Appearing in Renaissance Europe, the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ is an early ancestor of the modern museum. They also played a fundamental role in the development of modern science, even if they weren’t always that ‘scientific’ — it was not uncommon to find dried dragon blood or mythical animal skeletons in their collections. The popularity of the cabinet of curiosities waned during the nineteenth century, as it was replaced by official institutions and private collections.

The cabinets commonly featured antiques, objects of natural history (such as stuffed animals, dried insects, shells, skeletons, shells, herbarium, fossils) and even works of art. In cabinets of curiosities, collections were often organized into about four categories:

Artificialia, which groups the objects created or modified by human (antiques, works of art);

Naturalia, which includes creatures and natural objects (with a particular interest in monsters);

Exotica, which includes exotic plants and animals; and

Scientifica, which brings together scientific instruments.

Natural History is a collection of paintings that resemble the first science museums and follow this schema to configure a mix of history facts, personal experiences and found objects, depicted by the symbolic interaction of the paintings, in a personal and particular Cabinet of Curiosities.

The origin of those Wunderkammern is linked to the Illustration and the rationalistic approach to reality that emerges with the renaissance and accompanied the industrial and technological revolution that configured our modern world, but are also related to the expansion of young capitalism, colonization and depredation of the majority of the planet by the western powers.

The early Cabinets of Curiosities inspired me to create my own collection of rare, personally interesting objects in the series Natural History, in an intent to bypass the official, colonial¹ core of the original collections. Those were found objects, personal belongings with a particular story, and images found in natural science museums archives.