Cabinets of wonders in Venice

If I were ever to build a studiolo again, I would choose a location like Giovanni Grimani’s, the Patriarch of Aquileia.

The Grimani Palace stands in the heart of Venice, just a bridge away from one of the city’s most vibrant social hubs, the Santa Maria Formosa Square. Once home to the famous courtesan Veronica Franco’s salon and the palace of Sebastiano Venier, the victor of Lepanto, the area around it was always buzzing with life. Right in front of the palace ran the Ruga Giuffa, a bustling main street for the Armenian merchants from New Julfa, as its name suggests. Yet, despite its proximity to the hustle and bustle, the building itself was secluded, surrounded on two sides by canals – the Rio de Santa Maria Formosa and the Rio San Severo – and isolated from the outside world by a neighboring house on the third side. The only entrance, from the Armenian street, was a narrow passageway from the fourth side. After returning from the whirlwind of the world’s one of the busiest cities, Grimani could immediately retreat to the solitude of his study.

When he and his brother, Vettore, inherited the property from their uncle, Doge Antonio Grimani, in 1530, they immediately decided to build something new – something Venice had never seen before. The square courtyard, surrounded by red marble columns, wasn’t modeled on the typical Venetian merchant houses, but instead echoed the courtyards of ancient Roman domus, following the guidelines of the great Renaissance architectural theorists.

At one point, like every Venetian palace, the Grimani house’s main entrance faced the water – the Rio San Severo –, but with walking becoming the primary mode of transport in Venice, it was closed off

The staircase leading to the first floor was decorated between 1563 and 1565 by Federico Zuccari, an already famous Mannerist artist from Rome, at the request of Patriarch Grimani, after his brother’s death. Zuccari came to Venice specifically for Grimani, and besides this palace, he also painted frescoes and an altarpiece for the Patriarch’s chapel at San Francesco della Vigna. He even competed for commissions at San Rocco and the Doge’s Palace, but failed. Afterward, he continued his career in Florence, Rome, and Paris. On the ceiling of the staircase, alongside frescoes depicting the virtues of the patron, the rich stucco decorations echo the motifs of Grimani’s collection of ancient gems – a detail we will touch on later.

At the top of the stairs is the grand salon, occupying the entire northern wing of the palace. The walls of this room were once decorated with portraits of the Grimani family’s greats. Today, these are replaced by abstract paintings by Georg Baselitz, specifically created for the 2019-2022 Archinto exhibition. According to the artist, these works were inspired by Titian’s enigmatic portrait of Cardinal Federico Archinto (1558).

Giovanni Grimani was in fact a passionate collector. While collecting was not unusual in aristocratic circles, it was groundbreaking that he displayed his collection in dedicated exhibition rooms.

From the mid-1400s, Renaissance architectural theorists stressed that an ideal humanist should have a studiolo – a small space where one could consult ancient and Christian authors and display carefully selected wonders of nature and human craftsmanship to delight oneself and visitors. In an early period, the focus was on the rediscovered relics of antiquity, including sculptures and engraved gemstones. Grimani, too, amassed such a collection, displaying it in the western wing of the palace, open to guests (rooms 3-5 on the floor plan).

The patriarch left the sculptures to the Serenissima, and these became the foundation of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Venezia. After the palace's restoration in 2008, however, some of these sculptures were returned to their original place.

The Laocoön group is a 17th-century copy of the Vatican original

Pallas Athene Parthenos, a Roman imperial copy (1st-2nd century CE) of the 4th-3rd century BCE Hellenistic original

Suovetaurilia, a sacrificial offering of a pig, sheep, and bull for the community’s well-being and fertility – a 17th-century copy of a Roman relief unearthed in 1637 near Montalto di Castro and taken to the Louvre by Napoleon in 1801

The path leading through the four rooms culminated in the square-shaped Tribuna, with its coffered dome inspired by the Roman Pantheon. It was here that the majority of the returned sculptures were placed. The arrangement of the sculptures deliberately follows the tradition of Renaissance cabinets of curiosities, where the focus was not on chronological or stylistic order, but on curiosity, the decorative, trophy-like accumulation of objects that invited unexpected associations between the sculptures placed side by side.

