Wunderkammer

American Monsters: Images of Brazilian Nature from Early Modern Europe

3 Comments / Albert Eckhout, Brazil, Dutch Empire, Indigenous peoples, John Bulwer, Monsters, Portuguese Empire, Print Culture, Res Obscura, Seventeenth Century, Tatoos, Wunderkammer / By

“The most disgusting and nauseating thing which man ever saw.” -Spanish chronicler Andres Bernaldez on Christopher Columbus’ first impression of Caribbean iguanas, 1513. IN HIS BOOK Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Harvard literature professor Stephen Greenblatt argues that “the production of a sense of the marvelous in the New World is at the very …

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Cabinets of Curiosities in the Seventeenth Century

6 Comments / Collecting, Curiosity Cabinets, Natural History, Res Obscura, Seventeenth Century, Visual Culture, Wunderkammer / By

“There is no man alone, because every man is a Microcosm, and carries the whole world about him… There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us.”– Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1642 Early modern Europeans envisioned their own bodies as miniature worlds which echoed God’s Creation in every detail. And in the expansionist, acquisitive …

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