Читать книгу Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric - Veronica Buckley - Страница 15

In the spring of 1649, the fabulous collection of the Emperor Rudolf, pushed and pulled all the way from Prague, was brought ashore at Stockholm, and Christina found herself mistress of one of the finest cultural treasures in Europe. It was a splendid crowning of many smaller efforts of plunder and purchase, the work of more than a century, as successive rulers had brought home piece after piece of beautiful tinder to stoke the Swedes’ reluctant aesthetic fires. Christina’s father had been the most determined of them, to the extent of leaving two of his best generals hostage in Bavaria for the sake of his newly looted Holbein canvases.¹ The Holbeins, along with works by Lucas Cranach and many other German and Dutch masters, were sufficient in number and in quality to form the basis of a first Swedish national collection, installed during Christina’s childhood in the Tre Kronor Castle. Though she was quick to appreciate her father’s methods of acquisition, she was slower to appreciate the works themselves; the restrained northern painters held little appeal for her, and she was able to give many fine canvases away without so much as a backward glance.

But whether she liked the paintings or not, they were important to her. A certain level of cultural life was necessary if Sweden’s national prestige were to be maintained, or indeed even acquired – there was a vast distance to be covered before the Swedes could compare with most of their northern neighbours, let alone with the richly cultured southern lands of Spain or France or, above all, Italy. Plundering was a quick, but not necessarily cheap, way of building up collections; armies were as costly as marble and canvas, and victory was not always assured. Besides, no one would fight for a sculpture or a painting; booty of this kind was unpredictable, to be seized opportunistically like windfall apples from the highest branches. No monarch could afford to presume upon it, and neither did Christina. Even as a young girl, tantalized by ambassadors’ tales of beautiful and brilliant things, she had sent emissaries abroad to seek out books and works of art. One envoy went as far as Egypt, lending his hand in excavations for the remnants of the ancient world. Others scoured the studios and libraries of Europe, unearthing sculptures and drawings and a great many books and manuscripts for the avid young Queen, whose plundering streak was strong enough for her to leave many bills unpaid.

It prevented her, too, from building up her collections in any systematic way. Though she did request specific books, to match her developing intellectual interests, her agents scouting for antiquities and works of art bought more or less at their own discretion, often sending back things that were not to Christina’s taste; ten paintings by Gerrit Dou, for instance, bought at considerable cost by her agent Silfvercrona in Holland, were soon passed on to Silfvercrona’s family. The Prague cornucopia did not change her approach to the northern schools of painting, though it contained many eloquent examples of it, but it did provide a concrete elaboration of the Renaissance ideas which had framed the minds of her own teachers. It was largely within that tradition that Christina was now forming her own view of the world.

The Emperor Rudolf had collected not only paintings and sculptures, but also objets d’art and all sorts of curiosities, sublime and ridiculous, inanimate and live – the lion now brought ashore for Christina was the lonely representative of a once great menagerie. Caravaggio canvases and Dürer woodcuts had overlooked displays of tools and shells and bits and pieces, including nails said to be from Noah’s Ark and a jawbone supposedly belonging to one of the sirens of Homer’s Odyssey. Rudolf had acquired many spectacular pieces, but not primarily so that they might be admired. Instead, the thousands of individual items were all intended to be understood together as a single entity, a complete representation of all the things and ideas in the material world. Together, they were to reveal the harmony of the created universe itself. The myriad items were almost like the words of a lost language; if enough of them could be collected, the links between them might be discerned, and the language of the universe might be finally understood.

This ‘pansophist’ idea underlying the Emperor’s great collection had been part of the received wisdom of his day, and it had not yet given way to the ideas of the empirical scientists, who instead were learning to think of the natural world as a vast series of discrete phenomena. At a time when it still seemed possible to find and categorize every single thing, whether natural or artificial, a collection served as a kind of ‘encyclopedia of the visible world’. It was important to complete it, for without every piece, the overall meaning of the universe itself could not be deciphered. Collecting was a kind of ‘practical alchemy’ which, in its highest form, could reveal the hidden essence of things.²

Though she was well versed in pansophist ideas, and she was to look to other aspects of pansophism to guide her own spiritual path, Christina had no wish to build a collection in this grand Renaissance way. In her grandfather’s day, when the Emperor was acquiring his host of objects, any Swedish noble wishing to follow suit would simply have been too poor to do so, and the haphazard selection of items looted or bought en masse