Christina Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric. Veronica Buckley

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