Traces of Meanings in Catalogues and Collections. The Eighteenth-Century Mineral Cabinet.

Usually, things that enter a museum do not acquire additional traces of use and remain materially intact. They entered a museum due to some specific meanings and became semiophores.1 Such qualities differentiated them from the row of other similar but ordinary things and made them valuable. Later, inside a museum, these meanings start changing and developing: they may be reinterpreted, recontextualized, or supplanted by new significations in response to shifting epistemological paradigms, curatorial practices, or sociocultural demands. A museum item has no single meaning but layers of them. All these meanings, both historical and contemporary, interact and accumulate, are unseen but remain a crucial part of its museum essence, and they leave traces.
In this contribution, I aim to address the question of traces left behind, engaging with the history of the Mineral Cabinet of the SPb Kunstkamera (1714-1836), the first public mineral collection in Russia.2 Samples of minerals belonging to any mineralogical collection or museum can be regarded as objects of material culture,3 i.e. items that have meanings outside strict boundaries of modern academic mineralogical science. My contribution addresses how to recognise the traces of meaning that museum things possess and acquire over time by analyzing written sources and collections.
Theoretical Framework
Following Ian Hodder, any object of material culture has three types of meaning.4 First, there is the object involved in exchanges of matter, energy and information. This meaning concerns how the object is used and how it conveys information about social characteristics, personal feelings and religious beliefs; the object’s meaning lies in the effects it has on the world. Second, the object has meaning as a part of a code, set or structure, and its particular meaning depends on its place within the code.5 The third type of meaning is the content of meaning, i.e. the historical content of the changing ideas and associations of the object itself. In the context of my research, it appears that objects lose their meanings of the first type as soon as they enter a museum. Upon entry, their practical, functional meanings are not important anymore and are replaced by meaning of the second type, meaning they acquire within a museum collection.6
How can these types of meanings be recognized in museums items? Susan Pearce suggests that the meanings of museum objects should be considered as a complex of their past and present interpretations, emphasizing the importance of historical variability in these meanings (from metonymic to metaphorical). A collectible object is polysemantic, but the nature of its meanings is not the same: a metonymic meaning is immovably fixed “in the object itself”, in its structure or functions (in those very arbitrary practical and symbolic meanings; and this is where the “magic of the thing” manifests itself, according to Peirce). Metaphorical meanings are changeable and are formed during communication.7 A museum object functions simultaneously as a metonymic sign and as a metaphorical symbol, giving rise to the possibility of multiple interpretations. Each time an observer can simultaneously choose any meaning from the set of metonymic meanings and transfer it to the set of metaphorical ones, or assign new meanings to the object. Between multiple theories of meaning, the Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy suggests differing two main types: the first sort of theory, a semantic theory, is a theory which assigns semantic content to expressions of a language. The second sort of theory, a metasemantic theory, is a theory which states the facts in virtue of which expressions have the semantic contents that they have.8 As it seems, traces of semantic contents of items can be found in catalogues, but metasemantic traces lie outside the texts.
Historical Context and Source Base
A challenge in studying the eighteenth-century Mineral Cabinet of the Kunstkamera lies in its current invisibility. Over the course of its long history, original specimens have been either dispersed or intermixed with later acquisitions. By the early twentieth century, the entire collection was re-catalogued in new inventory books, with no reference to the provenance or historical context of individual items. The three surviving catalogues of the Mineral Cabinet (1745, 1760, 1786-89), known as mineral catalogues, are the only sources representing the eighteenth-century collection as an entity. The catalogues of the Mineral Cabinet were written in Latin by scientists of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The first one was compiled by Johann Georg Gmelin and Mikhail Lomonosov, and was printed in 1745 as a part of the consolidated catalogue of all the Kunstkamera collections (zoological, botanical, anatomical, etc.).9 The two other catalogues, which were kept in manuscript form, were the Johann Gotlob Lehmann catalogue (1760)10 and the catalogue of Johann Georgi, Hans Michael Renovanz and Vasily Zuev (1786-1789).11 Each of these three mineral catalogues was different; none of the descriptions were repeated, and pre-existing records for items were not reused. Over fifty years in the eighteenth century, the same growing collection of minerals was described anew three times. Between 1745 and 1789, the only formal reason for compiling a new catalogue appears to have been the relocation of the Mineral Cabinet within the Kunstkamera, that is, the reorganization of the exhibition halls housing the mineralogical collection. The significant common feature the mineral catalogues had, was that every catalogue followed an order of a system of mineralogy, and text was constructed according to mineralogical systematics.12 The three different catalogues featured three distinct systems of mineralogy, each with its own specific order of mineral “classes”. What they had in common, however, was that each system presented a ready-made table of these classes, into the columns of which descriptions of specific mineral specimens from the collection were to be placed. A catalogue in the eighteenth century was a kind of desiderata list that clearly defined the composition of a collection. Throughout the eighteenth century, a mineralogical collection served as the material embodiment of mineralogical systematics. However, the descriptions of mineral specimens continued to evolve within those ready-made tables from one catalogue to another, and this line of change reflects the ongoing process of accumulating meanings attributed to museum objects.

