View source for Kunstkamera, St Petersburg, Russia


The Kunstkamera of Peter the Great is often seen as a haphazard collection of incoherent rarities, but from the outset, objects were collected systematically subject to a well defined plan. The current claim that the Kunstkamera is the world's first museum is currently being investigated by staff, and never be able to be clearly determined, but the Kunstkamera may very well be, do to its organization, be the worlds first Modern Museum, "Modern" meaning a kind of Enlightenment fruition, in spite of the antique nature of its exhibits. The Kunstkamera is the "Oldest" "New" Museum. Peter's main interest was in [[Naturalia]], rather than the so-called [[artificialia]]. Peter encouraged research of [[deformities]], all along trying to debunk the superstitious fear of [[monsters]]. 

He issued an ukase ordering malformed, still-born infants to be sent from all over the country to the imperial collection. He subsequently had them put on show in the Kunstkamera as examples of accidents of nature. In 1716 Peter established the mineral cabinet of Kunstkamera, depositing there a collection of 1195 minerals which he had bought from Gotvald, a Danzig doctor. 

The collection was enriched with Russian minerals. It was a predecessor of the Fersman Mineralogical Museum, now based in Moscow. Many items were bought in Amsterdam from pharmacologist [[Albertus Seba]] (1716) and anatomist [[Frederik Ruysch]] (1717) and formed the basis for the Academy of Sciences. 

The Kunstkamera was specially built to house these two extensive collections. A third acquisition came from Jacob de Wilde, a collector of gems and scientific instruments. Head-physician to the czar, Robert Erskine, and his secretary Johann Daniel Schumacher were responsible for the acquisition. 

In the 1830s, the Kunstkamera collections were dispersed to newly established imperial museums, the most important being the [[Peter the Great Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia|Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography]], established in 1879. It has a collection approaching 2,000,000 items and has been known as the Peter the Great Museum since 1903 (in order to distinguish the older museum from the [[Russian Museum of Ethnography, Saint Petersburg, Russia|Russian Museum of Ethnography]]). 

Originally there were separate museums for anthropology and ethnography, but on 5 December 1878 it was decided to merge them into a single museum with Leopold Schrenk being appointed on November 10th, 1879. It was not until 1887 that the museum was finally provided with its own exhibition premises attached to Kunstkamera in Tamozhennyi pereulok. On 23 September, 1889, the first exhibition of the unified Museum was opened. One of the most gruesome exhibits is the head of Willem Mons, brother of Anna Mons. In 1747 some objects were lost in a fire. The museum houses 78 watercolours by the Peruvian artist Pancho Fierro, the largest collection outside Peru. These were brought back by Schrenk following his visit there in 1854.

[[catagory:Museums]]
[[category:Russia]]