The Architecture of Knowledge: Science, Collecting and Display in Eighteenth-Century Naples

Before the age of the ‘modern’ museum – understood as an institutionalized space for education and entertainment, structured according to standard criteria of classification – the passions of curiosity and wonder materialized in eclectic collections that defied the borders between art, science and nature.1 In cabinets of rarities and in Wunderkammern, mathematical instruments and fossils often shared the same space as paintings, sculptures and ancient vases. If lack of standard classification systems was characteristic of such modes of display, the accumulation and exhibition of objects was not left entirely to chance. Different notions of order informed the ways in which space was manipulated and used for display in the early modern period.2 Items were pulled together to satisfy the collector’s idiosyncrasies, yet the existence of a market of curiosities suggests less heterogeneity than one would assume.3 Although the visual representations of early cabinets of curiosities and Wunderkammern illustrate