Cabinet of Curiosity (or Curiosities) came into popular use starting in 15th century Renaissance Europe. They were originally rooms filled with all type of objects from nature, from antiquity, and from the art world. Eventually these collections would be stored in elaborately modeled cabinets, full of drawers and shelves of different sizes and shapes. Today's modern furniture analogy would be a curio cabinet. Very large cabinets of curiosities, with massive numbers of specimens, eventually became the base collection for many of the world's great public museums. Physicians, merchants, nobility, and royalty were the many kinds of citizens that would collect and build cabinets to display their collections.
In Germany in 1550, Kunstkammer
("Chamber of Art") was 1st used to describe these collections. Also
used was Wunderkammer ("Collection of Marvelous Things") to
describe collections more populated by objects from the natural word, such as
fossils, mineral formations, and animal and plant specimens. Eventually the two words were joined and were used as Kunst-und
Wunderkammer ("Cabinets of Art and Wonder"). Cabinets became
increasingly popular as the printing press came into wide usage (allowing
publication of catalogues displaying all of a collector's unique treasures).
The newly expanding mercantile class, benefitting from New World trade,
provided wealth to purchase items from around the world. Expeditions to North
and South America, Asia, and Africa sent many ships back to Europe full of
natural history merchandise for collectors.
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