Buying and selling rare, unusual, bizarre items. More specifically: taxidermy, memento mori, bones, skulls, skeletons, oddities and rarities of the animal, vegetable and mineral way, ethnographic curiosities.
Under the direction of Giano Del Bufalo, the department deals with an area of collecting that has been experiencing a surprising revival since the last decades of the 20th century. This new collecting trend, revisiting the fascinating tradition of seventeenth-century Wunderkammern, revives the passion for rare and unusual objects, discovering a modern inclination of taste towards the curiosities of nature, the bizarre, the macabre and even the monstrous. Since the fashion of the new curiosities started in northern European countries and, in particular, in the Anglo-Saxon area, the vocabulary used by its connoisseurs is rich in English expressions. These expressions have been flanked, partly replacing it, by the classic Latin nomenclature which classified wunderkammer objects into naturalia, exotica, artificialia and scientific.
More specifically, the experts of the department of Oddities, Curiosities & Wonders seek and propose:
- natural oddities – Curiosities and oddities of the animal and plant world;
- mineral oddities – Curiosities and rarities of the mineral world
- Tassidermia – A passion, that for the mummified bodies of animals, which in the neowunderkammern is combined with the principles of protection of protected species, since modern munmifiers operate only on corpses of animals not killed by man.
- medical oddities – A vast area of interest ranging from ancient medical equipment to curiosities about the human body and its pathologies;
- bone collectibles – Bones, skulls, whole skeletons, both human and animal;
- wet preserve collectibles – whole organs or animals preserved in liquid solutions (alcoholic or formaldehyde based);
- funeral oddities – From memento mori to everything related to death
- fake o gaffe collectibles – Fakes actually created by human hand to simulate curiosities or natural monstrosities (sirens, alien skulls, etc.).
- Exotics – Ethnographic curiosities
At the department is always available a selection of rare, curious and unusual items that can be purchased out of auction.
In parallel, the department offers an expertise and diagnostic analysis service.
An expert in antique marbles, Renaissance museum collections and wunderkammern, Giano Del Bufalo is one of the most famous Italian exponents of the modern collecting trend that rethinks the concept of cabinet de curiosities in a postmodern key. Since 2015 he has opened in Rome, in Via di San Teodoro, Mirabilia, one of the most qualified Italian galleries of ethnographic art and natural history, a chambers of wonders of singular charm in which the spirit of the amazing collections of mirabilia assembled by Rudolf II of Habsburg lives again.
Staff
Giano del Bufalo
Department head
