Among the countlessly fascinating aspects of eighteenth-century European cultural life were the cabinets of curiosities—collections of eclectic objects their accumulator found to be of particular interest, whether archeological findings, plant or animal specimens, geological treasures, scientific instruments, religious artifacts, paintings or books. While such cabinets were often the domain of wealthy monarchs, many more modest collections were the products of amateurs who nevertheless possessed the financial means to travel and collect objets d’art, souvenirs or instruments of science from around the globe. Among the most celebrated cabinets was that of Belsazar Hacquet, a surgeon and professor of anatomy, whose Ljubljana collection was visited by European nobility, including the Holy Roman Emperor. Hacquet’s cabinet not only featured an anatomical theater but contained in excess of four thousand items, reflecting in particular his extensive botanical and mineralogical interests. Somewhat more modest was the Cabinet de curiosités of Joseph Bonnier de La Mosson, with its prized natural history collection, located in Paris’ fashionable Boulevard Saint-Germain. Unfortunately, Bonnier’s widow was forced to sell off the collection to cover her late husband’s debts. Occasionally, however, such collections outlived their founders and blossomed into magnificent museums, such as the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera (Russia’s first museum), the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and Strasbourg’s Musée Zoologique.

Beyond collections of natural history, jewels, armor or religious relics, curiosity cabinets tended to feature a wide variety of scientific or mechanical instruments, tools often used by their collectors with which they helped further research of all types. And because of their scientific origins, musical chronometers were occasionally also found in these cabinets (a term used to describe the repositories for such collections and only later the furniture itself). We have already met a collector of such a device, Germany’s Johann Friedrich Armand von Uffenbach, whose diverse Wunderkammer included a numerous array of scientific, mathematical, optical and mechanical tools and the chronomètre Feuillet discussed previously. Following Uffenbach’s death, his Kammer passed through a series of hands before making its way to the University of Gottingen.