Future Exhibitions

Cabinets of Wonder

Summer 2015

The cabinet of curiosities or wunderkammer acts as the precursor of the modern museum collection in many respects. Incorporating the natural world, the fine and decorative arts as well as the sciences these collections, displayed either in richly decorated interiors or, on a smaller scale, in exquisitely crafted furniture, were meant to represent the world and all aspects of knowledge in miniature. As such, they were understood as symbols of temporal power as much as they were collections of objects of vertu and natural history. Although superseded in the 18th century by modern patterns of museological taxonomies the wunderkammer’s influence can still be discerned. More recently the artists such as Joseph Cornel, Marcel Duchamp and Jane Wildgoose have taken the cabinet of curiosities as a departure for their art.  Even certain aspects of Sir John Soane’s Museum play upon the concepts and modes of display that characterised the historical cabinet. In particular it is Soane’s  ‘moving’ the monuments of classical antiquity to his house/ museum at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields of that echoes the wunderkammer’s telescoping of the wider world into one point. The exhibition will take in famous examples of the cabinet of curiosities from that at Schloss Ambras to Walpole’s cabinet for Strawberry Hill (and even the Soane). It will also look at how the cabinet is still present through the activities of contemporary collectors and artists. (Further details to be confirmed)