Cabinets of curiosity were institutional precursors of serious Orientalism

Evidence

Though Nicolas de Nicolay (1517–83) can be variously described as a soldier, spy or cartographer, he was effectively a professional travel writer who travelled throughout Europe, North Africa and Turkey and then wrote about his experiences, most notably in Les quatre premiers livres des navigations et peregrinations orientales (1567). Nicolay’s book was illustrated with the exotic costumes of the East and was presumably much consulted by European painters of Eastern themes as well as by people who had been invited to fancy-dress parties. However, the number of travellers who went out to the Near East and then wrote about their experience in the sixteenth century was a mere trickle compared to what it would become in the seventeenth century. As merchants, pilgrims and scholar adventurers brought exotic objects of all kinds back to Europe – American Indian drums, unusual seashells, Persian ceramics, hitherto unknown herbs, stuffed mermen, Chinese ivories, Indian money, narwhal horns and so on – private collectors set up cabinets of curiosity that were unsystematic collections of the rare and the marvellous. The cabinet of curiosity, a primitive and often fanciful attempt to organize the flood of new knowledge coming from exotic parts, besides being the ancestor of the museum, was also one of the institutional precursors of serious Orientalism. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 120

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the museum-history lineage in The Library: A Fragile History and to material-culture collecting practices across early modern Europe.