Florentine mosaics – art works or mineralogical objects?
Most, if not all, of the item descriptions in the eighteenth-century catalogues of the Mineral Cabinet collection are so different that it is impossible to reliably correlate or compare them with one another. Fortunately, several Florentine mosaic plaques, which were kept in the museum’s storage without any information about their origin, thus obscuring their provenance, were successfully attributed to the Kunstkamera’s Mineral Cabinet collection based on descriptions found in the 1745 catalogue.13 Furthermore, it was possible to identify their descriptions in the catalogues of 1760 and 1786-89.
The 1745 Mineral Catalogue emphasizes that some of the images on the plates are natural, created by Nature itself. Ruins, mountains, and clouds appear as natural patterns on the surface of a stone known at the time as Florentine marble.14 Similarly, some trees depicted on other plates, previously described under the old name Dentrite, are also natural formations.15 The description in the 1745 catalogue brought the plaques into the category of “figured stones,” referring to a specific narrative that had been known at least since the time of Pliny the Elder and remained widespread in the natural sciences throughout the seventeenth and, to some extent, the eighteenth centuries.16 The key idea was that these images were created not only by human hands, but also by Nature itself. Later catalogues no longer included such details. By the time the 1786–89 catalogue was compiled, the concept of “sports of Nature” had disappeared from academic mineralogical science, and these mosaics were recorded under the general name of marble.17 In our time, the Florentine mosaic plaques kept in the Fersman Mineralogical Museum, like many other items in the museum’s collection of precious and decorative stones, demonstrate the beauty of natural stone and serve solely an ornamental function, decorating the otherwise strictly mineralogical exhibition. However, the descriptions in the eighteenth-century catalogues, which incorporated details of the curious shapes and patterns of these items into the mineralogical scientific narrative, reveal alternative meanings that both the objects and the very concept of the mineral world once carried. In the context of the types of meaning that material objects can hold, as discussed by Ian Hodder, these meanings belong to the second type, those that are revealed within specific narratives.
The catalogues of the Mineral Cabinet contain lists of collection items, each accompanied by a definition and description. The structure and sequence of these descriptions can help reveal the underlying organization and logic of the collection. A catalogue can be considered a source of meaning for the collection’s items, so a series of catalogues may reflect the development and transformation of those meanings over time. However, a catalogue does not preserve all the meanings embodied in material objects. It remains a collection of words, not of things, and in this it differs fundamentally from the collection itself, which has a spatial dimension and presents objects visually rather than verbally. The impression one gains from reading about an object is not the same as the experience of encountering it physically, in its material presence. It is not the written descriptions, but rather the material arrangement of the collection that engages the viewer—primarily through embodied, muscular effort—in perceiving the objects as singular museum artifacts. This physical interaction invites the viewer to intuitively discern the relationships among the objects themselves and their broader connections to the world.
