ARTH 4160/6160 Topics in Colonial Encounters: Visual Archives of the Spanish Empire (Fall 2025): Collecting: Cabinets

Subject headings

• Collectors and collecting > History.
• Collectors and collecting > Europe > History.
• Cabinets of curiosities > Europe > History.
• Museums > Europe > History.
• Curiosities and wonders > Early works to 1800

Isabel Yaya, “Wonders of America: The Curiosity Cabinet as a Site of Representation and Knowledge,”  Journal of the History of Collections, Volume 20, Issue 2, November 2008, Pages 173–188, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhm038

Engraving from from Ferrante Imperato. Dell'Historia Naturale (Naples, 1599), the earliest illustration of a cabinet of curiosities. Ferrante Imperato was a Neapolitan apothecary who displayed his cabinet at the Palazzo Orsini di Gravina in Naples. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Example article: Morrall, Andrew. "Object Worlds: Kunststück and Kunstkammer." In A Cultural History of Objects in the Renaissance, edited by James Symonds , 195–217. The Cultural Histories Series. London,: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Accessed September 3, 2025. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474206914.ch-008.