Cabinet of Curiosities | Can’t Sleep? Learn About History’s Strangest Collections

In 1599, a naturalist named Ferrante Imperato published a book about his collection in Naples. The engraving that served as its frontispiece shows a vaulted room where every surface is occupied: preserved fishes, stuffed mammals, curious shells, and a stuffed crocodile suspended from the ceiling. The bookcases are stacked with volumes lying flat in the medieval fashion, spines turned inward to protect the pages from dust. This image is the earliest pictorial record of a natural history cabinet, and it captures something essential about the era: a world where a crocodile could hang next to a shelf of dried plants, and nobody saw a contradiction.

The cabinets of curiosities that emerged in sixteenth-century Europe were encyclopedic collections of objects whose categorical boundaries had not yet been defined. The term "cabinet" originally described a room rather than a piece of furniture. Modern terminology would sort the contents into natural history, geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious relics, works of art, and antiquities. But the people who built these collections did not make those distinctions. A single room might hold preserved fishes, stuffed mammals, shells, corals, minerals, sculptures, paintings, coins, medals, clockwork automata, and what were believed to be unicorn horns. The point was not to organize knowledge into tidy categories. The point was to assemble