Cabinets of Curiosities

by Mauries, Patrick

• ISBN13: 9780500510919
• ISBN10: 0500510911
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-11-01
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson

Summary

The cabinet of curiosities, that strange assemblage of marvels from the natural world with virtuoso man-made objects, seemed definitively consigned to realms where only scholars venture. Its 300-year history apparently came to an end with the eccentric collectors of the baroque age, when scientific thinking and rationalism took over. But in recent years the cabinet of curiosities has reappeared in exhibitions in Europe and America and in international colloquia on university campuses, while reemerging as a source of inspiration for interior decorators and contemporary artists.

This spectacular and ingenious book traces the history of these "rooms of wonders, " from their first appearance in the inventories and engravings commissioned by Renaissance nobles such as the Medici and the Hapsburgs, via those of the Dane Ole Wurm and the Italian polymath Athanasius Kircher, to the cabinets of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientists Elias Ashmole and Levinas Vincent.

Much was genuinely scientific: minerals, fossils, stuffed and preserved animals and plants.

Table of Contents

Prelude	7	(5)
The Theatre of the World	12	(76)
Opening the Cabinets	88	(68)
The Collector: `senex puerilis'	156	(28)
The Phantom Cabinet: 18th--19th Centuries	184	(26)
Resurgences: the Spirit of Curiosity	210	(43)
Notes	253	(1)
Bibliography	253	(1)
Sources of Illustrations	254	(2)
Index	256