excerpt: ""Mark Dion's Project: A Natural History of Wonder and a Wonderful History of Nature" by Lisa Graziose Corrin

Dion's 'model' for these arrangements begins with the wunderkammer, an encyclopedic, albeit idiosyncratic collection of rare objects, natural wonders and curiosities amassed by aristocracy and wealthy bourgeoisie from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The inventory of a typical wunderkammer included examples of naturalia (specimens created by God: animals, vegetables and minerals and unique examples of nature's oddities and deformities); artificialia (things made by man such as paintings, sculpture, musical instruments and scientific inventions and hybrid combinations of elements made by nature but 'perfected' by man, perhaps a nautilus set in an ornate gilt mount and transformed into a vessel; antiquities (objects of historical significance such as medals of rulers); and ethnographica ('exotica associated with Native peoples from the New World).

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Displayed in glass cabinets, on shelves, set in niches and hanging from ceilings, the assorted contents of a wunderkammer were seen in one contiguous space as a holistic group of objects that could be touched and rearranged poetically to produce a kind of awe that could enlighten the mind, delight the senses and encourage conversation. Objects might be divided in any number of ways, for example, by the type of material they were made of, or according to a philosophical statement, such as that depicted in a painting of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella in their collector's cabinet (1626). More usually, the objects were organized according to what was visually pleasing to the owner generally without regard for function, origin, historic continuity, artistic style or school. Comparisons might suggest similarities between cultures by juxtaposing a multitude of objects from different cultural groups, or the endless artistry in nature as embodied in a bountiful array of objects of a particular shape or design.

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Moreover, these collections were neither completed nor systematized because God had made nature infinite and the 'order of nature was not shackled to coherent sets of laws, but was subject to unlimited variability and novelty'. These arbitrary visual arrangements therefore seemed 'natural', and capable of revealing knowledge that was at once empirical and metaphorical without need of explanatory texts.