Introduction

Removed from their utilitarian purpose, objects in the pre-modern cabinet of curiosities functioned as what Krzysztof Pomian referred to as sémiophores , “des objets qui n’ont point d’utilité, mais qui répresentent l’invisible, c’està- dire sont dotés d’une signification.” Curious objects from faraway places are “ramassés […] à cause de leur signification, en tant que representants de l’invisible: des pays exotiques, des sociétés différentes, des climats étranges.” From the outset, the spatial organization of cabinets, museums, or exhibits embodied an ambition to represent the invisible in a comprehensive context. As Francis Bacon wrote in Gesta Grayorum, “ and so you may have in small compass a model of universal nature made private.” This was the role the cabinet had to play, together with the library and the garden, in the encapsulation of “universal nature.” Display contexts were thus managed, on the one hand, through a process of removal and displacement of objects, of cutting and separation, or, of “making fragments,” as Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett argued. On the other hand, exhibition spaces also constituted new settings of coherence, significance, and re-enactment. Contexts of display, therefore, negotiated an ambiguous tension between absence and presence, elusiveness, mobility, and fixation.