Cabinets of Curiosity have probably always existed, albeit in different forms. In a seminal work on the subject published in 1908, Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance (later translated as Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance), Viennese art historian Julius von Schlosser argued that Greek and Roman temples acted as proto-cabinets of curiosity, a role then taken on by medieval churches with their valuable holdings of vessels, vestments and reliquaries, often masterpieces of craftsmanship incorporating precious metal and gemstones.
As we now understand the term, cabinets of curiosity were first created in the late 15th and 16th centuries, around the same time that Western European horizons – geographic, religious, scientific, metaphysical – began to expand. New worlds, new ideas: they recast the way in which people thought of themselves and their surroundings. The Renaissance cabinet of curiosities was frequently filled with rare and priceless treasures. But unlike collections held in earlier ages by temples or churches, these ones belonged to individuals. And while they were the forerunners of the modern museum, initially they existed not in the public realm, but in private ownership and were thus accessible only to the privileged few. Because their contents were costly, they were almost exclusively the preserve of princes and members of the aristocracy, representative of that caste’s wealth and power. Cabinets could vary in size from a single piece of furniture – a cabinet – with drawers holding different articles, to a room or even series of rooms specifically designed to display the owner’s collection.
By the mid-16th century, similar collections had begun to appear north of the Alps and to develop into the kunstkammer (room of art), a term apparently first employed by Count Froben Christoph of Zimmern in his historical account Zimmerische Chronik of 1564–66. Alternatively, they might be called Wunderkammer (room of wonder). Whatever the name, they featured a broad range of objects, including Artificialia (products of man) and Naturalia (products of nature), with some pieces being a hybrid combination of both. A cup owned by the Emperor Rudolf II in the early 17th century, for example, was made from an elaborately carved horn of a rhinoceros, on top of which sat a silver-gilt lid in the form of a grimacing monster, a fossilized shark’s tongue coming out of its mouth and a pair of African warthog tusks serving as its horns. Scientific instruments, clocks and automaton might also feature in the typical kunstkammer. Priceless works of art were placed alongside strange items brought from distant lands on one of the newly opened global trade routes, pieces from the distant past were displayed next to the newest objets de vertu. They were united in their diversity, their beauty and their singularity. In many instances, they were small but wondrously formed, a display of the craftsman’s ingenuity, incorporating rare materials such as crystal, ivory and amber, together with gold and silver and gemstones.
Collectors would acquire valuable antiquities, including sculptures, mosaics, cameos, medals and coins. They commissioned paintings from leading artists and sought out bizarre and curious pieces. Isabella d’Este was the proud owner of a unicorn’s horn, while in 17th century Vienna the Emperor Ferdinand III possessed a bowl (or chalice) said to have come from Solomon’s Temple as well as horn which had belonged to the Magi. Other collectors came to own mermaids’ skeletons or taxidermized creatures that were part bird, part beast. Brought together, these diverse items reflected the era’s budding curiosity and insatiable thirst for better comprehension of what was then a rapidly changing world. Collections were simultaneously intended to delight the eye and to encourage closer study of nature in all her forms. In 1565 Samuel Quiccheberg, scientific and artistic adviser to Albrecht V of Bavaria, published Inscriptiones vel tituli theatre amplissimi, the first treatise on collecting in which he described the cabinet of curiosity as being ‘a theatre of the broadest scope, containing authentic materials and precise reproductions of the whole of the universe.’
While some of the largest and most famous Kunstkammern were formed by the likes of the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague Castle or the Archduke Ferdinand II in Schloss Ambras outside Innsbruck, members of the emerging European bourgeoisie also began to form their own collections. In 1599 the Neapolitan apothecary Ferrante Imperato published Dell’Historia Naturale, which included an engraving depicting his own cabinet of curiosities then on display in the city’s Palazzo Gravina. The picture shows the extraordinary objects gathered by Imperato in one room, said to have numbered as many as 35,000 plant, mineral and animal specimens, including shells, marine creatures and even a crocodile suspended from the ceiling.
