Cabinets of Curiosities

I Digress

12 Sept

Today we digress from The Paris Catacombs and the Rembrandt House Museum to ponder the question, what is a cabinet of curiosity?

What is a Cabinet of Curiosity?

When the Italian Renaissance came about, the aristocracy found that they liked collecting stuff. But where to put all the stuff that you collect? There’s a cabinet for that. A cabinet full of curiosities.

The cabinet of curiosities, sometimes known as a Wunderkammer, was a place, typically a cabinet, but not in the early days, where one could store and show off all the weird and wacky things they had picked up along their travels.

The cabinets were pretty common for about two hundred years. Anywhere from 1550 to 1750, you could find one of these cabinets in most wealthy homes.

And it makes sense that this was the heyday of the Wunderkammer. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, there was a whole lot of discovering going on. Science was starting to grow out of older schools of thought surrounding magic.

At first it was really only something that royalty and nobles would have lying around the place. And really only those from Europe. But they were meant to display a selection of everything that the world had to offer.

Instruction guides and manuals were even put together to show the proper way to display your curiosities and appropriate ways to preserve what you had collected. They appeared towards the second half of the 16th century, so you can really see how these things were taking off.

Before all of this though, the only real collecting had been around Greek and Roman artifacts that came from the Greek and Roman ancient worlds. But as we move into the 16th century, the collections started to become simpler.

In fact, the earliest illustration of a cabinet of curiosity is one of a natural history cabinet and is actually an engraving from Ferrante Imperato’s Dell’Historica Naturale that was around in 1599.

Basically all of Northern Europe were all about the collecting, and some of the most famous collections belonged to the most famous people at the time. There was Rudolf II in Prague; Augustus II, King of Poland; and Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria.

The cabinets were meant to show off the wealth and taste of these people with money to spare and display what an inquiring mind looks like. It was rare to find a prince, noble or even naturalist, who didn’t have a cabinet of curiosity. It was definitely a way to flex how wealthy you were and your standing in polite society.

And the coolest cabinet collections, even had people travelling from all over to check it out. Think of it like private or personal museums.

In terms of the cabinet itself, these would come in a whole range of sizes. Some had ones that were small and basically a bit of furniture with a couple of draws to show off your collections, and on the other end of spectrum, there were some that was literally an entire room of the house.

In fact, originally a cabinet would mean a room, rather than a distinct piece of furniture. But in those ‘smaller’ collections, some even had multiple cabinets to fit everything in.

The cabinets would have strategically placed drawers and shelves that would allow the owner to display their collection in a unique way. In an article on the history of collecting, Sotheby’s describes the items in a collection like this:

Every object offered an opportunity to tell a story about an epic adventure, or more often, to fabricate one.

So we know that Cabinets of Curiosities were popular all throughout Europe, but they weren’t all known by the same name. They were known as Wunderkammer or kunstkammer, Italian’s would call them Stanzino, or studiolo, or something a bit more modern, museo or galleria, which was actually more popular when referring to collections containing art.

Inside cabinets you could find all sorts of things, like antiques, natural history objects, which could include stuffed animals, shells, skeletons, insects or fossils and then there were works of art. A complete collection would see a representation of a wide range of objects.

Each cabinet or collection was typically organised into the following four categories: Artificialia, which as the name suggests was a display of artificial, or human modified objects, like antiques or works of art; Naturalia, again its easy to figure it our from the name, this category contained anything from the natural world, but also included rare or deformed creatures, often referred to as monsters; Exotica, was the collection of exotic plants and animals that were typically from distant lands; and lastly, Scientifica, which was anything that looked like a scientific instrument, some examples are clocks or automatons.

Because collecting these precious and rare objects was seen as something that was common among the rich and powerful, it’s understandable that these cabinets would basically become a symbol of social standing. But as seen in the aforementioned four categories, the knowledge of the world wasn’t really separated into subjects for study like they are today. Not to mention that the distinctions between categories was very fuzzy a well.

From Cabinet to Museum

So because the collections that made up the cabinets of curiosities were created before the rules that make up modern museums, it’s not that much of a leap to believe that what appeared in a cabinet a lot of the time wasn’t true.

Often, parts of animals or plants were combined with other animals or plants to create a new animal or plant. This created a slew of fantasy creatures and monsters, and while it really lived up to that aspect of being unique, it wasn’t an accurate depiction of the world.

But I don’t think it’s really that big of a deal, these cabinets weren’t meant to be scientifically accurate, and many knew that. And hey, if you had the money, why wouldn’t you create your own version of the world that lived in your cabinet.

The owner of the Wunderkammer was fully in charge of the juxtaposition and the interpretation of the collection and the content was a reflection of their taste and identity.

But as the 18th century came about, the popularity of science as a discipline rose, and people started to expect the science of the real world to be reflected in the display of cabinets.

And then it was late in the 18th century, that saw the popularity of cabinets in general start to fade, and the modern museum start to take their place in terms of displaying artefacts of the world in an accurate manner.

Francis Bacon, the modern science philosopher, really wasn’t a fan of these cabinets of curiosities, he called them:

Frivolous impostures for pleasure and strangeness.

And yeah, they were, but back in the day when they were all the rage, that’s exactly what they were, just some fun, something to display the odd things that you picked up along your travels.

But Steven Mullaney made the point in The Place of the Stage that museums weren’t a new kind of cabinet, but, almost like a Phoenix

[they] rise from the ruins of such collections…the modern museum organises the wonder-cabinet by breaking it down – that is to say, by analysing it, regrouping the random and the strange into recognisable categories that are systematic, discrete and exemplary.

Museums started to focus on displaying objects as per Linnaeus’ taxonomy or Darwin’s theory of evolution. The modern museum is more designed for teaching rather than exploration. And as the centuries passed, the rules surrounding museums would become hard and fast for almost every kind of museum you can find today.

George Brown Goode, who was the director of the US National Museum even wrote this in 1889:

The people’s museum should be much more than a house full of specimens in glass cases. It should be a house full of ideas, arranged with the strictest attention to system.

And that’s exactly what they would become. Actually each museum had their own system depending on what they were displaying. History museums were more concerned with chronology, where as Natural History Museums like to organise things taxonomically, and art museums liked to display works by place, artist and school. In fact, Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun had this to say about art galleries not arranged by school and artist in 1793:

[it is] as ridiculous as a natural history cabinet arranged without regard to genus, class or family.

There really was no room for the randomness or uniqueness that was seen in cabinets of curiosities in modern museums.

Back to cabinets again?

And yet, cabinets seemed to have a revival in the later half of the 20th century. It seemed like the strict rules that organised museums was a bit out of date, not to mention collections really reminded a lot of people of the horrors of colonialism.

The modern cabinets of curiosities allowed a new way to imagine museum collections and displays. In fact, museums even seemed to embrace this new way of displaying objects. In the 1980s, museums started to use this new-old way to display their items in storage, or even to explore the historical roots of their collections and to pose ethical questions about the objects.

But it was artists and curators who really embraced this fun, personal and evocative way of displaying their collection that seemed to have vanished a couple of centuries earlier.

This modern cabinet of curiosity seems to be an alternative way to restore the mysticism of the museum experience. Especially in our attention-stricken world, perhaps this modern cabinet experience is exactly what we need to instil excitement about our natural world.

Featured