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

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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 Humanities and Social Sciences Library examined through the window of a cabinet of curiosities, with the hope of edifying, delighting, and perhaps even surprising modern-day viewers.

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.

History of Cabinets of Curiosities

Cabinet de Curiosités (Gilles Thibault, McGill University)
http://pages.infinit.net/cabinet/introduction.html

Millennium: One Thousand Years of History (CNN)
http://www.turnerlearning.com/cnn/millennium/ep6/ep6_sg5.html

Cabinet de Curiosités: Les cabinets de curiosités ou le voyage immobile (Francis Adoue)
http://perso.club-internet.fr/thoth333/htm/curios.htm

The Museums and the Order of the Universe (Nordisk Museologi)
http://www.umu.se/nordic.museology/NM/931Summaries.html

Historique des cabinets de curiosités (Laure Gigou)
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/laure.gigou/pages/histmus/mus10.htm

"Mathmatical Wunderkammen" (William Mueller)
http://www.wmueller.com/home/papers/wund.html

Museums and Their Functions (John D. McEachran, Texas A & M University)
http://wfscnet.tamu.edu/COURSES/wfsc421.htm

Prominent Figures and Cabinets in the History of Wunderkammern

The Premonstratensian Monastery (Strahov, Prague, Czech Republic)
http://www.vol.cz/MONASTERY/index.htm

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)
http://www.filosofia.unibo.it/aldrovandi/

Ulysse Aldrovandi [1522-1605] (École Nationale Vétérinaire de Lyon)
http://www.vet-lyon.fr/fondsancien/autour/aldro1.htm

The History of the Zoological Museum, University of Copenhagen (ZMUC)
http://www.zmuc.dk/HeadWeb/old-museum.htm

Collections: Kunstkammer (Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna)
http://www.khm.at/homeE107.html

The Correspondence of Athanasius Kircher: The World of a Seventeenth Century Jesuit (Institute and Museum of the History of Science, Florence, Italy)
http://193.206.220.68/kircher/index.html

The Tradescant Collection (The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford)
http://www.ashmol.ox.ac.uk/ash/amulets/tradescant/tradescant00.html

Peter the Great's Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkammer)
http://www.kunstkamera.ru/english/

At the Instance of Benjamin Franklin: A Brief History of the Library Company of Philadelphia (The Library Company of Philadelphia)
http://www.librarycompany.org/instance.htm

Charles Willson Peale (Jennifer Lindbeck, Dickinson College)
http://www.dickinson.edu/~nicholsa/Romnat/cwpeale.htm

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)
http://www.lostmuseum.cuny.edu/

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)
http://www.peabody.harvard.edu/Lewis_and_Clark/

Histoire des Origines à 1851 (Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève)
http://www-bsg.univ-paris1.fr/bsg/histoire.htm

John Cotton Dana's Role in Public Library Policies: Access and Publicity (Nora Galbraith and Joy Smith)
http://luna.cas.usf.edu/~jsmith3/jcdR.html

The Cabinet of Curiosity Today

Objects of Knowledge: A University Collects (University of California at Santa Barbara)
http://time.arts.ucla.edu/microcosms/

Devices of Wonder (J. Paul Getty Museum)
http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/devices/choice.html

Theatrum naturae et artis [Theater of Nature and Art] (Humboldt University)
http://www2.hu-berlin.de/hzk/theatrum/

The Museum of Jurassic Technology
http://www.mjt.org/

Museum of Online Museums: Galleries, Exhibitions & Shows
http://www.coudal.com/archives/museum.html

Angela Lorenz Artist's Books
http://www.angelalorenzartistsbooks.com/archive.htm

Marjorie Moore: Art & Collections: "Categories, Collections, and a Cabinet of Wonder" (Susie Kalil, Glassel School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)
http://majmoore.home.texas.net/BuyArt/Recentshow.html

My Body: A Wunderkammer (Shelley Jackson)
http://www.altx.com/thebody/

Wunderkammer: Wonderworks (BRIC/Brooklyn Information & Culture)
http://www.bcat-tv.org/rotunda/wunderkammer/wunderkammer.asp

Kunstkammer Georg Laue
http://www.kunstkammer.com/de/

Cabinets and Pods (Middle Street School, Brighton UK)
http://www.middlestreet.brighton-hove.sch.uk/cabinet/index.htm

WonderWalker (Walker Art Center)
http://wonderwalker.walkerart.org/index.html

"World Wide Wunderkammer: A Metaphor for Mapping Social Spaces" (Mappa Mundi)
http://mappa.mundi.net/reviews/wonderwalker/

The Wunderkammer (Robert Rogers, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design)
http://www.nscad.ns.ca/brsite/wcab/index.html