A Cabinet of Curiosities

I love these images. This has a passing resemblance to mine.



This article explains it well:

The Cabinet of Curiosities

Wunderkammern or “Wonder-Chambers”: Forerunners of Modern-Day Museums

Dec 14, 2006 Suzanne Hill

Wunderkammern fostered the Renaissance craze to assemble strange, frivolous, yet aesthetic personal collections.

In the past, new scientific discoveries, strange finds, and striking pieces of original artwork were greeted with awe and wonder. It became popular during the Renaissance to build a "cabinet of curiosities" to display a private collection of art and natural objects of which the owner was extremely proud. These groups of objects were at first housed in an actual cabinet or ornate piece of furniture, known as Wunderkammern or Wunderkabinetts. They are simultaneously pieces of furniture and the collections of items within them.

In the exhibits of these early Wunderkammern, owners might display strange, beautiful, mysterious, and precious marvels like starfish, monkey teeth, alligator skins, phosphorescent minerals, Indian canoes, Egyptian figurines, and “unicorn tails.” Rich art patrons would display their new art acquisitions in the intimate backdrop of a prized spot in an ornate carved cabinet. At Kensington castle, Sir Walter Cope is said to have displayed, “holy relics from a Spanish ship; earthen pitchers and porcelain from China; a Madonna made of feathers; a back-scratcher; a Javanese costume, Arabian coats; the horn and tail of a rhinoceros; the baubles and bells of Henry VIII's fool; and a Turkish emperor's golden seal.” The collections demonstrated manmade wonders and the diversity of God’s creations as well as a fascination with new scientific approaches to the study of natural phenomena. Each collection’s commitment to miscellany dependended on the idiosyncratic interests of the collector.

Ole Worm
For example, Ole Worm, personal physician to King Christian IV of Denmark, assembled a fascinating collection that ranged from fossils to preserved plants, bones, tortoise shells, and any manner of curiosity. Much of these objects he collected during his extensive travels. Today the Georg Laue gallery in Munich recreates the Renaissance cabinet with many rare curiosities and objects made of exotic materials like coral, ivory, rhinoceros horn, chamois horn, rare woods, silver, gold, and semiprecious stones like rock crystal and serpentine.

The objects on display in these storage or display spaces were marvels of nature. Formal boundaries between scientific disciplines didn’t yet exist so science, art, and the natural order of the universe were all interconnected to those of the seventeenth century. The move toward the modern museum began in the eighteenth century.

Peale Museum
One of the earliest museums in the world open to the public was the Peale Museum founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, in 1784 by the painter and scientist, Charles Willson Peale. The collection consisted of both natural history objects and portraits (the majority of the paintings were done by him and his son Rembrandt Peale). Then Peale’s son established the Peale Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1814, and today this museum (still with a collection featuring paintings and natural history objects) is the oldest museum building in the Western Hemisphere. At the height of its popularity, the Museum’s Quadruped Room displayed 90 specimens of mammals. Its Long Room had more than 700 bird specimens situated in mini-dioramas, about 4000 insects in glass cases, numerous minerals, and scores of Peale's portraits. A third room showcased marine specimens. Peale's famous mammoth skeleton was among the first such mounting anywhere in the world.

The collections of the Wunderkammern have their beginnings in the curiosity spawned by the Renaissance. Later Western scholarship would sort natural finds into increasingly distinct categories, such as botany, biology, geology, archaeology, anthropology, and art. As the rigors of scientific thought developed, the chamber of curiosities or “Wonder Cabinet” began to seem primitive and went out of fashion. As it became important to specialize and separate by discipline, the Renaissance notion of the all-embracing collection was abandoned in favor of a more up-to-date view of the world. But certainly the Wunderkammern are evidence of humans’ timeless interest in collecting intriguing objects.

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