Kunstkammer
Early Modern Art and Curiosity Cabinets in the Holy Roman Empire
Jeffrey Chipps Smith
Reaktion Books 2022
Hb, 336pp, £35, ISBN 9781789146127
The (plural ), or (more fully) the , or cabinet of curiosity, was a world in miniature, an assembly of the recondite and bizarre, which could be a chamber or sequence of rooms, which might well contain actual cabinets containing categories of exhibits. It represented a crucial stage in the history of taste before the advent of modern museums in the Age of Enlightenment, when collections were separated out into natural history, fine art, mechanical wonders, anomalies, and so forth.