One of the most surprising placements is the 2nd-1st century BCE sculpture of the Rape of Ganymede, suspended directly beneath the dome opening, as if the eagle had flown through the opening to abduct the young cupbearer and take him to Zeus.

Another interesting room is the Sala a Fogliami, the Room of Foliages, named after the ceiling’s foliage decoration. The many trees, fruits, flowers, and the birds flitting and hunting between them are depicted with scientific precision, leading us into the next chapter of Renaissance wonder rooms – the shift from man-made wonders to those created by God.

Natural curiosities – narwhal tusks, ostrich eggs, and deformities – had already found a place in medieval princely collections alongside artworks. However, it wasn’t until the flow of discoveries into Europe and the growing interest in natural sciences that these naturalia began to share equal footing with artificialia in cabinets of curiosities. This change took place in the 17th century, after the Grimani collection was completed, so from a Kunst- und Wunderkammer, Wunder is represented only on the ceiling of this room.

A new exhibition now aims to address this imbalance, hosted in the eastern wing of the Grimani Palace, facing the canal, under the title A Cabinet of Wonders.

Inside the palace, the Camerino di Callisto and Camerino di Apollo are considered Giovanni Grimani’s former private studiolo, where he may have kept part of his collection – perhaps the gems and natural curiosities that hadn’t yet been organized into a Wunderkammer. In these rooms, alongside the Sala del Doge and the palace chapel, a dual exhibition was staged – a Kunst- und Wunderkammer that never existed here but could have, much like in the numerous 17th-century palaces in Venice and beyond.

The first part of the exhibition reconstructs an authentic-looking wonder cabinet with objects selected from Venetian and other museums. The artificialia include works by Titian, Giambologna, young Brueghel, and Veronese, along with silverwork, inlaid cabinets, and gold automata. These are all scrutinized by the critical gaze of Grimani’s portrait, painted by Jacopo and Domenico Tintoretto, which hangs on the wall. The background of the naturalia is a 17th-century engraving of a Wunderkammer, from which emerge colorful specimens, corals, shells, fish, and, of course, crocodiles – essential elements in every cabinet of wonders.

The three rooms following the two camerini display a contemporary Wunderkammer, almost complete, featuring the collection of George Loudon, a Dutch collector living in London. Loudon, who began collecting at a young age, finally found his true passion for contemporary art in the 1970s. This led to his next obsession – collecting scientific educational tools, as he says, “which have lost their didactic purpose, and now we can do whatever we like with them.” Thus, they can be viewed as art, appreciated for their beauty, craftsmanship, and the technical knowledge of their creators.

This viewpoint illustrates how the concept of the cabinet of curiosisties has evolved over the past century. Up until the late 18th century, its objects were regarded as creations of God, and collecting and studying them was a way to understand the secret order behind them. As natural sciences gained more ground in the 19th century and took over this function, the wonder room faded from fashion. It was rediscovered in Julius von Schlosser’s 1908 monograph, and soon after, artists – especially the surrealists – seized on them for the possibility of free association between randomly accumulated curiosities. The essence of the cabinet of curiosities has since shifted from understanding a hidden order to creating artworks from objets trouvés, with viewers establishing associations or simply enjoying their diversity.

Today, the cabinet of wonders has even become a design style, particularly in American and British contexts. Dedicated magazines and experts now offer interiors and décor in the Wunderkammer style. It’s no surprise that curator Thierry Morel enlisted professional scenographer Flemming Fallesen to design the exhibition at a professional level recognized by gourmands as well.

This approach has also led to the democratization of the cabinet of wonders. Today, it’s not the strict rules from the handbooks of humanist antiquarians and natural historians that define a cabinet of curiosities but the viewer’s eye. If we look around at the objects scattered across our desks – stones and shells brought from the beach, driftwood, colorful leaves and chestnuts, orpictures pinned to the wall – we can see: we too have our own Kunst- und Wunderkammer.