CABINETS OF CURIOSITY: SITES OF KNOWLEDGE

Cabinets of Curiosity were gathered by princes, popes, merchants, scholars and even tavern-keepers. Their contents varied according to the means and interests of their owners: physicians collected anatomical specimens; merchants bought rarities from far-flung trading posts; artists gathered prints, drawings and casts of ancient sculpture; princes and potentates inventoried local resources. These sixteenth-century collections had a variety of names. Kunst-kammern were devoted to art and splendid examples of human artifice. Schat-kammern were where rulers hoarded crown jewels and other precious objects. Ruest-kammern housed armor and weaponry. But most inclusive was the Wunder-kammer, the Studiolo, the Rariteitenkabinett--Curiosity Cabinets, which were as thorough representations of the world as lay within the means of the collector.

The vast range of objects in a Curiosity Cabinet included items such as plant and mineral samples, fossils, zoological specimens (especially monstrous ones), exotic artifacts from distant cultures, commemorative medals and plaques, portraits of the collector's ancestors, exquisite and rare products of human artifice and curious examples of natural artifice (such as architecturally striking shells and stones with patterns that seemed to form pictures). While rarities and anomalies were especially treasured, it was also common for the cabinet to represent local history, products, and natural resources. The practical aspects of life were also acknowledged through the inclusion of tools and instruments, often displayed along with their products (as we displayed geological tools along with mineral samples in our geology case). Weapons also tended to be well represented, especially in royal collections, since they were the instruments of political power and emblems of the aristocracy as the military class. In our cabinet, we included a prominent arrangement of weapons from around the world, as they would have been displayed in the sixteenth century.

Curiosity Cabinets, containing hundreds or even thousands of specimens, proved ideal sites for the comparative analysis of specimens that forms the basis of most modern humanities and sciences, such as biology, chemistry, geology, anthropology, and history. The Curiosity Cabinet is the precursor of the museum and, like the museum, performed an educational function, facilitating the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge and encouraging both theoretical and practical applications. Unlike the modern museum, however, the Curiosity Cabinet was not intended for a public audience; knowledge was power, and thus was the private preserve of an elite few.

Knowledge in a Curiosity Cabinet was not segregated into separate disciplines as it is in modern scholarship. The pursuit of knowledge was a synthesizing activity, based more on qualitative comparison than on quantitative analysis. Aesthetics and science, mathematics and mysticism, ethics and natural history were all interconnected, intertwined into an all-encompassing system of visual correspondence and poetic resonance. Any number of associations between objects could be made in a Curiosity Cabinet, and the objects thus participated in a variety of categories simultaneously.