ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on practices of display at early modern European courts. Just as objects and artworks were imbued with power dynamics, diplomatic ideals and scholarly ambitions, so too were the strategies of display that were used in making them available for consumption. A consideration of genres of collections – the studiolo, Kunstkammer, picture gallery, sculpture gallery – shows how display was used to organise thinking and confer meaning, to pronounce and shape knowledge and, above all, to articulate a sense of understanding about the self and even the world. Motivated by power, memory, wealth and seduction, no form of display at court was ever neutral, where the question of how to display was of equal significance to what to display.
