Project 1 - Cabinet of Curiosities

The two natural history museums we visited for the cabinets of curiosity assignment were fascinating and mesmerizing. La Specola in Florence has a vast collection of crystals and taxidermy species ranging from insects and amphibians to any kind of mammal that can be imagined. The different rooms flow seamlessly and display millions of creatures. They are grouped by like species, which shows how they began to categorize animals in these cabinets of curiosity. One of the most impressive parts of the museum is the anatomical wax sculptures that were made to study medicine, the human body and how it operates. The Natural History Museum in Venice has quite an array of specimens as well, however there aren’t nearly as many as in La Specola. While La Specola’s displays are very formal and scientifically laid out, the Natural History Museum in Venice had a much more aesthetic way of grouping their curiosities. The Natural History Museum categorized its objects by their color, shape, size, etc. and not necessarily by the species. There were some rooms that had completely random groupings but they just looked very aesthetically pleasing with the graphic and interactive displays. La Specola has an almost overwhelming way of displaying their items because there are so many put in the cases and it’s hard to see everything. I was most drawn to both the crystals and the sea creatures. I have lived on a houseboat with my father since I was a child so it was interesting recognizing all the species that I’m familiar with. That is why I chose to focus my project on species we find in the ocean.

The eight drawings from La Specola aimed to just be simple studies of the species and not really an artistic statement apart from the way they were drawn. They were drawn with different size pens and done in a very simple way. They started out as just the species in the middle of the paper, then I decided to crop them to make them more graphic and better composed. These were of coral, a seahorse, an octopus, a giant squid, a stingray, a crab, a shell and a starfish. The other eight drawings were combinations of sea creatures and various crystals from La Specola. The first four of the creature/crystal combinations were focused on the animal and had the crystals added on to them. These base figures were of a jellyfish, a turtle, a fish, and coral. The second half of them were primarily made from the crystals with the features of the creature added on for more of a fantastical effect. These four were based on a sea urchin, a shark, mussels, and a different kind of shell. Then, I took the second group of eight drawings and cut them up strategically so that they could be rearranged in to a different shape. The goal was to make them resemble the shape of any given crystal. They look like crystals from far away but with strange detail and then when one gets closer to the drawings and sees that they have various parts of both animal and crystal.