A room revisited: a contemporary artist is inspired by a "cabinet of curiosities" collected by a naturalist of another era.

Publication: Natural History

Publication Date: 01-SEP-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Natural History Magazine, Inc.

In 1985, in a back room of the Museums of Natural History in Copenhagen, I came face to face with a wall-size reproduction of a familiar engraving. It depicted the interior of a museum--the Museum Wormianum--established by Ole Worm, a seventeenth-century Danish archaeologist, embryologist, natural philosopher, physician, and teacher. The engraving was the frontispiece to his 400-page catalog Worm's Museum; or, History of Very Rare Things, Natural and Artificial, Domestic and Exotic, Which Are Stored in the Author's House in Copenhagen, published (in Latin) in 1655, a year after his death.

Near the reproduction of the picture I saw one of the few known survivors from Worm's collection: the jaw of a horse, clasped by the branch of a tree that had grown around it. In the engraving, this curious object appears, pale and shadowy, alongside hundreds of other objects. But here, in the modern museum, that single element had been uprooted, transported to the present, and transmuted, as if by alchemy, into three-dimensional bone and wood. I photographed the captive jaw from every angle.

As the years passed, I...

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