Focus on this artwork and discuss the Curiosity cabinets.
This type of print represents Renaissance humanist interest in the idea that everyone was connected to and through nature. This scientific movement, empiricism, re-examined previous ideas about what it meant to be human and a part of nature. It questioned what moral and civic involvement should look like in citizens and how individuals should act as participants in society. As a result, there was an increase in exploration of nature through scientific methods. Apothecaries, like Ferranto Imperte, collected natural objects such as animals, botanicals, and minerals as a way to experiment and draw conclusions about the physical world. Imperato, through his investigations, found new species of animals, such as the Salamandre terrestri. When examining what it meant to be human, Renaissance humanists placed heavy emphasis on an individual's moral and ethical agency, along with stressing the importance of using critical reasoning to examine the natural world. Through improving these calculated and curiosity centered ways of looking at the world, it was thought that an individual could discover their individual purpose in society.  This helped fuel the surge of curiosity cabinets because as scientific exploration was encouraged, more discoveries were found and people wanted to share their knowledge with other academics. Often referred to by many different titles such as “wunderkammer”, meaning wonder chamber, or “cabinet of wonders”, there were many variations of these collections. Each one was centered around discovery of nature or other objects that facilitated a curiosity of the natural world.
Renaissance humanist empiricism