Still Life with a Gilt Cup, Willem Claesz Heda, 1635 - Rijksmuseum
In the West, modern museums evolved from so-called Cabinets of Curiosities, which typically displayed wondrous artifacts of the natural world—shells, fossils, plants and organisms—taken from their context and mounted inside. The natural world is sampled and split apart, studied and displayed.
At Japanese Museums, Art and Nature Merge - WSJ
If you happened to be wealthy and educated and alive in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, it was fashionable to have a Wunderkammern, a “wonder chamber,” or a “cabinet of curiosities” in your house—a room filled with rare and remarkable objects that served as a kind of external display of your thirst for knowledge of the world.
Austin Kleon • Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered (Austin Kleon)
In 1909, Boston’s Museum of Fine Art moved into a new Beaux Arts building that displayed only the most significant artworks, with lesser ones stored in the basement and accessible only to scholars. The galleries were well-lit and generously sized. While paintings were still stacked on top of one another in symmetrical arrangements, the MFA limited
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