The Making of The Cabinet Part I: Samuel Quiccheberg’s “Exemplary Objects and Exceptional Images”

Abstract The Cabinet, the first of three activity areas in the Europe 1600–1815 Galleries, contains some of the most remarkable seventeenth-century European items from the V&A’s collections, revealing pan-European collecting practices from 1600 to 1720 and exploring that period’s fascination with the interplay between artifice and nature. A number of historical written and visual sources informed the selection of objects and established how they might be physically arranged. This article explains the sources and processes involved, and the precedence accorded to Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones vel Tituli Theatri Amplissimi, published in Munich in 1565.