The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology

lure of antiquity

Translated into six languages

The Kunstkammer was a programmatic display of art and oddities amassed by wealthy Europeans during the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. These nascent museums reflected the ambitions of such thinkers as Descartes, Locke, and Kepler to unite the forces of nature with art and technology. Bredekamp advances a radical view that the baroque Kunstkammer is also the nucleus of modern cyberspace.


Horst Bredekamp (Humboldt University, Berlin), author, is the author of ten books and numerous articles, many of them translated into several languages.

Allison Brown, translator, has translated German scholarly books and essays since 1988. Her main fields of interest include history, art, and the social and political sciences, especially women’s and cultural studies. She has an MA in translation science and is certified by the state of Berlin to translate official documents into English.

Anthony T. Grafton (Princeton University), introduction, is the author of Defenders of the Text, Forgers and Critics, and numerous other books.