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Collector's Cabinets of Curiosity: A Brief History
by Helen Glazer © 2002
Collecting natural history specimens began among doctors and pharmacists in the 16th century, and was taken up by European aristocrats. It continued as a popular hobby for the well-to-do through the 19th Century. The craze for amassing collections of shells, insects, taxidermic specimens of animals and minerals was fueled by the Enlightenment mindset, which was preoccupied with creating comprehensive systems of classifying natural phenomena. This ideal was fed by the exploration of distant territories that could only be reached by ship, where species hitherto unknown to Europeans were discovered and documented. The impulse to classify was accompanied by a fascination with oddities and aberrations such as two-headed calves.
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Collectors did not only accumulate objects: science met art in the production of natural history prints and books. Perhaps the prototypical 18th Century collector, a Dutch apothecary named Albertus Seba, |
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Alexander Von Humboldt (1759-1859), a German scientist and world explorer of the 19th Century,
embarked on one of the early expeditions to the interior regions of South America and Central
America, charting the land and recording the flora and fauna as well as the customs of native
peoples. As a prototypical collector, Humboldt surrounded himself in his own study with books,
maps, globes, natural history specimens, and artifacts of ancient Greece and Rome.
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Albertus Seba (above right) assembled the prototypical collector's cabinet of natural history of the 18th century and published a massive catalogue of his holdings. Many plates featured the unusual groupings shown here (above left).
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recruited artists to document his holdings in a series of copperplate etchings which he published to order as his Thesaurus, a practice that was continued by later collectors in the 19th Century such as Alexander von Humboldt and Sir William Hamilton. Unlike Seba, these men and other of their contemporaries had the means to travel and undertake their own expeditions to places like the Amazon and Sicily, but they, too, published prints of their collections. 18th and 19th Century "cabinets of curiosities" formed the basis for many of today's natural history museums, and the natural history prints of the era are still appreciated not only for their scientific value but their aesthetic beauty.
Copyright © 2002. All rights reserved.
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