back to home page

Wonder cabinets, also known as cabinets of curiosities , Wunderkammer,  Kunstkammer or wonder-rooms) were medieval European precursors to both museums and freak shows.   Modern terminology would categorize the objects included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings) and antiquities.  The classic wonder cabinet might contain the finger bones of saints, mounted fossils, hair horns, specimens from foreign lands, monstrous births preserved in bottles, paintings of courtly dog women and dwarves, carved peach pits depicting the twelve apostles, strange rocks both earthly and fallen from heaven, and vanitas dioramas in dried human tissue.   "The Kunstkammer was regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world, and a memory theater,” wrote Francesaco  Fiorani, “The Kunstkammer conveyed symbolically the patron's control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction."