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The breadth of a collection signified its owner’s intelligence, wealth, taste, and business prowess. Royal cabinets of curiosity were often situated near parade rooms, where they could be flaunted when important visitors-and rivals-came to call. The flexibility of the Wunderkammer to toggle between nature and art, between the real and the imagined, allowed collectors to present their own versions of the world, sometimes to their political advantage. “Every object offered an opportunity to tell a story about an epic adventure or, more often, to fabricate one,” wrote art historian Giovanni Aloi. They also housed objects representing mysticism and the occult: stones said to be magical horns supposedly belonging to unicorns enchanted creatures meant to be mandrakes and mermaids (made by sewing together the torso of a monkey and the tail of a fish). Beyond objects extracted directly from nature, typical cabinets of curiosity contained sculptures, paintings, books, coins, medallions, precious gems, maps, and scientific instruments. Most Wunderkammer, though, weren’t meant to be purely scientific-they were also places to explore personal tastes, indulge mysticism, and demonstrate power. The Wunderkammer was not “an end in itself so much as a source of endless beginnings,” historian Earle Havens wrote, “a cabinet-sized microcosm of the endless, divinely created macrocosm whose wonders never cease.”
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Similarly, artists like Leonardo da Vinci eschewed religious subject matter in favor of representing the natural world and accurate human anatomy.Ĭollections like these operated as an ordered microcosm of the wider world, as well as a platform for people of the Renaissance to satisfy their craving for wonder-inducing experiences. While the Catholic Church attempted to prohibit scientific research-a threat to the theories put forth in biblical texts-volumes detailing medical discoveries and the structure of the cosmos were being published in droves. In this “Age of Exploration,” leaders across Italy, Spain, and England sent explorers around the globe to search for new territories and a deeper knowledge of the world.Īt the same time, science became a defined discipline that sought to answer big questions about the earth, the heavens, and the human body. The 13th-century invention of the compass and subsequent enhancements in cartography sparked an explosive period of exploration and global trade in the 1500s and 1600s. While ferreting away strange and wondrous objects “had been part of human evolution since time immeasurable,” as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Wolfram Koeppe has pointed out, this process of collecting flourished during the Renaissance. Plucked from many corners of the globe, these objectsrepresented a vast swath of art, science, and mysticism-what Quiccheberg called a “theater of the world.” In the words of contemporary scholar Patrick Mauriès, the Wunderkammer attempted to capture “all knowledge, the whole cosmos arranged on shelves.” Some were as small as cabinet, others as vast as labyrinth of large rooms. Simultaneously, in 1565, Samuel Van Quiccheberg penned what’s considered to be the inaugural guide to collecting, preservation, and display he based the text on his experience as the scientific and artistic adviser to the Duke of Bavaria, whose Wunderkammer he helped amass.Īccording to Quiccheberg, their contents fell under a variety categories like artificialia, man-made antiquities and artworks naturalia, plants, animals, and other items from nature scientifica, scientific instruments exotica, objects from distant lands and mirabilia, a bucket term for other marvels that spark wonder. Directly translated as “wonder chamber,” the word “Wunderkammer” first appeared in the mid-1500s, when Johannes Müller and Count Froben Christoph included it in their 1564–66 tome chronicling the lives of the noble Zimmern family.