Rooms of Wonder

"Through February 2: “Rooms of Wonder: From Wunderkammer to Museum, 1599-1899.” The exhibition will run through February 2, 2013.  A "Wunderkammer" is a room of wondrous things, a chamber containing objects that are noteworthy for their beauty, or their rarity, or their curious nature, or their artistic, scholarly, or monetary value. They originated as private collections in the 16th century, and proliferated throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, but began to decline when a more systematic approach developed towards the accumulation of natural and man-made objects. In the 19th century, separate art galleries and museums of natural history emerged from the Wunderkammer tradition; later descendants include the science museum, the museum of ethnography, and (at the lower end of the scale) circus and carnival freak shows. This exhibition, Rooms of Wonder: from Wunderkammer to Museum, 1599-1899, traces the development of illustrated catalogues of cabinets of curiosities, drawing from a private collection, and from items lent by the American Antiquarian Society, the Getty Research Institute Library, and Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities."