The Cabinet of Curiosities: 150 years of the Rätisches Museum

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Since the Baroque period, princes or wealthy citizens often displayed extraordinary objects in so-called cabinets of curiosities: naturalia, works of art, antiques and curiosities. Everything came together here in a colourful and fascinating mix. The modern museum, as we know it today, is a bourgeois invention of the 19th century. Across Europe, new exhibition houses emerged at that time. The Rätisches Museum also dates from that period: the lawyer, historian and politician Peter Conradin von Planta-Zuoz (1815–1902) initiated a «Bündnerische Stiftung für Wissenschaft und Kunst» with the aim of founding a museum. In doing so, he wanted to counter the ongoing outflow of valuable cultural heritage from Graubünden. On 8 June 1872, the Rätisches Museum opened its first exhibition on the ground floor of Buol House. Since then, objects relating to the history of Graubünden have been collected here. Today, the holdings comprise around 100 000 objects. For the anniversary, we invite you on a journey of discovery through the museum’s treasures, using 150 selected exhibits. For each year since the opening, one object has been chosen that entered the collection in that year. The exhibition thus shows a representative cross-section: precious, old and rare items appear here just as much as the surprising, the ordinary or the quirky, all side by side, in the style of the former cabinet of curiosities. The many small stories told in this way not only offer exciting insights into the past, but also trace, in terms of collection history, the path from the beginnings to today’s historical museum of Graubünden and its tasks.