamo Soranzo. Only select individuals such as Maximilian I of Bavaria were allowed to view the collections and were shown them by the emperor himself. On the other hand, court artists, natural philosophers (scientists) and craftsmen had virtually unlimited access to the collections.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, on his return from the Netherlands, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm brought an extensive and valuable collection of paintings, reliquaries, ecclesiastical vestments and rock crystal objects to Vienna which he installed in the Stallburg. The holdings also included tapestries together with sculptures in stone, wood, bronze and ivory.

Over the following centuries little was added to the Habsburg collections.