CHAPTER 4

A Theater of the Unseen: Athanasius

Kircher’s Museum in Rome
Mark A. Waddell

It is indeed absolutely plain that all things seen by us are in truth other
than what they seem.
—Athanasius Kircher, The Great Art of Light and Shadow (1646)

T
he celebrated museum of the Jesuit naturalist Athanasius Kircher
(1602–1680) seems a particularly apt subject for a collection on
world-building, for it was an entire world unto itself, an elaborate
and bewildering cosmos that existed nowhere else in early modern Europe.
In its heyday, the museum was an intellectual and spectacular marvel, vis-
ited by popes, cardinals, and princes as well as a host of intellectual lumi-
naries from both sides of the confessional divide. A visit to Rome by the
virtuosi of Europe inevitably included a sojourn in Father Kircher’s won-
drous collection, and Kircher himself once boasted in a letter that “no for-
eign visitor who has not seen the museum of the Collegio Romano can claim
that he has truly been in Rome.”1
For the historian, the collection that Kircher expanded and controlled in
the Society’s house of learning in early modern Rome, the Collegio Romano,
offers an intriguing glimpse of his epistemology. It was a visual and tangible
expression of the principles that governed his pursuit of knowledge; it was
also inherently ephemeral—its fortunes were closely tied to Kircher him-
self and, as he declined, so too did his collection. It disintegrated swiftly
following his death, in spite of the efforts to preserve it made by Filippo
Buonanni in the early years of the eighteenth century.
Kircher was not, however, a simple collector of natural marvels. He
was an active world-builder whose museum demonstrated his strong inter-
est in how we come to know things about the universe. The Kircherian

A. B. Kavey (ed.), World-Building and the Early Modern Imagination

© Allison B. Kavey 2010
68 ● Mark A. Waddell

collection did more than display tantalizing hints of Nature’s secrets, as

some have suggested; it also displayed the methodological keys required
to unlock those secrets. It trained its audiences in how to look, an exercise
mediated in this case by the intervention of artifice, even as it pointed
to the fallibility of our senses. Thus, the central core of the collection
was concerned less with accumulation and more with querying the act of
knowing.
At the same time, the collection also embodied important epistemo-
logical changes sweeping through the Society of Jesus in the seventeenth
century. In its attention to the use of apparatus and artifice, the collec-
tion embraced the disciplines of mixed mathematics and, perhaps, antici-
pated the culture of machines that would come to prevail in the Royal
Society under the auspices of Boyle, Hooke, and others. In its public char-
acter it emphasized the necessity for universal assent—still crucial to the
Aristotelian process of knowing—while its crowded galleries of spectacular
machines and philosophical puzzles called attention to the singular, subjec-
tive experience. It both challenged and celebrated the exercise of the senses,
straddling what was becoming an increasingly fraught boundary between
sensualism and skepticism. Most importantly, in its rhetorics of similitude,
spectacle, and correspondence the collection encouraged imaginative and
probable considerations of natural phenomena rather than offering certain
and evident demonstrations of causes.
The Kircherian museum offers a fascinating window on the ways in
which early modern Jesuits struggled to frame and understand the natu-
ral world. The cosmos presented by Kircher was a theater of the unseen,
simultaneously a celebration and a revelation of the hidden parts of Nature.
This almost paradoxical identity resulted in a space that functioned some-
where between spectacle and instruction, bemusement and enlightenment.
Indeed, “bemusement” seems a good term to apply to this collection:
Kircher wanted his audiences to be hesitant, overwhelmed, confused—in
a word, uncertain. Only then could they be instructed in new and more
powerful ways of understanding the world.

Situating Collection and Curator

Kircher was fond of embellishing the details of his early life (figure 4.1). He
claimed to have narrowly escaped death as a young boy after falling into
the local river and being swept under a mill wheel. Entering the Society of
Jesus in 1618 at the age of sixteen, he was displaced repeatedly over the next
several years by the constant warfare then plaguing Germany, and even-
tually found himself f loating down yet another river on a piece of ice—
with, he later claimed, a murderous mob of Protestants in pursuit. More
Protestants beat and threatened to hang him, and his improbable survival,
Kircher decided, was a clear case of divine providence. He reached Lyons