Wunderkammer Olbricht

About

The Olbricht Collection,featuring works from the Renaissance to the present day, took up permanent residency at me Collectors Room in May 2010 and has been on view in one form or other ever since.
A special highlight at me Collectors Room is the Wunderkammer Olbricht. On permanent display, it contains more than 300 precious exhibits dating from the Renaissance and Baroque. It rekindles in Berlin the tradition of the historical ‘cabinet of curiosities’ and, while raising the curtain on the past, manages to fulfil the original purpose that a Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer served some four or five centuries ago: engendering a sense of wonder in the viewer. The power to fascinate is still evident, for instance, in the fabled unicorn horn (now revealed by experts as the tusk of a narwhal), a mirror fashioned from amber (the ‘gold of the North’), the coconut chalice from the private collection of Alexander von Humboldt, the preserved specimen of a Nile crocodile, or wooden cabinets whose hidden mysteries reveal themselves only to the truly curious viewer.
The quality of the objects and their state of preservation is unique, making this particular Wunderkammer one of the most important of its kind.