American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In 1806, Emperor Franz I of Austria (1768–1835) commissioned the naturalist Baron Leopold von Fichtel (1770–1810) to acquire natural and ethnological material collected during Captain James Cook’s (1728–79) voyages at the end of the eighteenth century at an auction in London. This acquisition led to the creation of an Imperial Ethnographic Collection as a subdivision of the United Imperial and Royal Natural History Cabinets in Vienna. These were not, however, the oldest ethnographic pieces collected in Austria; several older Kunst- or Wunderkammern, or cabinets of curiosities, already housed those artifacts. At his castle in Ambras, Archduke Ferdinand II, Count of Tyrol, assembled the most well-known Wunderkammer; he was a noble lord surrounded by the phenomena of the universe, in the midst of his collectables, which were classified according to the principles of Pliny’s Natural History. At that time an exotic or strange appearance was a primary motive for collecting. Apart from a few short-termed special exhibitions, a global overview of this “otherness” of non-European cultures eventually became visible to the public eye in the ethnological exhibition halls of the Imperial and Royal Natural History Court Museum in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century. The halls destined to house these objects were decorated with “ethnological” paintings and sculptures that showed representatives of different Native peoples. The manner in which these individuals are represented mediates the subjective views about non-European peoples that existed in Western societies. The sculptures of Native Americans, the scope of this study, gave the objects exhibited in the showcases a European-invented ethnological context.