The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology on Beaumont Street, 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 Basel in 1661 by the University of Basel.
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
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 collections had preceded them, the classic cabinets of curiosities emerged in the sixteenth century. The term cabinet originally described a room rather than a piece of furniture. Modern terminology would categorize the objects included as belonging to natural history, geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art, and antiquities. In addition to the most famous and best documented cabinets of rulers and aristocrats, members of the merchant class and early practitioners of science in Europe formed collections that were precursors to museums.
"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