Museums: Wonder Rooms (part 2 of 6)

"An ideal museum show would… be a mating of Brideshead Revisited... with House & Garden…, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had."

— Robert Hughes

In Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire the concept of museum disappeared. While the powerful might accumulate art and artifacts, the general population could only view an ancient relic in a church or during a religious procession.

Not until the Renaissance did the interest in and ability to accumulate collections of non-essential objects begin to grow. Aristocrats, merchants, artists, alchemists and other educated successful citizens began gathering unusual items that interested them. These were stored and displayed in special Wonder Rooms (Wunderkammer). A person of lesser means might only have a single Cabinet of Curiosities in his house to hold such items. At the time the divisions between natural history, human history and religion were porous and the items collected were often more a reflection of the owner's interests than based on any sense of underlying organization.

One of the most famous of these collections was assembled by Danish physician and natural philosopher Olaus Wormius (1588-1655). Wormius studied natural phenomena at a time when medieval beliefs were giving way to those of the Scientific Revolution (1543-1687). He generally relied on empirical observation, noting that lemmings did not spontaneously arise from the air as was believed. However, even though he correctly stated that unicorn horns were actually from Narwhal he still believed that when ground into powder these horns could reverse poisoning.

The Museum Wormianum with Olaus Wormius in lower left

Wormius compiled engravings of the objects in his collection and speculations about their various meanings into a catalog titled the "Museum Wormianum", it was published after his death in 1655.

Still, Wonder Rooms and Cabinets of Curiosities were limited to those who could afford to assemble and maintain them. Frederick III of Denmark bought the Wormius collection and added it to his own. Before beginning his collection, King Christian I of Saxony was advised that three types of items indispensable in forming one were, "Art,… curious items from home or abroad… and… antlers, horns, claws, feathers and other things belonging to strange and curious animals."

(Read about An American Wonder Room in the next post on Museums)