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The famous Nuremberg goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer made this splendid casket in 1562 – just about the same time as Elector August established his Kunstkammer in the attic of Dresden Residential Palace. It shows a female figure holding a writing tablet with an inscription in Latin:

Science reawakens in the memory mortal things to life, it raises lasting memorials to the arts, it summons back into the light things that had fallen into darkness. 1562.

This young woman symbolises philosophy. She is reclining on a base of artificial stone. Its irregular shape contrasts with the form of the casket, which is both decorative and severe. Inside the casket are four ebony drawers. They are lined with silk and covered with silver-gilt. Moorish designs – inspired by Islamic art – have been applied with oil paint to the gold background.

The drawers can only be opened by operating a secret lock. The spring is released by a catch, hidden in the little gold vessel at the young woman’s feet.

This case beautifully illustrates the way educated people viewed the world in the mid-sixteenth century. They believed that knowledge made human beings superior to the natural world, that it could transform nature into art and immortalise it. That’s the message of the inscription. On the back of the case there’s a numerical square.  For Humanist scholars, it was the written word and the invention of numbers that were the key to human culture.