May 01, 2007

Ole Worm's Cabinet of Curiosities

" a goodly, huge cabinet, wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced; whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept; shall be sorted and included." -- Francis Bacon on the ideal Cabinet of Curiosities.

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I'm compiling a list of museums or collections which first started as Cabinets of Curiosities or Wunderkmmern for my own future travel reference.

KunstKamera in San Petersburg, Russia - Today, collections of Peter the Great’s Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkammer) are among the most complete and interesting in the world. (includes anatomical specimens made by the famous Dutch anatomist Frederick Ruysch)

Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milano, Italia - houses the collection of Manfredo Settala, also known as the milanese Archimedes.

Ambras Castle, Innsbruck, Austria - houses the only surviving collection of the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand II.

Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala, Sweden - The Augsburg art cabinet, the best preserved of the Kunstschränke made by Philipp Hainhofer, which was given to Gustavus Adolphus in 1632 by the City of Augsburg, is on display in the Gustavianum.

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK - The collection presented to the University of Oxford by Elias Ashmole (1617–92) was in origin already half a century old by this time, having been founded by John Tradescant (d.1638) and displayed to the public (for a fee), first by him and later by his son John (1608–62) in their dwelling house at Lambeth, widely known as 'The Ark'. The contents were universal in scope, with man-made and natural specimens from every corner of the known world.

Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, La Rochelle, France - houses the cabinet de curiosité Lafaille

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Frederick Ruysch's Anatomical Curiosities

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More info on Cabinets of Curiosities:

Peter Huber's excellent site (in german) on wunderkammern, featuring a list of museums mostly in germany.

Cabinets de Curiosités (french), interesting site by a canadian phd student including his reading notes on selected bibliography.

A lecture on Museums and their functions, featuring slides with engravings depicting famous cabinets of curiosities.

A bibliography by the University of California.

The King's Kunstkammer is an Internet exhibition, which is a partial reconstruction of the Royal Danish Kunstkammer which was established by King Frederik III in the mid-1600s - a collection which was broken up some 200 years later when all the pieces it contained were distributed among newly created specialist museums.

Curiositas (in french) has an extensive research on cabinets of curiosities based, as far as I can see, on Pierre Borel's inventory "Roole des principaux cabinets curieux, et autres choses remarquables qui se voyent ez principales Villes de l'Europe" or Huguetan's.

An article from Cabinet magazine. Very appropriate.

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Stephan Zick, Anatomical teaching model of a pregnant woman
Nuremberg, around 1680

(seen on Georg Laue's Kunstkammer)

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And from the New World, a cabinet of curiosities in itself:

The Wachsach Museum of Oddities and its shrunken heads and feejee mermaids;

The Museum of Jurassic Techonology which houses, for example, an exhibition about the dogs of the soviet space program;

P.T. Barnum's Museum turned Circus;

The National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington featuring, among other attractions, the stomach of the compulsive hair eating girl;

And my personal favorite, Ripley's Believe it or Not, a man's quest for oddities turned into a museum chain and turist trap.

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