The connection between the cataloguing of items in the Mineral Cabinet and the spatial organization of the collection was implicitly reflected in the first catalogue of 1745, which indicated the physical location of minerals in the collection’s rooms using the term scrinium and capsula. The mineralogical collection was contained in a special type of cabinet, like a chest of drawers (scrinium) with drawers (capsulae) correlating to classes of the system of mineralogy. Thus, a scrinium was the visible expression of a system of mineralogy, and its drawers corresponded to the columns of a table of the system of mineralogy.18 Items of the Mineral Cabinet were seen drawer by drawer as pages of a book are read, page by page, never altogether at the same time. Nothing beyond the system of mineralogy could be included in the collection—no other thematic sections, only the mineralogical system itself, which represents a perfect collection and already encompass all the items necessary for it to be considered complete. In the later catalogues of the Mineral Cabinet, the collection was described without indicating the locations of storage, but still strictly organized according to the classes of the mineralogical system. From the second half of the eighteenth century, the mechanics of the collection started to change. The collection, previously enclosed inside a cabinet, had now been completely turned inside out: a closed cabinet had been replaced by transparent ones and later a flat display case appeared like a table. Instead of presentation based on depth, flat surfaces appeared by the nineteenth century – the sort of space that is generally still used in mineralogical museums today. By that time, several thematic sections had emerged within the Mineral Cabinet: Russian and foreign minerals, fossils, and a little later, according to guides to the Mineral Cabinet from the early nineteenth century, also geographical and educational displays. Let us note here that there is a time when new meanings were attributed to mineral items. It had become important to be a Russian or a foreign mineral, suitable for education use or not etc. Mineralogical systematic order was preserved as just a small part of a more general assemblage representing an academic mineralogical museum.
The two different spatial models of a mineral cabinet correspond to two different conceptions of a collection. Metaphors in descriptions of a properly organized mineralogical collection changed through the eighteenth century: one compared a collection with a book, and later with a map.19 It is worth pointing out that it was a map showing the political boundaries between countries. From that time a mineralogical museum included much more content than just a system of mineralogy. At the time of the Russo-Turkish war, Catherine the Great wrote to Voltaire that after each new victory of the Russian army she erected an obelisk in her residence at Tsarskoye Selo, and if the war continued, her garden would look like a field for a skittling game. It is remarkable that the empress pointed out that all obelisks were made only of Russian marbles, considered not to be inferior in beauty to Italian variety.20 Russian natural stone in all its diversity and beauty was being used for the first time in political rhetoric as a visual representation of the power of Russia. In the Mineral cabinet at the end of the eighteenth century several marble obelisks appeared. The museum items undergoing selection and processing dictated by the accepted conditions of exhibition and storage preserve traces of the collection’s spatial organization, as a fresco or an icon which even when moved to an exhibition hall, always bears visible evidence of the special structure of the space of the temple for which they were intended (specific lighting conditions, for instance, define local colors and sharp contours, while placement high within a dome requires proportions tailored to particular viewing angles). In a mineral cabinet organized as a book it should be small pieces of certain shapes to suitably lie in a flat closed drawer, whereas in a open mineral cabinet organized as a map requires another type of object: bigger, more voluminous, and visible from a long distance. Some old collections’ samples cannot be successfully exhibited in modern museum display cases – for example, numerous flat stone tiles create an overly monotonous uniform surface there. But this is because they were intended for another space! – as plaques of Florentine mosaic, for example.
The radical transformation of the spatial organization of the Mineral Cabinet coincided with several other significant changes within the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. In the academic records of 1803, the Mineral Cabinet was, for the first time, officially renamed a mineralogical museum, and mineralogy was designated as an independent scientific discipline, rather than a subdivision of natural history alongside botany and zoology, as it had been previously classified. The mode of a collection as a book still operates within museum depositories for specialists, and likewise, a collection as a map with its internal regions and unexpected inhabitants suggests specific routes for the viewer and continues to function in museums.
In conclusion, a collection is a world where traces of different meanings flicker and fade over material objects, with the changing luster of museums appearing differently to different spectators and from various angles of view. Fragments of cultural meanings can be recognized by scrutinizing the text in the catalogues of the Mineral Cabinet of the Kunstkamera and other sources around it, paying attention to elements that appear at the margins of mineralogical descriptions. Such elements seem non-mineralogical, and all that seems wrong to a modern researcher in the catalogues (such as outdated, unnecessary, excessive, incomprehensible, inscrutable or just unacceptable to modern science) is the subject to be analyzed. Figurative speaking names of minerals, far from academic nomenclature but preserved in some mineralogical manuals, and the very existence of works of art within scientific mineralogical collections are traces of meanings which items born in other times.
