Kunstkamera

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kunstkamera, standing on the Universitetskaya Embankment in Saint Petersburg, began with a ukase. Peter the Great issued an imperial decree ordering that malformed stillborn infants from anywhere in Russia be sent to his personal collection. That collection, first opened to the public at the Summer Palace in 1714, became Russia's first public museum. What drove a tsar to build a cabinet of curiosities? Why did he acquire jars of human fetuses and insist the public look at them? And how did those strange, unsettling objects eventually give rise to one of Russia's great scientific institutions, with a collection approaching two million items?

• 2. A Cabinet Fit for a Tsar

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  Peter the Great modeled his collection on the European tradition of the kunstkammer, cabinets of curiosities that courts had maintained since the 16th century. These collections served a precise purpose: they allowed rulers and the elite to demonstrate command over the natural world and to acquire knowledge of it. Peter's own focus fell firmly on naturalia, meaning objects of nature, rather than artificialia, the manmade kind. A large portion of the founding collection came from two Dutch scholars. Peter acquired specimens from Frederick Ruysch and Levinus Vincent in 1697, including human and animal fetuses bearing various birth defects. Peter was not simply indulging a morbid taste. He actively encouraged research into deformities, with a stated aim of debunking the superstitious fear that surrounded so-called monsters. By putting these specimens on public display, he framed them not as omens but as accidents of nature.

• 3. Building the Collection

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  Two further purchases reshaped the scale of the enterprise entirely. In 1716, Peter acquired a large collection from the Dutch pharmacologist Albertus Seba, and the following year he purchased the holdings of the Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch. The sheer volume of these acquisitions made it clear that the Summer Palace could no longer serve as a home for the collection. A purpose-built structure became necessary. Prussian architect Georg Johann Mattarnovy designed the new building in the Petrine Baroque style. Its foundation stone was laid in 1719, and the building was fully completed in 1727. A third acquisition, from Jacob de Wilde, added gems and scientific instruments to what was already a remarkable range of objects. The purchases were largely coordinated by Robert Erskine, Peter's chief physician, alongside Erskine's secretary Johann Daniel Schumacher.

• 4. From Curiosity to Academy

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  The task of examining and organizing the Seba and Ruysch collections did more than fill shelves. It directly spurred the creation of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The museum moved to its present location on the Universitetskaya Embankment in 1727, the year the building was completed. The turreted Petrine Baroque structure still stands there today, topped by an Armillary Sphere crowning its spire. A fire in 1747 cost the collection some of its objects, a reminder of how precarious these early accumulations were. The museum continued to grow, even as the broader Kunstkamera collections were eventually dispersed in the 1830s to a range of newly established imperial institutions.

• 5. A Museum Remade

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  The most significant institution to emerge from that dispersal was the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, formally established in 1879. The museum took on the name of its founder in 1903, a deliberate move to distinguish it from the Russian Museum of Ethnography that had come into being alongside it. The first director of this new institution, Leopold Schrenk, held the post from 1879 to 1894. A long line of directors followed, including Vasily Radlov, who served from 1894 to 1918, and Chuner Taksami, who led the museum from 1997 to 2001. The museum's formal Russian abbreviation, MAE or MAE RAN, reflects its standing within the Russian Academy of Sciences. Today the collection holds nearly two million items drawn from non-Russian cultures across the world, sitting inside one of the few surviving examples of Petrine Baroque architecture.