Marie Antoinette lost her shoe and then her head
The shoe that Marie Antoinette lost on her way to the guillotine.
Categories: Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: fashion, guillotine, history, shoe
Category Archives: Museums
Witch in a bottle
Would you dare open this glass bottle, said to contain the spirit of a witch?
Categories: Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: curiosities, magic, mystery, witch
Syrup jars for earthworm oil
A collection of apothecary jars for storing oil of earthworms, plus recipes for making your own disgusting worm syrup
Categories: Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: apothecary, curiosities, drugs, medicine, science, worms
Two-faced death ring
Categories: Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: 17th century, death, face, gold, history, jewelry, memento mori, museum, ring, skull, unsettling
Tipu’s Tiger
Tipu’s (or Tippoo’s) Tiger is a life-sized wooden mechanical organ made around 1793, depicting a tiger mauling a man in European clothing. When the crank is turned, a hidden mechanism causes the man’s arm to goes up and down, and plays his wails of agony along the growls of the tiger. Under a flap on the tiger’s body there is also a small pipe organ, which can play 18 notes.
Categories: Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: animal, art, automaton, colonialism, figurine, grotesque, history, india, music, sculpture, tiger
Children not looking at modern art
Categories: Contemporary Art, history, Ideas, Museums • Tags: art, children, humor, imagination, museum, photography
Abandoned suitcases of insane asylum patients
Categories: Contemporary Art, Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: collection, history, institution, museum, nostalgia, outsider art, suitcase
Wax figures after the fire
I’m so unsettled and captivated by this incredible photograph of wax figures burnt and melted after the massive 1925 fire that destroyed Madame Tussauds wax museum in London. I think wax models alone are already pretty creepy, but I don’t think even the Chamber of Horrors can touch the pathos of this unintentionally gruesome scene. With missing heads and appendages, charred skin and clothing in disarray, the uncanny wax models truly look like the causalities of some great trauma. I’ve […]
Categories: Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: body, figurine, museum, sculpture, unsettling, wax
