Cabinet of Curiosities

La Specola, the world’s first science museum, is a place full of curiosity and wonder, not only showcasing the vast beginnings of scientific exploration but also the incredibly human way of trial and error. The museum is filled with taxidermies of different species of animals, but the best part is that some of them are assembled anatomically incorrect, such as the hippo with feet placed like a human, showing the lack of understanding at such an early stage of scientific development. Another part of the museum showcases wax replicas of the human body in various ways, like the muscles, inner intestines, and even the stages of pregnancy. Without understanding how a baby develops in the womb, early scientists believed a fetus was just a tiny little baby that grew in size, rather than the way we understand it now with our technology and advancement. It also showcased odd wax replicas of how the black plague and other illnesses affected the body and its decay with grotesque recreations. This not only showcased the technicality of every single piece in the museum, but also the art and hand that went into it. The artist’s creativity in taking string and dipping it in wax to create the veins is just an example of how inventive early artists were in working with scientific renderings. They also made each body look art like in their poses, especially the women, who were adorned with full faces and real hair to make them look beautiful, despite the grotesqueness of what was actually happening. The hall of crystals and the hall of skeletons are both parts of the museum that are full of wonder and curiosity. The skeletons, especially the large whale and rhinoceros, show the intense curiosity and the awkwardness of early study. The hall of crystals was the most wondrous part, especially in how it was categorized, by color, instead of by origin or type. The art project was inspired mainly by fear. Some animals and things in the museum, especially the wax anatomical parts, are associated with common fears such as snakes, bats, skeletons, vultures, crows, etc. Humans have learned to either despise or fear these things. The art piece explored how the outside world can be made less scary, while the inner fears are something much more powerful and fearful than any bat, insect, or bird on the outside. While the drawings were simple and “cute”, the eight inner fears were abstracted by only using white circles and a red circle to represent the fear or the person holding the fear. Using composition to create anxiety, the piece represented common inner psychological fears such as fear of rejection, loneliness, crowds, the outside, failure, death, heights, and fear of fear itself. Using the fear of fear itself as the focal point, the overall presentation spiraled out and slowly turned into the outside fears of the animals/skeleton drawings, showing that our deepest, most scary things  come from the inside.