Cabinets of Curiosities: Fulfilling the Urge for Accumulation, Order and Awe
Nothing is sweeter than to know all things. – Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605), Italy
The quest to know, and also to possess, the breadth of wonders within the physical world compelled intellectually curious (and arguably obsessive) men, from aristocrats to apothecaries, in 16th-18th century Europe to assemble “cabinets of curiosities.”
(photo from Cabinets of Curiosities, pp. 10-11)
These were not what we think of as a cabinet today – they were not single pieces of furniture with glass doors, but rather were entire rooms filled with spectacular specimens of natural history, intriguing selections of ethnographic artifacts, and exquisite pieces of hand-crafted decorative arts.
The lavishly illustrated book Cabinets of Curiosities* traces the history of these cabinets from the Renaissance into the Ages of Exploration and Enlightenment (roughly 1550-1750), and provides glimpses into their contents, as well as into the personalities of the people who assembled them.
Ulisse Aldrovandi’s goal was to create an inventory of the world. His cabinet of curiosities included 11,000 preserved “beasts” and minerals, 7,000 pressed plants, and 13 large folio volumes of colored drawings of natural phenomena. (Photo from Cabinets of Curiosities, p. 150)
These “cabinets” (more accurately described by the German word “Wunderkammer or “chambers of marvels”) were a product of an era of intellectual and cultural development that spanned medieval time periods when superstitions and infatuation with marvels and miracles were prevalent, and the modern period when scientific reasoning became the predominant frame for viewing and interpreting the world.
Collectors of curiosities in the mid-16th through mid-18th centuries were particularly attracted to objects with “properties of strangeness” that would amaze and enthrall all who viewed them—both oddities of nature such as a pickled crocodile embryo or a two-headed lamb, and exotic artifacts of human culture such as masks, ivory carvings, scientific instruments and weapons.
A jade mask from Central America acquired for an Italian cabinet of curiosities, circa 1650. (Photo from Cabinet of Curiosities, p. 74)
Yet these collectors were also driven by a more scientific impulse to gather, organize and catalog representations of all categories of nature—shells, corals, minerals, plant specimens, fossils, and so on.
View of the cabinet of the Danish collector and polymath Ole Worm, 1655 (photo from Cabinet of Curiosities, p. 19)
The more scientific perspective eventually became predominant in society at large, which in turn marginalized oddities and curiosities as mere entertainment.
Curiosity collections were dispersed, with some becoming important foundational material for major museums where they were duly separated into specialized displays of nature or culture.
Gone were the fabulous displays that characterized the original cabinets of curiosities in which mystery and imagination co-existed with reason and objective order.
Self-portrait of Charles Willson Peale, 1882, opening the curtain to his Philadelphia natural history museum, a showcase of scientific classification. (photo: pafa.org)
Our Encounter with a Prominent Curiosity Collector
While modern-day antiques enthusiasts are usually also collectors of one sort or another, rarely do private citizens now amass collections akin to the volume, range, diversity or peculiarity of material contained in the original cabinets of curiosities.
We did however, once meet and view the collection of a person whose tastes and impulses reflected those of the Baroque era collectors who were compelled to accumulate large quantities of strange objects for their curiosity cabinets.
Fiji Islands ceremonial cannibal fork from the Jamieson collection (photo: waddingtons.ca)
In 1999 Jeff visited the Toronto apartment and warehouse of William “Billy” Jamieson (1954-2011), a collector turned tribal arts dealer. Jeff and a colleague had made an appointment with Jamieson to look at Native art and artifacts he had just acquired when he purchased the collection of the defunct Niagara Falls Museum.
A Niagara Falls Museum exhibit recreated by Jamieson. The original museum was established in Ontario in 1827 by Thomas Barnett to display his own collection of taxidermic oddities (including a 3-eyed pig and a 2-headed calf), but the collections grew enormously in breadth and size throughout the museum’s long existence (photo: niagaramuseum.com)
While Jamieson was already a collector of curiosities, with a particular affinity for all things macabre (he owned 12 shrunken heads which constituted one of the world’s largest collections), upon acquiring the 700,000 objects of the Niagara Falls Museum he immediately became the owner of vast quantities of both bizarre and culturally significant objects.
Jamieson famously discovered through consultation with an Egyptologist that one of the Niagara Falls Museum’s mummies had been an important member of royalty, which allowed him to sell that mummy to a museum at Emory University in Atlanta for 2 million USD. Emory’s scholars then authenticated that the mummy was the body of Pharaoh Rameses I. The mummy has since been repatriated to Egypt, as shown above. (photo: worldarcheology.com)
This description of Jamieson’s loft, written by auctioneer and Inuit art specialist Duncan McLean, provides a glimpse into what a contemporary cabinet of curiosities looked like:
I truly enjoyed Billy’s eye for art and design. His three-storey, 6,000 sq. ft. downtown Toronto loft included a Cornelius Krieghoff painting hung alongside equatorial war gear, a rendering of Queen Victoria under disco ball lighting, art deco bronzes and 19th century American lithographs next to a South Pacific war shield decorated with a portrait of the superhero the Phantom – and a full size ostrich sculpture next to his big screen television – amongst much more.
Jamieson in his loft (photo copyright: James A. Ireland, 2009)
While the development and fates of the Niagara Falls Museum and Billy Jamieson’s collections are long stories, the story of our encounter with them is relatively short. Jeff eventually had the opportunity to purchase, at a steep but worth-it price, two early Native canoe paddles for his own collection.
Detail of incised and pigmented decoration on a circa 1780-1820 Great Lakes canoe paddle, ex. Niagara Falls Museum
Jamieson’s collection was sold at auction after his death from a heart attack in 2011. It is likely that most of the material—from ancient coins to animal eggs, shells and minerals to tribal tools, masks, sculptures and weaponry—has ended up in small, selective private collections of much lesser scope and grandeur than those of bygone rooms of marvel.
One of multiple restored cases displayed in a magnificent room of curiosities assembled by August Francke in Halle, Germany beginning in 1598 (photo from Cabinets of Curiosities, p. 30)
While the scale and opulence of curio displays have changed over the centuries, collectors’ attraction to unusual objects persists. In a future article we will look back at oddities we have sold, and explore the enduring influence of historical curiosity cabinets on contemporary décor.
Note the rustic sinuous branch chair in this glimpse into a room of a contemporary curiosity collector (photo from Cabinets of Curiosities, p. 242)
----------------------------------------------------------
* Cabinets of Curiosities by Patrick Mauriès (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999) is worth owning to pour over the photos and illustrations and read accompanying bits of text. For sustained reading, however, the language of its native Parisian author is a bit of a slog.
