Tiny mechanical insects. A set of solid silver furniture, made for a prince. Drinking vessels made from nautilus shells. Elaborate gilt clocks. A magic lantern. Gaming boards inlaid with ivory, amber, and mother-of-pearl. An Aztec feather mosaic shield. These are just a few of the kinds of items in Making Marvels, the exhibition catalogue from the exhibit of the same name on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from November 2019 until March 2020.

Princes collected these objects and many others in the early modern period as a mark of their distinction, as a way to demonstrate their aesthetic refinement and scientific sensibility, and as evidence of their temporal and geographic power. The collections, often known by the places they were kept—Wunderkammern (rooms of wonder) or Kunstkammern (rooms of art)—highlighted natural abundance and variation, princely magnificence, and the astonishing virtuosity of the artisans who took nature's raw and sometimes strange materials and made them into ingenious and exquisite treasures. Eight essays and an introduction accompany the catalogue entries and are loosely organized around Kunstkammern generally, princely edification and amusement, and technology.

From instruments of observation and measurement to classification systems, to showcasing new materials and innovative techniques, knowledge of the natural world—its phenomena, constituent elements, and governing principles—was an organizing principle and driving interest behind these collections. Essays by Pamela Smith, Peter Plassmeyer, and Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie take up the role of scientific knowledge in relation to Kunstkammern from perspectives both synthetic and particular. Smith's chapter on courtly marvels and the New Science based on experiment (however haphazard) deftly outlines two changes, epistemological and practical, that began over the course of the sixteenth century, and explains their impacts on princely collections. A more sustained, systematic interest in joining theoretical, syllogistic knowledge (argumentum) with natural knowledge from the sensorium and from working with materials (ars), and a greater interest among artisans and practitioners to write down their empirical knowledge both helped shape the conditions of possibility from which Kunstkammern emerged. Plassmeyer's chapter on scientific instruments as luxury objects amplifies Smith's argument about the increased interpenetration of different spheres of natural knowledge and social registers in this period, by examining the role of instrument makers, who often moved between the court, the university, and learned societies. The court, with interests in ballistics, metallurgy, agronomy, and medicine, was a space where theory and praxis commingled by necessity, and Donefer-Hickie clarifies how alchemy united multiple practical interests—distilling, glassmaking, metallurgy, and medicine—and why princes were patrons and practitioners of this art.

Although scientific knowledge was a focus of the exhibition and this catalogue, some of the other essays lack context and an awareness of recent historiography in the history of science and early modern studies. Many of the objects on display in Kunstkammern contained natural materials from places far from Dresden or Nuremberg, such as ebony, elephant ivory, Seychelles nut, coral, and tortoiseshell, and some manufactured items, like the Aztec feather mosaic shield, were trophies from distant, vanquished empires. Yet, aside from a few brief mentions of exploration and conquest, the remaining essays do not engage with recent scholarship that takes up the global turn in the history of science, in the history of empire, and of the early modern Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. The catalogue entries include several foreign items made specifically for the European elite, such as a late sixteenth-century Mexican feather mosaic depicting Saint Michael slaying the devil and a sixteenth-century chessboard made in Gujarat. But other than these entries, one gets little sense of the larger world intruding into these rooms of art, despite decades of scholarship that contextualize these non-European materials within networks of trade, Christianization, colonization, and enslavement. Two essays discuss the desire in this period to showcase items made from materials from Africa—elephant ivory and ostrich eggs—without mentioning that the increased availability of these materials stemmed from European incursions into West Africa for gold and human beings.

Overall, Making Marvels is positioned firmly within the Kunstkammer, with some interest in a few of the most highly paid artisans who served the prince's desires. How and why exotic materials traveled to the prince's court, what unquestioned imperatives rationalized the production of these luxury items, which invisible artisans kept the prince's astronomical instruments and distillation apparatus in working order—these questions are not within the scope of this volume. The items under discussion are beautiful and captivating, certainly, but they are also material witnesses to the forces and ideas that shaped their creation and use. By ignoring that greater context, Making Marvels uncritically recapitulates the point of these collections: to dazzle the viewer with luxury and virtuosity, and to naturalize the ideologies behind their creation.