This essay is based on a paper presented at the workshop Trace on Trace. Inter- and Transdisciplinary Perspectives, convened by the focus area Materiality between Past and Future at the Center for Theories in Historical Research, Bielefeld University, in November 2024. The workshop brought together researchers in history, philosophy, theatre and cultural studies to revisit, explore, and challenge the potential and boundaries of concepts of trace in relation to traces on objects.
Daria Novgorodova (dnovgorodova@gmail.com) is a historian of collections and collecting, and of gemmology. She has a background in geology and a PhD in Cultural Studies (The thesis: “The catalogues of the Mineral cabinet of the Kunstkamera of the 18th century: cultural history of the collection”). She is currently senior researcher of the Fersman Mineralogical Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences, after having been curator of the Precious and Decorative Stones Collection there between 2015 and 2020. She has published numerous articles in Russian, Polish and English on museology, the cultural history of eighteenth-century science, and the reconstruction of collecting practices.


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- See Krzysztof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris-Venise, XVIe – XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. [↩]
- The Mineral Cabinet of the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera was founded in 1714, when the private collections of Peter the Great were transported from Moscow to St. Petersburg and opened to the public at the end of 1718/the beginning of 1719. In 1725, after the creation of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, the Kunstkamera passed under the Academy’s control and in 1836 the Mineral Cabinet as well as some other Kunstkamera cabinets became a separate academic institution beyond the Kunstkamera, the Mineralogical Museum. Now it is called the Fersman Mineralogical Museum of the Russian Academy of Sciences and is located in Moscow. For more on the Mineral Cabinet of the Kunstkamera see in Daria Novgorodova, “The Constitution and Evolution of the First Russian Mineralogical Collection: The Mineral Cabinet of St. Petersburg’s Kunstkamera” in ORDERING KNOWLEDGE: Disciplinarity and the Shaping of European Modernity, ed. Jean-Jacques Chardin, Sorana Corneanu and Richard Somerset. Études anglophones. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2023, 253-276. [↩]
- See Susan Pearce, Museums, Objects, and Collections: A Cultural Study. Leicester: Leicester Univ. Press, 1992 and her other works. [↩]
- Ian Hodder, “The contextual analysis of symbolic meanings,” in Interpreting Objects and Collections, ed. Susan M. Pearce. London/New York: Taylor & Francis, 1994, 12, first published in The Archaeology of Contextual Meanings., ed. Ian Hodder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 1. [↩]
- The code here is the concept of semiotics, that is a kind of convention for communication that enables the production and interpretation of texts, see Daniel Chandler, Semiotics: The Basics. 4th Edition. London/New York: Routledge, 2022. [↩]
- More on the nature of a collection see Susan Stewart, On longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1993. [↩]
- Susan Peirce refers here, among other things, to the phenomenological theory of the “implicit reader” in Wolfgang Iser, The implied reader: Patterns of communication in prose fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. [↩]
- Jeff Speaks, “Theories of Meaning,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2024 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, URL: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2024/entries/meaning/ (27.06.2025). [↩]
- ‘Catalogus minerarum’, Musei Imperialis Petropolitani, vol. 1:3 (St. Petersburg: Typis Academiae scientiarum Petropolitanae, 1745), later M. V. Lomonosov, ’Mineral’nyi katalog’, 7-70 (in Latin), 71-241 (in Russian), recent edition: ’Musei Imperialis Petropolitani’, vol. 1, in N. N. Kazanskii (ed.), Slovar’ iazyka M. V. Lomonosova, vyp. 5, 359-467. [↩]
