A Kunstkammer of stories

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, princes, physicians and merchants across Europe assembled Kunstkammern: rooms in which a narwhal tusk sold as a unicorn's horn might sit beside a clock, a branch of coral, a carved cherry stone and a painted miniature. The aim was not tidy classification. It was relation. Each object stood in for a larger order of things, and together they made a small, walkable model of the world.

Things in Worlds is a Kunstkammer assembled from paintings. Each entry takes a single object from a single picture, a pearl, a skull, a chessboard, a caterpillar, and asks what it is doing there. Who made it, who paid for it, where it came from, and what it meant to the people who first stood in front of it.

Objects are reliable witnesses because they travel. Ultramarine was ground from lapis lazuli mined in the mountains of Afghanistan before it became the Virgin's robe in a Florentine chapel. A Chinese porcelain dish crossed two oceans before it appeared on a Dutch table. Things carry economies and beliefs, fears, fashions and private jokes. Looked at closely enough, one of them can hold an entire period.

The relation also runs the other way. A painting is itself a thing: it is commissioned, cut down, overpainted, looted, sold, restored and rehung for audiences its maker never imagined. Objects contain worlds, and worlds are built out of objects. This collection lives in the space between the two.

Over time the entries begin to speak to one another. A convex mirror in Bruges answers a mirror in Madrid; a broken lute string in London rhymes with an hourglass somewhere else. There is no correct order in which to read them. As in any cabinet of wonders, the connections are left for the visitor to make.

Every image comes from a public-domain or openly licensed collection and is credited on its page. Facts are checked against museum records and published scholarship.