What would the Wunderkammer of a 17th-century collector living today look like? The Civic Museums of Pavia recreate it.

In the Collector’s Room of the Visconti Castle in Pavia, the exhibition Mnemosyne opened on October 2022 and will be open until April 25, 2023. The Theater of Memory, curated by Paolo Linetti. What would a seventeenth-century collector’s wunderkammer or studiolo have looked like if he had lived to the present day, always keen to show the evolution of the world and new boundaries?

This question is the starting point for the exhibition that aims to show the history of collecting from its origins to contemporary times.

The one large room recreated in the hall of the Civic Museums thus becomes a true"Chamber of Wonders" created in the spirit of the Wunderkammer that spread throughout Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries.

A specially designed layout will showcase goods belonging to the categories of Artificialia (man’s creations of works of art, such as statues, jewelry, paintings, archaeological finds), Naturalia (shells and corals, exotic animals, monstrosities of nature) and again Scientifica (works of human ingenuity) and Exotica (objects from the Far East or from beyond the Pillars of Hercules).

The exhibition is also an opportunity to see works of art that have never been exhibited from the deposits of the Pavia Civic Museums, taxidermy works (ostriches, crocodiles...) from the Kosmos Museum, African works from the Frate Sole Foundation, and others from the Pavia Botanical Garden. Also significant are loans from the Museum of Science in Milan and the C. Mazzocchi Museum of Oriental Art in Coccaglio.

The exhibition will be further enriched by goods from private collections: 19th-century Japanese armor, kimonos, an Ottoman dragon-shaped opium pipe from the 18th-19th centuries, a peacock and more.

Completing the Civic Museums’ wunderkammer will be a selection of Gian Carozzi’s Vanitas, works by Elena Carozzi, Valentina Giovando and R.E.M.I.D.A.

“I consider the creation of this exhibition an important piece of the larger project dedicated to our Civic Museums,” said Culture Councillor Mariangela Singali Calisti, "after the long period of forced closure. A period of gloom, however, that allowed us to reflect on the idea of a museum that we wanted and want to promote: a space where ancient and contemporary meet, with appealing proposals, sophisticated but at the same time able to surprise the most diverse public. Mnemosyne is an evocative proposal, dense with cultural and visual stimuli, which invites to make a kind of journey experience in the history of the wonderful in art and culture."

What would the Wunderkammer of a 17th-century collector living today look like? The Civic Museums of Pavia recreate it.

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