The Cabinet of curiosity I blogged about here does not actually exist. It is a wonderful Trompe l'Oeil artwork, made all the more remarkable by the fact that it is not a painting but is constructed from slivers of inlaid stone.
This explanation is from here
Amazingly, this is not a painting! It’s a picture made of a mosaic of tiny slivers of inlaid stone. It was done about four hundred years ago by Flemish artist Domenico Remps, and usually it lives in a small institution in Florence called the Opificio delle Pietre Dure.
The subject is a so-called cabinet of curiosities. These were little display collections of natural and artistic curiosities, placed in specially made cabinets by wealthy collectors between four and three hundred years ago. They went out of fashion as collections of such things became too large and specialised for a small cabinet, but they are the ancestors of today’s museums.
Trompe L’oeil is french for Trick the Eye. The idea of pictures in this style is to be so realistic that, ideally, viewers might be deceived into not realising that they were looking at a picture rather than the real thing.
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