6 - Places of Knowledge between Ulm and the Netherlands in the Seventeenth Century: The Kunstkammer of Johannes Faulhaber

Summary

Abstract

This article investigates how the Kunstkammer of Johannes Faulhaber, renowned mathematician and engineer of Ulm, functioned as a place dedicated to the advancement of mechanical-architectural knowledge. Examining several unstudied publications associated with his Kunstkammer and a previously unknown inventory, we reconstruct the collection and examine Faulhaber's advertisement of it in printed catalogues. A comparison of Faulhaber᾽s collection with that of his contemporary Joseph Furttenbach the Elder highlights specifics of its focus and scope. The Kunstkammer was also a place of technology transfer, whereby aspects of Dutch military technology were introduced into the German context, and were in turn further disseminated through Faulhaber's publications. In this sense, Faulhaber᾽s Kunstkammer can be understood as an entanglement of ‘places’ – both physical and printed.

Keywords: art chamber, technical model, fortification, secrecy, technology transfer, engineer

In 1628 Johannes Faulhaber (1580-1635), mathematician and engineer in Ulm, published his brief brochure Geheime Kunstkammer (secret art chamber). This essentially unstudied publication is one of the earliest printed records of a Kunstkammer of an engineer or technical designer. Faulhaber's unique collection exhibited machines and fortification models, technical and mathematical manuscripts and drawings, as well as drawing and measuring instruments, rather than the artificialia, naturalia, and exotica typical of Kunst- and Wunderkammern. This article focuses on Faulhaber's Kunstkammer as a dedicated place of mechanical and architectural knowledge. The didactic function and use of the collection, and its related publications, may be likened to an entangled space of engineering knowledge production and distribution. Still, as Faulhaber's Kunstkammer does not survive, it is necessary to reconstruct it by reverting to his Geheime Kunstkammer and similar publications, as well as a previously unpublished handwritten inventory, the so-called Specification, which enumerates his models, drawing and measuring instruments, fortification and machine drawings, and other items.

Johannes Faulhaber's Kunstkammer was part of his estate and famous school of mathematics, founded in 1600, which was visited by a numerous young scholars, as well as members of the high-ranking nobility. Both the collection and the school formed a dedicated place for education and the transfer of mechanical-architectural knowledge within Ulm and abroad. Consequently, Faulhaber sought to ensure his establishment's success by means of printed publications – notably his Geheime Kunstkammer – in effect ‘spreading out’ the theoretical equalization of the collection's physical place within an imaginative space of the textual Kunstkammer.