Great collections continued to be formed over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, perhaps none greater than belonging to Sir Hans Sloane. Born in 1660 in Killyleagh, County Down, even as a child Sloane collected plants, shells, bird eggs and other objects of natural history which he carefully catalogued. At the age of 19 he left Ireland and moved to London to study chemistry and then medicine. After some years travelling elsewhere in Europe, Sloane spent time in Jamaica and the Caribbean (where he is sometimes credited with inventing milk chocolate). Back in London and married to an heiress, he became a successful physician, appointed President of the College of Physicians in 1719. He also continued collecting, so that by the time of his death at the age of 92 in 1753 he had amassed some 71,000 objects, many of them acquired from other collectors – notably James Petiver and William Charleton – and housed in a property he owned in Chelsea, London (where he is still recalled through the names of such locations as Sloane Square and Hans Crescent). In his will, Sloane bequeathed the entire collection to the nation, on condition of payment of £20,000 to his heirs, and that Parliament create a new and freely accessible public museum to house it. The funds were raised through a national lottery and in June 1753, an Act of Parliament established the British Museum, where much of Sloane’s collection remains to the present day.
Sir Hans Sloane was by no means the only Irish creator of a cabinet of curiosities. Also in the 18th century, Dr Richard Pococke, a Church of Ireland clergyman who in 1756 became Bishop of Ossory, developed his own remarkable collection, perhaps inspired by those he had seen when travelling through Europe as a young man. Writing from Berlin to his mother in October 1736, he described visiting ‘the Chambers of Sciences & Curiosities in the Palace, where are very rich Cabinets & great curiosities, natural & artificial…an Egg with a Crocodiles head just out of it no bigger than a Goose Egg, a trunk of a tree with the horns of a deer run thro it & part of the head let into it, which I believe was done by art, the tree standing & appears plainly to have grown after it being much bigger where the horns run in than in any other part, stones natural mix’d with gold, &c.’ Pococke later travelled to the Middle East and while there acquired objects, including ancient Egyptian mummies, bringing them back to Ireland where they were installed in the Bishop’s Palace in Kilkenny. Visitors to the episcopal residence could see the mummies alongside antique Greek and Roman coins and medals, as well as urns, fossils and shells, and in the garden several basalt stones that Pococke had carried off from the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim.
Incorporating items collected by Charles Cobbe, Archbishop of Dublin, the cabinet of curiosities at Newbridge, County Dublin was essentially the creation of his son Thomas and daughter-in-law Lady Betty Cobbe who lived there from the time of their marriage in 1755 to their respective deaths in the early 19th century. Originally referred to as ‘ye Ark’, the cabinet filled an entire room in Newbridge, its walls lined with hand-painted sheets depicting oriental scenes and held in place by faux bamboo découpage trellising. A suite of specially made cases and display cabinets were filled with a typically diverse range of items, shells, exotica, curios, much of it from other countries. In 1758, for example, the Cobbes bought some coral, as well as a nest of vipers and a ‘Solar Microscope.’ Eventually, the collection came to include a stuffed crocodile, an ostrich egg mounted in a bog oak stand, a set of ivory chess pieces from China and a depiction of the coronation of George III (1761) carved in bone and placed inside a glass bottle.
Over time, the room in Newbridge began to suffer neglect: even by 1858 it was being described as ‘the poor old museum.’ In the 1960s the paper on the walls was taken down and sold, the cases and cabinets moved first to the basement and then an attic lumber room, and the space converted into a sitting room. More recently, Newbridge’s cabinet of curiosities has been recreated, a replica of the wallpaper produced from memory by a member of the family, Alec Cobbe, the cases brought down from the attic, and a replica sample of the collection once more on display. It offers an opportunity to see how cabinets of curiosity, in all their quirky, whimsical idiosyncrasy, would have looked when they were more widespread.
Kunstkammer: An Idiosyncratic Cabinet of Curiosities runs at Lismore Castle Arts, County Waterford until October 26th 2025.
The Irish Aesthete is generously supported by
