The nineteenth-century museum and auction house are seemingly distinct spaces with opposing functions: while the former represents a contemplative space that accumulates objects of art and science, the latter provides a forum for lively sales events that disperse wares to the highest bidders. This contribution blurs the border between museums and marketplaces by studying the Berlin Zoological Museum's duplicate specimen auctions between 1818 and the 1840s. It attends to the operations and tools involved in commodifying specimens as duplicates, particularly the auction catalogue. The paper furthermore contextualizes the museum's sales in a broader history of duplicate auctions across Berlin's collection landscape.

This article studies the history of the specimen collection formed by the Franco-Prussian naturalist Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838), particularly its assembly during the Russian-led Rurik expedition (1815–18) and its subsequent donation to the museums of Berlin University. It examines three inventories which emerged in the process of transferring objects from an individual collector to an institutional collection, and which demonstrate how transformations in the textual documentation of the collection shaped the objects’ perceived significance. Paying attention to the people who generated collection documents, as well as the intended audiences and the purposes for which they were written, the article argues, is a crucial prerequisite for analysing the history, movements and meaning of collections and collected objects.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract