Ashmolean Museum
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The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology on Beaumont Street in Oxford, England, is Britain's first public museum. Its first building was erected in 1678–1683 to house the cabinet of curiosities tha
Front façade of the museum
Wood-engraving of the Ashmolean c. 1845
The museum's renovated central atrium in 2009
Rive des Esclavons, by J. M. W. Turner, c. 1840
Cabinet of curiosities
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Cabinets of curiosities, also known as wonder-rooms, were encyclopedic collections of objects whose categorical boundaries were, in Renaissance Europe, yet to be defined. Although more rudimentary col
Ashmolean Museum
…and Archaeology () on Beaumont Street in Oxford, England, is Britain's first public museum. Its first building was erected in 1678–1683 to house the cabinet of curiosities that Elias Ashmole gave to the University of Oxford in 1677. It is also the world's second university museum, after the establishment of the Kunstmuseum…
"Musei Wormiani Historia", the frontispiece from the Museum Wormianum depicting Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities
A male Narwhal, whose tusk, as a unicorn horn, was a common piece in cabinets
A corner of a cabinet, painted by Frans II Francken in 1636, reveals the range of connoisseurship of a Baroque-era virtuoso.
Fold-out engraving from Ferrante Imperato's Dell'Historia Naturale (Naples 1599), the earliest illustration of a natural history cabinet