Albertus Seba's Cabinet of natural curiosities: Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri, 1734–1765

Public museums are a relatively new invention. However, the passion for collecting things, and setting them aside as treasured objects, has a long tradition. From the sixteenth century, in many European palaces and aristocratic residences, cupboards and whole rooms were set aside to house the particular collections of princes and noblemen. The earliest of these "cabinets of wonders", as they were most commonly called, were to be found in Italy, during the 1570s. North of the Alps, one of the most famous was the Wunderkammer of the homophobic Emperor Rudolf II. Why European princes engaged in the often very costly enterprise of putting together such cabinets-none were open to the general public-has recently been much discussed by historians. It has been pointed out that these collections served not only to display their owners' wealth, taste and learning, but that they were also used to trumpet princely fame abroad and display their magnificence before foreign dignitaries and potentates. A wide variety of objects found their way into these cabinets of wonders, all crammed together in drawers or densely arrayed floor to ceiling: antique coins and figurines, jewellery, exquisite furniture, books and paintings, were displayed next to rare plants, stuffed animals from faraway lands, minerals and even magical things such as horns of unicorns, bezoars and monstrous men and animals. The heterogeneity of these collections was not the result ofcaprice or chance but was calculated to dazzle the onlooker, deliberately provoking wonder and awe. However, not only the noble and politically important were eager to surround themselves with the marvels of God's creation. From the middle of the sixteenth century, more and more members of the middling classes were filling their townhouses with things they considered precious and rare. Their motivation for doing so was very similar to that of their noble peers, albeit their collections tended to be more specialized. Two of the most famous collections were amassed by Albertus Seba (1665-1736), an Amsterdam apothecary. For decades, Seba haunted the docks of his home city, at that time the centre of the international maritime trade, thanks to the Dutch East India trading company. He supplied departing ships with cases of medicine and treated sick sailors from incoming ships, often in return for the rare specimens of exotic animals, plants, and minerals these men were bringing home. Seba exhibited the best specimens in a specially designed room in his Amsterdam house and the collection soon attracted many visitors from all over Europe. Even Peter the Great visited it in 1717, and was so impressed that he bought it and shipped all the items to St Petersburg. Seba immediately set about building up a second, even larger collection. In 1731, he commissioned no less than thirteen artists to draw every single specimen he owned. He had the drawings transferred to large, folio-page copper plates for printing and these were finally published between 1734 and 1765 in four volumes entitled Thesaurus. Initially, the catalogues were published in black and white, leaving it to buyers to have their edition painted at their own expense by special colourists. Seba's catalogue is now sumptuously reproduced by Taschen, the art-book publishing house. The edition, printed in folio-sized pages, leaves out nothing of the original in its single, exquisite volume, weighing seventeen pounds, copied from the richly coloured original, hand-tinted edition held by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Hague. The introduction and