For Europeans at the end of the 16th century, the enormity and diversity of the world was gradually sharpening into focus. Where once oceans fell off into “here be dragons” territory, whole continents had emerged with jagged edges creeping along maps, offering a vast landscape of unknown people and places. The fascination with the astounding scale of this global realm was ready to propel science, literature, and art into the Age of Enlightenment. It is at this precipice that “Rooms of Wonder: From Wunderkammer to Museum, 1599-1899” at the Grolier Club, that venerable organization of bibliophilia and graphic arts on the Upper East Side of New York, begins, starting with the publication of Ferrante Imperato’s “Dell'Historia Naturale” in Naples in 1599. The compendium of early natural history knowledge opened with the oldest known illustration of a Wunderkammer on its frontispiece. Literally rooms of wonders, these Wunderkammers would flourish around the continent as assemblies of objects both precious and curious in a determination to understand this suddenly large world, resulting in collections that would guide the creation of our modern museums.

Gathered in the Grolier Club’s stately gallery beneath shelves from their own library of literary art, “Rooms of Wonder” focuses on the catalogues of curiosity cabinets, with rare selections from Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Getty Research Institute Library, and the Peabody Library at Johns Hopkins University, as well as from the private collection of the curator, Florence Fearrington. Each book is, due to the delicate nature of the texts, behind glass and open to a sample page. Viewing the spectacle of natural oddities and artistic marvels illustrated in these open books is a glimpse into the sheer scope of what was amassed in the curiosity cabinets — which included practically anything, provided it inspired some sense of awe. 

They held stacks of sea shells, pinned beetles, Roman artifacts, and often “monsters” of the animal world; an announcement for an 1815 Austrian traveling exhibition features a seven-legged pig. There were dinosaur bones, believed by some in the 16th and 17th centuries to be the remains of giants  (dinosaurs not being formally named until 1842). There were automata (early robots), philosopher's stones (objects of alchemy believed to turn metals into gold), instruments of science and music, and objects from the “New World,” which remained largely mysterious long after Columbus, as well as from other far-flung locales like Africa and East Asia. Human oddities, both pickled as pieces of anatomy in jars and sometimes living, also appeared. Michael Bernhard Valentini included in his 1714 catalogue, “Museum Museorum,” a man born with no hands or feet who is illustrated playing dominos, threading a needle, and even bowling out on the lawn (or at least gazing at the pins and ball as if to bowl). The most popular Wunderkammer item was a stuffed crocodile on the ceiling, a trend started by Ferrante Imperato himself in that first illustration.

Through the arranging of this chaotic accumulation, taxonomic systems emerged, as did studies like comparative anatomy inspired by the juxtaposition of the unfamiliar, such as with the French naturalist Georges Cuvier, who would compare fossils to living species in the late 18th and early 19th century. Frederik Ruysch, a Dutch botanist and anatomist, arranged objects in sometimes startling displays for engravings. Included in “Rooms of Wonder” is an illustration centering on a bouquet of dried coral, shells, and kidney stones, flanked by the bobble-headed skeletons of three fetuses, one posed as if sobbing into a lace handkerchief sewn by Ruysch’s daughter.

This dawning interest in classification would ultimately cause a move away from Wunderkammers, shifting to more specialization in the late 18th and 19th century. However, while science largely abandoned the novel for the serious, the public museum movement kept the collecting of the unusual alive, especially in the American metropolises in the once mysterious “New World.”

An advertisement for Col. Wood’s Museums in Philadelphia and Chicago promises “500,000 curiosities from all parts of the world” with this enticing footnote: “Persons who are Curiosities in Themselves or have charge of such, should apply at once as I am placing fortunes in the hands of hundreds.” The exhibition also gives ample time through ticket stubs and newspaper clippings to the king of spectacle P.T. Barnum’s grand American Museum in New York, which notoriously was lost in a fire. It boasted 15,000 visitors a day to its extraordinary and often lurid displays, like the infamous Fiji mermaid made from a monkey sewed to a fish.

The growing desire for research over accumulation also caused the Wunderkammer to wane in museums, yet the fragments of the cabinets formed the basis for their collections. Prolific antiquarian and intellectual of the mystical Elias Ashmole’s curiosities grew into the celebrated Ashmoleon Museum at Oxford University; the National Museum of Natural History in Paris still has dark corners housing deformed “monsters” of biology. Even giants like the Metropolitan Museum and the Louvre have art works that were once displayed alongside things as bizarre as mermaid hands and unicorn horns. “Rooms of Wonder” cracks open the pages of this curious history of our contemporary collections, one spawned by the allure of the strange and compelled by our enduring attraction to the unknown.

“Rooms of Wonder: From Wunderkammer to Museum, 1599-1899” is on view through February 2, 2013 at the Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York. 

To see images from "Rooms of Wonder," click on the slideshow.