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
Tag: history
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
Preserved bread from Pompeii
This is the ultimate piece of toast: a loaf of bread made in the first century AD, which was discovered at Pompeii, preserved for centuries in the volcanic ashes of Mount Vesuvius.
Categories: Curiosities, history • Tags: archaeology, bread, history, pompeii, preserved, toast
Katzenklavier: The Cat-Piano
When I was a kid, my weird and wonderful mother used to amuse us by picking up the cat and pretending to play it like a bagpipe, using its tail as a mouthpiece. Her improvised feline instrument has, sadly, been upstaged by my discovery of the Katzenklavier, a Cat-Piano (also known as a cat organ) dreamed up in the 16th century.
Categories: Curiosities, history, Ideas • Tags: animal, cat, curiosities, history, instrument, music, piano, psychiatry, unsettling
Rare eight-legged doll
This very rare doll from the early nineteenth century demonstrates a very innovative design for its day: a wheel of legs which allow the doll to ‘walk’ when it is pushed across the floor. The doll would have originally been costumed in a long dress to hide the leg mechanism, so only two walking feet would have shown at a time. The value of this remarkable hand-carved doll, with its enamel eyes, coiled chignon, jointed arms and delicately painted features, […]
Categories: history, Ideas • Tags: 19th century, body, doll, figurine, history, rare, toy, walking
Abandoned suitcases of insane asylum patients
Categories: Contemporary Art, Curiosities, history, Museums • Tags: collection, history, institution, museum, nostalgia, outsider art, suitcase
WWII Parachute Crash Test Dummies
I know very little about these wonderful objects, but Obsolete, a combination antiques shop and contemporary art gallery in Venice, California, claims that they are World War Two parachute crash test dummies. The images are taken from Obsolete’s Facebook page, where it also says each dummy weighs up to 225lbs. I’d love to know more about these splendid models and their history, but information is surprisingly scarce. Here is a great history of the parachute, for example, but there is […]
Categories: Curiosities, history • Tags: body, crash test dummies, history, parachute, sculpture, WWII
Cleaning the elephant skin
My last post on the inflatable skins in James Lomax’s Untitled (Me and My Friend) (2011) reminded me of this ridiculously interesting series of photographs from the archives of the American Museum of Natural History. Taken between 1933-1935 by Thane L. Bierwert, they show museum staff engaged in the task of cleaning and re-mounting the skin of an elephant for display. As well as offering a great (and I suspect rare) behind-the-scenes glance of a 1930s natural history museum, that […]
Categories: history, Museums • Tags: elephant, history, museum, skin, taxidermy, unsettling
