"The desire magically to complete the incomplete belonged to the same baroque mentality that conceived of painting as theatrical and theatre as pictorial. Both genres pleased the senses by making ideas concrete in a kinetically conceived medium. Salomon Kleiner's (1703-1761) album of watercolour interiors of the 'Red Crayfish' pharmacy and private museum in Vienna wonderfully instantiated the belief that to think is to paint. This important typographer and portraitist of royal and princely palaces captured the stagelike presence of the monumental cabinet of curiosities located at the hart of dispensary. With its doors flung open, the dramatically enframed Wunderkammer offered a spectacle on all four sides.

...Christoph Laurence Joseph de Pauli's elegantly spacious and frescoed druggist's shop was captured in Kleiner's graphic series as a complex environment where economic and aesthetic practices commingled. Useful medicine and physic rubbed shoulders with promiscuously mixed anomalies, gems and orfevrerie. The ordinary commercial transactions between transitory customers, owners, and hired help intersected with the microstructure of a permanent collection of rarities. If the bustling business world reified social hierarchies, the enchanting Wunderschrank elided differences between media, combined the natural with the artificial, and juxtaposed the mechanical with the organically grown in the manner of a present-day gridded digital image. The exotic antecedent of miniaturizing 'electrobricolage,' fabricated today from quotidian files, desk litter and the detritus of cyberspace, Kleiner's unique suite of interior views provides a glimpse into how the mid-eighteenth-century middle- and upper-class consumer might recombine the auratic objects amassed in the camera materialium.

...A late flowering of the mannerist Wunderkammer, this private gallery contained a typically eclectic mixture of the fine and the decorative arts, antiques and petrifications, Turkish daggers and spolia dating to the siege of Vienna in 1683, crucifixes, votive hands, portrait miniatures, caricatures, exotica, erotica, momento mori, narwhal tusks, ammonites, and armadillo carapaces.

...The magical display cabinet dominating the sanctuary of the back room was organised according to the principle that, while material phenomena might be made to correspond, they could not be translated into one another. Small, tactile objects existed within a sensual sphere of analogies in which they served both as tokens for, and as reproductions of, an otherwise unsiezable realm. ...Whether under the eye or under the nose, shown in a treasury or stocking a utilitarian space, miniature goods actualised the hermetic connections existing between macro- and microcosm, body and mind."
Pp. 240-248, Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment entertainment and the eclipse of visual education.