What did museums used to look like? The University of Coimbra’s Science Museum attempted to answer this question by pooling together a variety of works from its collections into a single room. The Cabinet of Curiosities exhibition evokes the 18th-century mindset of organizing things according to an aesthetic rather than empirical logic. The result is a treasure trove of objects. They range from the scientific (a whale skeleton), to the wondrous (the world’s largest seed), to the grotesque (a taxidermied donkey), to the deceptively sinister (a carved silver anklet that was…
