Humanities and Social Sciences
Library > Exhibitions
The
Public's Treasures: A Cabinet of Curiosities from The New York Public Library
June 7-August 24, 2002
Edna Barnes Salomon Room (Third Floor)
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street
Suggested Linking 
A phenomenon of the Renaissance, cabinets of curiosities
(also known as Wunderkammern, or cabinets of wonder) proliferated throughout
Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Encyclopedic in approach, the cabinets
emphasized the exceptional, the rare, and the marvelous, attempting to encompass
the results both of God's creation (nature) and of man's (art). In the exhibition
The Public's Treasures: A Cabinet of Curiosities from The New York Public
Library, we pull back the curtain to reveal a selection from the holdings
of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building examined through the window
of a cabinet of curiosities, with the hope of edifying, delighting, and perhaps
even surprising modern-day viewers. For more information about the exhibition,
see the exhibition brochure.
The following websites provide further information
regarding the general history of cabinets of curiosities, specific figures
and collections that were significant in the history of Wunderkammern,
as well as the intriguing ways in which contemporary scholars, artists, educators,
and website developers have considered the concept of the cabinet of curiosities
and in some instances created a modern-day cabinet of wonders.
These sites are not part of http://www.nypl.org,
The New York Public Library's website. The Library has no control over their
content or availability. View a printable
version of these links.
History of Cabinets of Curiosities
Cabinet de Curiosités
(Gilles Thibault, McGill University)
Millennium: One
Thousand Years of History (CNN)
Cabinet de Curiosités:
Les cabinets de curiosités ou le voyage immobile (Francis Adoue)
The Museums and the
Order of the Universe (Nordisk Museologi)
Historique des cabinets
de curiosités (Laure Gigou)
"Mathematical Wunderkammern"
(William Mueller)
Museums and Their Functions
(John D. McEachran, Texas A & M University)
Prominent Figures and Cabinets in the History of Wunderkammern
The
Premonstratensian Monastery (Strahov, Prague, Czech Republic)
Il teatro della natura
di Ulisse Aldrovandi (Università degli Studi di Bologna: Centro
Interdipartimentale di ricerca in epistemologia e storia delle scienze "Federigo
Enriques", Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, Musei di Palazzo Poggi)
Ulysse Aldrovandi (1522-1605)
(École Nationale Vétérinaire de Lyon)
The History of the Zoological
Museum, University of Copenhagen (ZMUC)
Collections: Kunstkammer (Kunsthistorisches
Museum Vienna)
The Correspondence of
Athanasius Kircher: The World of a Seventeenth Century Jesuit (Institute
and Museum of the History of Science, Florence, Italy)
The Tradescant
Collection (The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of
Oxford)
Peter the Great's Museum of Anthropology
and Ethnography (Kunstkammer)
At the Instance of Benjamin
Franklin: A Brief History of the Library Company of Philadelphia (The
Library Company of Philadelphia)
Charles Willson Peale
(Jennifer Lindbeck, Dickinson College)
The Lost Museum (Center for
Media and Learning/American Social History Project and the New Media Lab at
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York)
The Ethnography
of Lewis and Clark: Native American Objects and the American Quest for Commerce
and Science (Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University)
Bibliothèque Sainte_Geneviève:
Histoire des Origines à 1851
The Cabinet of Curiosity Today
Devices of Wonder
(J. Paul Getty Museum)
Theatrum naturae et artis
[Theater of Nature and Art] (Humboldt University)
The Museum of Jurassic Technology
Museum of Online Museums:
Galleries, Exhibitions, and Shows
Angela Lorenz Artist's Books
My Body: A Wunderkammer (Shelley
Jackson)
Wunderkammer: Wonderworks
(BRIC/Brooklyn Information & Culture)
Kunstkammer Georg Laue
Cabinets and
Pods (Middle Street School, Brighton, UK)
WonderWalker (Walker Art Center)
"World Wide Wunderkammer:
A Metaphor for Mapping Social Spaces" (Mappa Mundi)
The Wunderkammer
(Robert Rogers, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design)
