Daniela Bleichmar, Seeing the World in a Room: Looking at Exotica in Early Modern

Collections, w: COLLECTING ACROSS CULTURES. MATERIAL EXCHANGES IN THE EARLY MODERN

ATLANTIC WORLD, red. Daniela Bleichmar i Peter C. Mancall, University of
Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 2011, s. 30.

while catalogues and inventories present us with lists of individual

objects, collections were experienced spatially as aggregates of multiple objects.
The experience of the collection was a narrative, constructed by the collector
and by the visitor, which pinned down the meaning of objects. The gaze opera-
tive in the collection, traveling from object to object, was a way of seeing that
constructed narratives. The collector who guided a visitor through his cabinet
directed the experience by telling stories about the objects on display�that is
precisely the function of the prose account of a visit to Lastanosa�s collection or
of the guides depicted in the engravings of Imperato�s and Cospi�s cabinets
(Figures 1.2 and 1.3). The collection functioned not only as an accumulation of
objects but also as a narrated social experience. The guide, with his pointing
stick, invites us not so much to see objects as to see them in a certain way and as
part of a certain story. Andre�s de Uztarroz�s Descripcio�n of Lastanosa�s
collection
allows the reader to wander the palace room by room and in this way to attempt
to reconstruct the collection as a space, as an experience, and as a narrative.