This interdisciplinary study combines theoretical frameworks of analysis and methodologies from anthropology and history. Mariana de Campos Françozo uses these to examine the role of circulation of people, objects, and ideas on the development of collecting of rare objects in Europe and on Europe's production of scientific knowledge about the New World and its peoples during the seventeenth century.
De Campos Françozo reconstructs the formation of the cabinet of curiosities of Count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen during his term of duty in Recife as governor of Dutch Brazil (1637–1644) and follows his personal trajectory and the path of his collection after his return to Holland. Her study is thus divided into three main moments that coincide with chapters: the period of collection-building (1637–1644) in Chapter 2; the period of collection-exhibition and production of scientific knowledge about Brazil in Europe (c. 1644–1655) in Chapter 3); and the period of collection-fragmentation and dispersal of objects (1655–1679) through a process of gift-giving in Chapter 4.
The author not only offers readers an overview of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic and Northern Europe, the Atlantic World, and Brazil but also tackles and provides answers to important questions related to the history of collecting and the production of scientific knowledge. Among the questions: Why and how was this collection built? Which objects were included in the collection, both naturalia and artificialia? How were they obtained? What meanings were attached to these objects? Who assisted Nassau in the process of collection-building, including European artists and naturalists, Brazilian Native American leaders, and African rulers? How and why was the collection brought to Europe? How was the kunstkamer presented to the European, elite and how was it interpreted and understood by that same elite as well as scholars? How did this collection influence the production of scientific knowledge about Brazil in Northern and Western Europe? And, finally, why did Nassau, unlike other collectors of the time, dispose of the objects in his collection and with what purposes?
To reconstruct the trajectory of Nassau's kunstkamer from its building phase to its fragmentation and identify and study the collection's objects, De Campos Françozo supplements her native Portuguese with knowledge of German and Dutch. She combines the analysis of written sources with a thorough study of the artifacts and visual representations that were part of Nassau's cabinet of curiosities. She relies on the analysis of historical documents, both printed and manuscript, such as inventories of collections, catalogues of auctions, descriptions of Nassau's kunstkamer, correspondence between collection owners and intermediaries or brokers, and travelogues. She also examines scientific books published at the time, like the Historia naturalis Brasilie written by Georg Markgraf (1610–1644) and the medical doctor Willem Piso (1610–1678) and later published by Johannes de Laet.
In her study of the objects that had once been part of Nassau's collection, De Campos Françozo includes paintings and drawings by artists such as Albert Eckhout (c.1610–1666) and Frans Post (1612–1680), representing the Brazilian landscape, its people and fauna and flora, as well as the artifacts themselves. This extensive investigation and the dispersal of the collection forces the author to conduct research in archives, libraries, and museums throughout Northern and Western Europe, including the Archive of Royal House, Royal Library, the National Archives of the Netherlands, the Royal Library and the National Museum of Denmark, and the Gotha Research Library in Germany, among others. In the final section of the book, the author includes high-quality reproductions of several key images and objects of Nassau's kunstkamer, found in these archives and libraries.
This study is thus an important contribution to the fields of historical anthropology and cultural history, in particular to the scholarship on the circulation of people, objects (namely exotica), and ideas, and to the academic debates on collecting, collection- building, and the production of knowledge in early modern Europe. This book is also a significant addition to the historiography on seventeenth-century Dutch Brazil, and the Dutch Atlantic at large. The author sheds new light on the scientific and cultural agenda of Count Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, as governor of Dutch Brazil, and its impact in the world of knowledge of Northern and Western Europe.
In her analysis of the objects and drawings of Nassau's collection, De Campos Françozo also unveils the role played by Brazilian Native American groups and their leaders, as well as that of African rulers in the Kongo region, in the count's political and diplomatic operations in the Atlantic World. In this connection, she documents the importance of gift-giving—in its material and symbolic dimensions—in Dutch Atlantic politics. She has added significantly to the study of the production of knowledge about Brazil and Africa, and its impact on the Dutch Republic and Northern and Western Europe more widely.
