The cabinet of curiosities: what it was, who built them, and what it turned into

A cabinet of curiosities was not a shelf of oddments. It was a room, built between roughly 1500 and 1750, arranged on a theory about how knowledge fits together, and the better ones turned into the museums we still use. There was a published manual for arranging one by 1565. There were also forged basilisks, narwhal tusks sold as unicorn horn, and human remains taken from people who never agreed to it, which is the part the interiors magazines leave out. Here is what was in them, who built them, why they stopped, and what is worth taking from the idea.

What the room was for

The Wunderkammer, or Kunstkammer in its art heavy version, belongs to a period when natural history, art, antiquities and engineering were not yet separate subjects. A collector was trying to assemble a sample of the whole world in one room, on the assumption that putting the parts next to each other would reveal how they connected.

Collections were usually sorted into categories that look strange now and were rigorous then. Naturalia covered everything from nature. Artificialia covered everything made by people. Exotica covered material from distant places. Scientifica covered instruments, and mirabilia covered the things that fitted nowhere, which were often the ones people came to see.

Samuel Quiccheberg published a treatise on how to lay a collection out in 1565, which is the first real museum manual: what to acquire, how to group it, how to light it, how to keep a catalogue. The ambition was systematic even where the contents were not.

The rooms you can still picture

Two engravings have shaped every modern image of these rooms. The frontispiece to Ferrante Imperato's natural history of 1599 shows a Naples room with a crocodile suspended from the ceiling, shelves of shells and books and visitors in hats. The frontispiece to the Museum Wormianum of 1655 shows the Copenhagen collection of Ole Worm, with antlers, skulls, kayaks and spears covering every surface including the floor.

The crocodile on the ceiling is worth noticing because it is a design decision, not an accident. Hanging the largest specimen overhead frees the walls, gives the room a focal point above eye level, and creates the sense of a space that continues upwards. Modern shops that put a stuffed thing on the ceiling are quoting Imperato whether they know it or not.

The great princely collections ran on a different scale. Rudolf the Second's holdings in Prague filled a purpose built wing, and Athanasius Kircher's museum in Rome combined specimens with machines he had designed to demonstrate principles, which made it as much a laboratory as a display.

Where the fakes were

Any market that rewards the extraordinary produces the extraordinary to order. Dried rays were cut, folded and stitched into winged dragons and sold as basilisks, and enough survive in collections that they have their own name, Jenny Hanivers. Fabricated mermaids were made from monkey and fish parts. Composite skeletons were assembled from several animals.

Unicorn horn is the clearest case, because it was a commodity rather than a curiosity. The horns were narwhal tusks, traded south from the Arctic, and they commanded enormous prices for their supposed medical properties. Several European treasuries held one.

The collectors were not simply credulous. Many of them debated which specimens were genuine, in print, and the arguments are part of how natural history learned to test a claim. But the room rewarded wonder, and the supply adjusted, which is a pattern worth recognising in any market for unusual objects, including this one.

How the cabinets became the museums

John Tradescant and his son ran a collection in Lambeth, open to anyone who paid, catalogued in 1656 as the Musaeum Tradescantianum. It passed, under disputed circumstances, to Elias Ashmole, who gave it to the University of Oxford, and the Ashmolean opened in 1683 as the first university museum open to the public. That is the hinge between a private room and a public institution.

Hans Sloane's collection, far larger, was bought by Parliament after his death and became the founding holding of the British Museum in 1753. Peter the Great's Kunstkamera, opened in St Petersburg in 1714, was a state collection from the start. The private cabinet did not disappear so much as it was absorbed.

What ended the form was classification. Linnaeus published his system in 1735, disciplines separated, and a collection that mixed a rhinoceros horn with a clock and a Roman coin stopped being a statement about the order of the world and started looking like a lack of filing. The contents were split between natural history museums, art galleries and antiquities departments, which is roughly where they still sit.

The part that is not decorative

A great many of these collections contain material taken from people who were never asked. Human remains, sacred objects and everyday belongings were removed during colonial expansion and sold into European cabinets as exotica, and the current work of repatriation in museums across Europe and North America is the long consequence of exactly this period.

That history is the reason we will not sell real human or animal remains, and it is worth stating plainly rather than implying. The aesthetic of the curiosity cabinet is available without any of its contents: cast metal, iron, glass and paper can carry the whole look, and nothing on a shelf has to have come out of a grave or a reef.

It is also the reason the word curiosity should be used carefully. The things in those rooms were curiosities to the people who had taken them, and were something else entirely to the people they came from.

What the idea is still good for

The one genuinely useful principle from these rooms is that a collection of unlike things reads better than a collection of similar ones. A shelf of eight small animals in the same material becomes wallpaper. The same shelf with a vessel, a timekeeper and a book on it becomes a group, because the eye has something to compare.

Scale does the same job. Vary the heights deliberately, keep one object clearly largest, and leave a third of the surface empty, which is the single piece of advice that improves almost every shelf. A set such as the dry half of the menagerie gives you a family of related forms, and it works better with one unrelated object among them than on its own.

The historical cabinets also always had something that measured or demonstrated. That is why an instrument sits so well in a group of specimens: a half hour glass or a skull used as a functional object like the glasses skull breaks a shelf of animals into two kinds of thing. The rule underneath is just contrast, which is the same rule that makes a dark room work.

Questions people actually ask

What is a cabinet of curiosities?

A room, not a piece of furniture, assembled in Europe between about 1500 and 1750 to hold a sample of the whole world: natural specimens, art, antiquities, instruments and oddities together. The German term is Wunderkammer, meaning wonder chamber.

What happened to the cabinets of curiosities?

They became museums or were broken up. The Tradescant collection became the Ashmolean in 1683 and Hans Sloane's founded the British Museum in 1753. Linnaean classification and the separation of disciplines made the mixed room obsolete as a way of organising knowledge.

Were cabinets of curiosities full of fakes?

Many contained them. Dried rays were cut and stitched into basilisks, mermaids were built from animal parts, and narwhal tusks were traded at great expense as unicorn horn. Collectors argued about authenticity in print, and those arguments helped natural history develop its tests.

How do you arrange a curiosity shelf at home?

Mix the kinds of thing rather than repeating one. Keep one object clearly the largest, vary the heights, include something that measures or has a function, and leave about a third of the surface empty so the group reads as chosen rather than stored.