Mark Meadow
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara, California

Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellow in History - Class of Fall 2014

A specialist in Northern European art of the early modern period at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Mark Meadow explores the histories of rhetoric and collecting as well as early modern ritual and spectacle. He completed his BA, MA, and PhD (1994) at the University of California at Berkeley, after playing Baroque oboe and recorder for several years as a chamber musician, and studying at Oberlin Conservatory, the Schola Cantorum in Basel, Switzerland, and the Royal Conservatory in s’Gravenhage, Netherlands. Meadow is the author of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs and the Practice of Rhetoric (Waanders Uitgeverij, 2002) and the editor of several volumes, including translations and critical editions of Symon Andriessoon’s 1550 Duytsche adagia ofte spreeckwoorden (Verloren Uitgeveri, 2003) and Samuel Quiccheberg’s 1565 Inscriptiones vel tituli theatri amplissimi (Getty Research Institute, 2013). Meadow’s research has been supported by the Alfried Krupp-Kolleg at Greifswald Universität, the Netherlands Science Foundation, Kress Foundation, Getty Research Institute, the University of California, and others. As Co-Director of “The Microcosms Project,” at the University of California, Meadow investigated the history, functions, and future of the material collections in the contemporary university. Recently he also co-founded Proteus: Studies in Identity Formation in Early-Modern Image-Text-Ritual-Habitat, a new book series with Brepols Publishers in Belgium.

Project Description

Quiccheberg’s Containers: Inventing Practical Knowledge in Early Modern Collections

In his Academy project, “Quiccheberg’s Containers: Inventing Practical Knowledge in Early Modern Collections,” Mark Meadow examined Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones, a key early treatise on collecting, along with a range of primary sources and Kunstkammer artifacts. He presents early modern German collections as pragmatic sites of knowledge-making that are intimately bound to the rise of the modern nation-state and the emergence of a global mercantile and informational economy. Rather than a phenomenon of conspicuous display by the princely elites, Meadow’s project shows that the Kunstkammer emerged decades earlier than once thought, through the collecting activities of the Fuggers, the Augsburg banking magnates who also sponsored a colonial project to the Caribbean coast of South America. Turning to Quiccheberg’s later employment with Albrecht of Bavaria, Meadow redefines such royal collections as “practical sites of knowledge” used by royals and their ministers, who applied science, mathematics, nature, and art to statecraft. Central to this story are “value regimes”— Meadow’s term for the conversion, transfer, and fluidity of various forms of capital, knowledge, and technology. In rewriting the narrative of early museums, “Quiccheberg’s Containers” also contributes to a new history of museums and knowledge-making institutions that extends to the modern research university and beyond.

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