The importance of touch in cabinets of curiosities and the early museums

Abstract

This article aims to draw an initial and therefore preliminary picture of the importance of the sense of touch at two key moments in the European history of collecting. By putting our main focus on the early modern cabinets of curiosities, with special attention for the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, we will show the long history of evoking a personal experience with extraordinary objects and shed new light on how these cabinets functioned as precursors of the early museums of the second half of the eighteenth century. We want to make clear that touch is important for interacting with the collections, although we cannot deny that the objects were not always really touched, but often only touched in the imagination. Therefore, Alois Riegl’s concept of Nahsicht, often translated as “haptic perception,” serves as a starting point for us.