WHAT IS A CABINET OF CURIOSITIES?
- Curiothèque LAB
- Mar 16
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 15
When the Danish physician Ole Worm died, he left behind a large and very unusual collection that had taken most of his life to build: a narwhal skull, a dried ray reshaped into a dragon, the stuffed cub of a polar bear hanging from the ceiling, a mechanical automaton dressed in what was believed to be native American costume that could move and pick up objects, a collection of coins, manuscripts in Arabic, a stuffed bird that no one could identify. These rooms were called Wunderkammer, cabinet of curiosities, or room of wonders. People built them roughly between 1550 and 1750. The practice attracted anyone with money and curiosity, from princes to apothecaries. They were all driven by the same belief: that the world was richer and more interesting than anyone yet knew.
Collections like these were usually organised into categories. Naturalia: shells, fossils, dried plants, taxidermy, corals, stones, horns of creatures both real and imagined. Artificialia: clocks, coins, paintings, mechanical toys, carved ivory. Exotica: objects from distant lands, proof that the world did not end at the borders of the country where the collector lived. The Polish historian Krzysztof Pomian called such objects "semiophores": things with no practical value that exist only to be seen. Intermediaries between the visible and the invisible world.
A physician like Ole Worm could be, at the same time, a naturalist, an alchemist, a coin collector and a researcher of Arabic manuscripts. For that time, this was not a contradiction. Such collections existed even before knowledge was divided into separate sciences, each with its own academic institutions.
The collector would welcome guests, show them the exhibits and tell stories about them – about a narwhal tusk, an engraving depicting a unicorn, and a dried stingray that had been cut into the shape of a dragon and suspended from the ceiling. The guests were always at once surprised, puzzled and delighted - and that was precisely what the owner of the collection was aiming for. And it is hardly surprising - after all, to this day we still love a good mystery.
These collections certainly influenced the development of the sciences. Doctors who kept anatomical specimens began to notice patterns and differences. Naturalists who displayed plants from different countries learnt to compare and classify them. Apothecaries who kept bezoars and mummy powder alongside dried herbs were paving the way for future pharmacology. The collector’s curiosity was so strong that it helped subsequent generations to continue their studies and make new discoveries.
Some of these private collections eventually became museums. The first university museum opened in Basel in 1671. In 1677, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford acquired the Tradescant collection. The British Museum was founded in 1753 on the basis of the collection of the physician Hans Sloane. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna inherited the Habsburg collections. The exhibits were grouped by category, labelled and arranged in chronological order. It became easier to find one’s way around museums – and this had a significant impact on museum acquisition and classification practices, which are still being developed to this day.
The ‘Curiothèque’ project began as an attempt to look inside these earliest cabinets and try to view all the collections through the eyes of their contemporaries.
Next in the series: who collected these objects and why.
Text by Lera Salynskaia for Curiothèque LAB
Sources:
Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Tudor (Penguin, 2015);
Juliette Caze, Cabinets de curiosités anatomiques, médicaux et macabres (Dunod, 2023); Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned (Routledge, 1995);
Anton Nelikhov, Myths of Fossils (MIF, 2025)
Image source:
All images from Museum Wormianum courtesy of the Dean and Chapter of Worcester Cathedral (UK)
Curiothèque is a research laboratory. If you are an expert and have something to add, we would love to hear from you: curiothequelab@gmail.com