- The Fersman mineralogical museum has two copies: Lehmann’s Catalog älteres Exemplar. Bd. I, Bd. II, the Archive of the Fersman mineralogical museum, d. No 15 (Bd. I), 78 l., Д. No 16 (Bd. II), 82 l.; Lehmann’s Catalog. Neueres Exemplar. Bd. I. II, the Archive of the Fersman mineralogical museum, d. No 17, 166 l. [↩]
- The catalogue of the Mineral Cabinet of 1786-1789 was in four parts: Russian minerals, foreign minerals and two parts for Russian and foreign fossils. The descriptions of minerals were made by Johann Georgi and Hans Michael Renovanz and the descriptions of fossils by Vasily Zuev. The catalogue for foreign minerals is Index Lithophylacei exotici Musei Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis Petropolitanae. MDCCLXXXIX, the Archive of the Fersman mineralogical museum, d. no. 60, 98 l. (copies see I. G. Georgi, Catalogus Mineralium Musaei Academiae Scientarum Imperialis, methodo Wallerii digestus. Anno MDCCLXXXVIII, PFA RAN, r-d I, op. 122, no. 8, 96 l.; I. G. Georgi, Index Lithophylacei exotici Musei Academiae Scientiarum Petropolitanae. Anno MDCCLXXXIX, PFA RAN, r-d I, op. 122, no. 8a, 2 l.). The catalogue for Russian minerals is Index Lithophylacei Rossici Musei Academiae scientarum Petropolitanae. Georgi’s Katalog der russichen Mineralien und Gesteine (1786–1789), Copie des Georgischen Originals), the Archive of the Fersman mineralogical museum, d. b/n, 50 l. The catalogue for Russian fossils is Enumeratio fossilium Rossiae indigenorum, classem quartam Systematij mineralogici Walleriani constituentium. [27 November 1788], the Archive of the Fersman mineralogical museum, d. No. 1, l. 82-94. It is not currently known where the catalogue for foreign fossils is, and whether it has survived, but we have its brief contents at the end of the Russian fossils catalogue (Enumeratio fossilium Rossiae, 94). [↩]
- A system of mineralogy, which described the systematic order of the third kingdom of Nature, comprising minerals, could have been one of the three components of a general System of Nature, alongside the System of Plants and the System of Animals, or it might have been developed independently. It is known that, by the mid-eighteenth century, around thirty different systems of mineralogy coexisted. [↩]
- Daria D. Novgorodova, “Samples of Marble Florentine mosaic and Ruin Marbles from collections of the Fersman Mineralogical Museum in the Kunstkamera’s Mineral Catalogue (1745),” in New Data on Minerals 46 (2011), 123-134. [↩]
- Now referred to as ruin marble. [↩]
- Those manganese inclusions now known as dendrites. [↩]
- On how this narrative was reflected in art of that times see Isabella Augart, Maurice Saß and Iris Wenderholm (eds.), Steinformen: Materialität, Qualität, Imitation. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110583618. [↩]
- Index Lithophylacei exotici, “Marmor dendricitum cum figuris mosaicis. Marmor pictorium florentinium.” [↩]
- See, for example, the illustration of a such organization of a mineral cabinet in Johann Kentmann,“Nomenclaturae rerum fossilium” in De omni rervm fossilivm genere, gemmis, lapidibvs, metallis, et hvivsmodi, libri aliqvot, pleriqve nvnc primvm editi. Tiguri: excudebat Iacobus Gesnerus, 1565, t.p. [↩]
- See there my more detailed article on the spatial organization of the Mineral cabinet: Daria Novgorodova, “History of Space of the Mineral Cabinet in the Eighteenth Century,” in Collection in the space of culture, ed. Tatʹâna Suvorova, Irina Alekseevna Polâkova and Christopher J. Duffin. Kaliningrad: Kaliningrad Regional Amber Museum, 2019, 92-104. [↩]
- Voltaire, Œuvres complètes. Nouvelle édition avec notices, préfaces, variantes, table analytique […], Paris: Garnier Frères, Libraires-Éditeurs. 1882, 498-499. [↩]
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Daria Novgorodova (July 8, 2025). Traces of Meanings in Catalogues and Collections. The Eighteenth-Century Mineral Cabinet. Geschichtstheorie am Werk. Retrieved November 16, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14aom

