Cabinets of Curiosity

Museums are a relatively modern invention. Before they became standard features of capital cities in the 18th and 19th centuries, the great ‘collections’ were private.

They were assembled by monarchs, princes and ‘natural philosophers’ and consisted of everything from natural wonders (including unicorn horns) and magical relics (eg. fragments of Noah’s ark) to ingenious devices and objects of human artistry, including paintings. Such collections were not divided into art, science, natural history and technology as they are in modern museums. They all fitted together as one overall representation of the known and half-known world. Who assembled them? What kinds of things appealed to them, and why? And how did they classify and understand them? And what can we learn from this very different way of ‘seeing things’?