Public museums are also a history of private collectors and collecting, as many of the world’s oldest museums began as the personal collections of wealthy...
A cabinet of curiosities – or wunderkammer – stored and exhibited various objects and artefacts, particularly leaning towards the rare, eclectic and esoteric. They told a particular...
The old, seventeenth-century cabinets were filled with preserved animals, horns, tusks, skeletons, minerals, and other interesting human-made objects: ancient sculptures, miniatures; clockwork automata; ethnographic specimens from exotic locations....