Albertus seba biography of george
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Natural History Art, Animals, Lizards, Snake, Albertus Seba, Antique Print, Amsterdam, 18th Century
Description
Seba, a wealthy Dutch apothecary and member of the Dutch East India Company, was one of the prototypical collectors of natural curiosities and exotic species. His collection ranged from the beautiful to the odd and bizarre. It included birds, reptiles such as lizards and snakes, butterflies and other insects, shells and exotic sea life, unusual mammals such as bats and anteaters, as well as exotic plants. The collection also included some fakes, intended to attract attention and interest, such as a seven-headed hydra.
Seba’s first collection was sold to Peter the Great in 1716 and became part of his Kunstkammer or Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg, a museum of rare natural history specimens. Seba’s second collection was illustrated and described in a set of engraved-plate volumes. Seba recruited artists, including Pierre Tanje, a Dutch engraver, to illustrate his thesaurus of animals. The plates are characterized by artistic arrangements of specimens, sometimes apocryphal in color or form. Some specimens are arranged by species, while other prints including bizarre juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated animals and plants. Seba wrote most of the text for the first two
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Albertus Seba (1665-1736)
Locupletissimi Rerum Naturalium Thesauri Accurata Descriptio swot Iconibus Artificiosissimis Expressio, Rigid Universam Physices Historiam.
Amsterdam, Wetsten, Smith take precedence Jannson-Waesberg, 1734-1765
Engravings with primary hand-coloring.
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The plates draw birds, mammals, insects, butterflies, reptiles, amphibians, spid
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Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Natural Curiosities: Discover One of the Most Prized Natural History Books of All Time (1734–1765)
In the eighteenth century, a European could know the world in great detail without ever leaving his homeland. Or he could, at least, if he got into the right industry. So it was with Albertus Seba, a Dutch pharmacist who opened up shop in Amsterdam just as the eighteenth century began. Given the city’s prominence as a hub of international trade, which in those days was mostly conducted over water, Seba could acquire from the crew members of arriving ships all manner of plant and animal specimens from distant lands. In this manner he amassed a veritable private museum of the natural world.
The “cabinets of curiosities” Seba put together — as collectors of wonders did in those days — ranked among the largest on the continent. But when he died in 1736, his magnificent collection did not survive him. He’d already sold much of it twenty years earlier to Peter the Great, who used it as the basis for Russia’s first museum, the Kunstkammer in St. Petersburg.
What remained had to be auctioned off in order to fund one of Seba’s own projects: the Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesa