An extravagant visual feast of 272 illustrations, this sumptuous book covers the history of the cabinet of curiosity - or estude, studiolo, theatrum mundi or Wunderkammer- which blossomed in the 16th and 17th centuries as a successor to mediaeval relic collections and royal treasure chambers. The aim, as laid out in Francis Bacon's Gesta Grayorum (1594), was to compile "a goodly, huge cabinet, wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance and the shuffle of things hath produced; whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept; shall be sorted and included." In other words, a microcosm of the world - all knowledge, the cosmos arranged on shelves, in cupboards, or hanging from the ceiling, "infinite riches in a little room" at a time when individuals could still aspire to know everything.

For the princely collectors of Renaissance Italy, the arrangement of individual objects in their studioli was crucial, placing them in a neo-platonic framework of meaning and correspondences, revealing unity in multiplicity.