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another. Over the course of the year, my interns—Frank
Walsh and Michael J. Albani—and I discovered how some
soft-spoken D’Arcy pieces have made their presences
known while others have begun to tell new stories.
In the 17th century, the Dutch were a global maritime
power. Through oceanic expansion and establishment
of colonial outposts, particularly in the Southern
Hemisphere, their capital city of Amsterdam became a
preeminent seat of European learning in geography and
astronomy. There, Willem Janszoon Blaeu (ca. 1570–1638)
rose to become the finest map, atlas, and globe maker of
his day. As knowledge of the earth grew, so did Blaeu’s
globes. His first globes, published in 1599, measured 34
cm in diameter, but by 1617 he had doubled their size to
68 cm, the size of the pair exhibited at LUMA.
Blaeu could not have attained such widespread
success without contributions from earlier intellectuals,
one of whom is represented by a piece of metalwork
displayed in a case against the west wall. A curator from
the Adler Planetarium has calculated that the astrolabe
that once hung from the D’Arcy’s bronze astrolabe throne,
dated 1570, was larger than any surviving astrolabe from
the period. The throne is engraved with the signature of
its maker,
Gualterus Arscenius nepos Gemma Frisy
(Walter
Arscenius, nephew of Gemma Frisy). Arscenius (ca. 1555–
1575), who lived and worked in Louvain, was the foremost
navigational instrument maker of the mid-17th century.
He also asserted a strong relationship to renowned Dutch
cartographer Gemma Frisius, his uncle and mentor.
Frisius’s modifications to the designs of several nautical
navigation devices—including the astrolabe—facilitated
increased European exploration of the seas.
When Blaeu first arrived in Amsterdam in 1598, he
embodied the enterprising spirit of a new generation of
cartographers seeking to succeed Frisius’s rapidly waning
circle of students. It is quite likely that Blaeu was familiar
with Arscenius’s work since his own astronomy instructor,
Tycho Brahe, used instruments created by Arscenius for
his celebrated celestial research. Furthermore, Blaeu
would have certainly known about maps and charts
published by another Frisius protégé, Gerardus Mercator,
as they sustained Blaeu’s most fervent competitor, Jodocus
Hondius. Their commercial rivalry came to be rather
dramatically called the “globe wars.”
Upon Willem’s death in 1638, his son, Joan Blaeu, took
over the family business. Whereas the father had competed
to create the most accurate and up-to-date navigational
aids, his shrewd, entrepreneurial son sought to out-produce
his competitors. Quantity overwhelmed quality. The
accuracy of Joan’s maps and atlases did not keep pace with
contemporary discoveries. Consequently, the copper plates
Willem Blaeu used to print his globes remained operative
even into the early 18th century. Corrections had to be
printed on separate sheets and glued over the appropriate
sectors of the globe as we noticed on the coastline of some
Japanese islands. The last printer to own Blaeu’s plates was
Jacques de la Feuille. We found his name in the dedicatory
panel on the celestial globe, thereby dating the production
of this pair to between 1696 and ca. 1719.
Blaeu included illustrations of many monstrous sea
creatures on his terrestrial globe. Merfolk and hippocamps
(half-horse, half-fish creatures) frolic in the oceans.
Baroque-era scientists did not necessarily discount the
plausibility of such aquatic presences. Ambroise Paré, for
example, asserted the existence of tritons and sirens, as
well as fish-monks and fish-bishops in his 1573 text
Des
monstres et prodiges
. A triton and siren adorn Arscenius’s
astrolabe throne. In the same display case is another triton
and siren pair from the early 17th century. Cast in bronze
and gilded, they most likely acted as feet for a chest.
Could it, in the manner of the Collector’s Chest across the
gallery, have contained
naturalia
—a European collector’s
treasured natural wonders from around the globe?
We tend to interpret the D’Arcy’s 16th-century
Collector’s Chest by the great German goldsmith Wenzel
Jamnitzer (1507/08–1585) in terms of its Classical
decoration.The presence of twelve Greco-Roman gods and
goddesses on its exterior allude to its owner’s Humanist
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