In 1617 Frans Francken the Younger painted a collector’s cabinet: shells, coins, shark’s teeth jutting off the table toward you, desiccated sea creatures pinned between landscapes. Then, through a doorway on the right, he painted a second collection lying in ruins — a globe, a lute, a broken statue — while donkey-headed figures raise clubs over it. Thea Applebaum Licht’s essay for The Public Domain Review is about the genre that grew from images like this one, and about what the ass-headed iconoclasts were arguing.

Cabinets — Wunderkammern, Kunstkammern — were a private collector’s world. No firm line ran between natural and unnatural, sacred and secular:

  • The effect, as historian Lorraine Daston put it, was “cornucopia-like bounty and startling variety, a visual tribute to the exuberant creativity of nature and art”
  • Owning naturalia and fine art signalled possession of “the knowledge these objects stood for” (Marlise Rijks)
  • The earliest known image of a cabinet is a 1599 woodcut of the Neapolitan apothecary Ferrante Imperato’s collection
  • Many of these paintings depict displays that never existed — the artist picked references from his own or a patron’s holdings and composed them on canvas, so the picture itself was an act of connoisseurship

The donkeys were not decoration. As Reformation disputes over materiality and idolatry ran through the sixteenth century, the Francken family — active in Antwerp’s Counter-Reformation, hiding religious images at home during the “Silent Iconoclasm” — used the trope across several paintings to argue that attacking images attacks learning as such.

As the century went on, collections specialized into art alone, stripped of naturalia, and gallery painting split in two. One branch staged fantastical rooms: Rubens and Brueghel’s The Sense of Sight (1617) fills an opulent hall with Raphael, a telescope, a globe, busts and a monkey contemplating a seascape. The other became documentary — Willem van Haecht recording the Archduchess Isabella’s salon in 1621, David Teniers cataloguing his patron’s pictures by painting the same room over and over, Pietro Antonio Martini engraving the 1787 Louvre salon “as a report for an absent audience.”

The political arc in the essay is the part worth keeping. The word “cabinet” once meant privacy and authority — the masculine heart of the house, where vanishingly few people ever saw what was inside. Museums and salons broke that open, and the crowds in later gallery paintings swell until they dwarf the art. That is Walter Benjamin’s territory, a century early: concentration against distraction, cult value against exhibition value. Licht’s conclusion is generous — curation, selection, arrangement can give copies an aura of their own, and “in digital curation today, in the intimacy of online spaces, perhaps there are cabinets of curiosity still to be found.”