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During the 16th century a new kind of ‘museum’ began to be in vogue, called a cabinet of curiosities or Wunderkammer (in German). These were rooms devoted to the display of objects and artifacts: works of art, natural history specimens, archaeology finds, skeletons, strange mutations and animal remains. It was as if during the Renaissance a sense of wonder and numinousness migrated from places of worship to the world of natural history and science. In the medieval world the Incarnation, and other divine mysteries evoked wonder. Now men and women looked about them and found an undefinable fascination in the sensual particulars of the world.
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These included people and things in the natural world that were oddly formed. Leonardo was fascinated by all varieties of beauty and lack of it.
Perhaps it might be said that the 16th century discovered the experience of what the Polynesians call mana: a sense of a spiritual force which permeates objects in the world.
The medieval naturalists believed that the way objects look told you their nature. For instance, the herb Hepatica was shaped like a liver, so it must be good for liver complaints. But as science developed through the 17 and 18th centuries it disenchanted the world; making it apparent that mathematics, not appearances told you the hidden structure of things.
But if the expressive properties of objects may not tell you much about them, they are wonderful interlocutors, drawing out from the mind’s recesses, dreams, worries preoccupations and metaphors.
How can they do this? Well, the difficulty in discovering new things about yourself and your relation to the world is that thought runs in well worn tracks. Of the 70,000 thoughts you had today, 95% are the same as those you had yesterday.
But when you stand in front of a work of art, a natural curiosity (or an ocean vista) you are sometimes seduced and diverted from your mental habits, entering into a state of reverie, asking “what makes this thing familiar and strange, both, at the same time?”
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Until you encountered the object your mind was like a supersaturated solution, needing a seed around which a thought could form. Suddenly the oddness, the sharpness, the beauty or ugliness, of some thing over there, created awareness of a mental content needing to take shape in here: regrets, connections, memories and ideas that you did not know you had until the object crystallized them.