A Cabinet of Wonders at Palazzo Grimani, Venice — where narwhal tusks sit alongside old masters

In the Sala di Psiche of the Palazzo Grimani in Venice, a table is laden with precious objects. Among them are a silvery nautilus shell on a gilded bronze stand and a grand curved olifant, or horn, carved from ivory and bound with intricate brass bands. A pair of narwhal tusks, maybe two metres high, frame a fireplace, its stone interior carved with a flaming salamander; and a small bronze statue of Mercury, made in 1580 by the virtuoso Giambologna, leaps in front of a 16th-century cabinet whose decoration is made of slivers of inlaid wood as fine as silken threads. With red plush walls and dim lighting, it’s like stepping back in time, as if the owner of these objects has only just left the room.

This grand assemblage of exotic finery is, in fact, a fantasy, brought together by the curator Thierry Morel in A Cabinet of Wonders — an evocation of the cabinets of curiosities, or wunderkammer, that first became popular in the 16th century.

Then they were meant to demonstrate the knowledge, sophistication and taste of their collectors and, of course, dazzle the specially invited visitor. Now, Morel’s mélange, which fills three more rooms with precious objects, also provides a passage to another quite different collection — a real one — that belongs to George Loudon, a Dutch financier who now lives in London.

Loudon has amassed 300 mostly 19th-century examples of botanical, zoological and marine life, made before photography became the primary teaching and reference tool of the life sciences. To this Morel has applied his curatorial hand. There are perfect renditions of lemons made in wax, the mutations of disease clearly detailed; hemlock and pansies in papier-mâché; slugs whose slipperiness is captured in stippled glass; a papier-mâché turkey made of multiple numbered parts.

The Palazzo Grimani provides a fitting backdrop for both parts of this back-to-back show. As the home of Giovanni Grimani in the second half of the 16th century, it was filled with treasures from antiquity and the very latest in decoration. Grimani hired the Florentine Francesco Salviati to create elaborate frescoes; Giovanni da Udine — once Raphael’s leading architectural assistant in Rome — for his flamboyant stucco flourishes and large-scale inlays of multicoloured marble; Camillo Mantovano painted an entire rus in urbe ceiling as a leafy joyous canopy, with fruit trees, flowers and animals in what is now called the Sala Fogliami. The Palazzo, then, is a collection in itself — of artistry, precious stones, statues and interior finery, all in the service of Grimani’s ambitions to demonstrate life lived on a superior plane.

Morel’s ambitions are on show here, too. A well-connected art world operator, in 2013 he succeeded in bringing more than 70 old master paintings from Robert Walpole’s 18th-century collection back from the Hermitage in St Petersburg to Houghton Hall in Norfolk for a six-month run. Here he has delved into private collections in Switzerland and the nearby Veneto for some exciting loans for the initial rooms. They include a mournful, late-period Magdalene by Titian which has been in private hands since 1800; and a Veronese from the same collection that has been equally unseen until now. “It is a jewel,” says Morel. “A record of a relationship between patron and artist. An intimate piece of property.”

Venice is a good location, too, for an exhibition which intermingles ideas of religion, mythology, science and trade, and which venerates the extremities of craft (a clock, where a tiny clock face is balanced with a rider on a golden camel; a smooth black philosopher’s stone banded in worked bronze; a delicate Dutch mandolin). It’s a love letter to the enduring aesthetic culture of Italy and the outward-looking nature of La Serenissima, a place from which explorers once sailed into a freshly mapped world. (A handsome Coronelli globe, detailing the 17th-century version, was found to be too big to haul through the palazzo’s windows or doors at the last minute. “We only discovered that with 48 hours to go,” Morel says wistfully.)

On both sides of the bipartite show, parallels emerge. The dialectic of life and death, of beauty and decay, is played out in the first half in a putrefying still life by the 17th-century Flemish painter Jasper Geeraards, and in the second in the pages of a 19th-century book, where butterflies have been pressed into the paper with a chemical to release their colours. The latter was the work of French explorers in Mexico at the time of Maximillian’s rule.

Indeed, the whiff of colonisation is everywhere, from the fine ancient statues in the Sala del Doge, created from the wealth of conquering Greeks then Romans, to the reassembled elephant bird eggs found in Madagascar sometime before 1700. After that the unwieldy dodo-like animal became extinct, as traders and colonisers imported pests and hunters from the western world. It’s in snake skulls from Africa and South America, in a North American obsidian hand axe, and an incredible collection of shells, from southern India or Sri Lanka, presumably amassed by an amateur enthusiast as an aside from his daily bureaucratic duties in a faraway land.

You could say that Loudon, now 82, started this collection as an enthusiastic amateur. He had previously collected contemporary art, beginning in 1980 with radical British sculptors such as Bill Woodrow and Anish Kapoor, before moving on to American artists such as Kiki Smith, then early Basquiat. “But he always insisted we live closest to the most difficult works,” says his wife Angie. “There was a pair of suspended underpants, I remember.”

By 2000, he had, in his words, “lost the continuity and therefore the knowledge of what was really going on in contemporary art”, when he came across glass works by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, 19th-century glass artists from Dresden skilled in rendering flowers and sea creatures with incredible accuracy. Loudon acquired his first Blaschka around 2005, and from these beginnings grew an interest in scientific drawings and models, most often made for teaching purposes. Among those used to explain human anatomy are an outsized foot in plaster and metal, scaled up to be better visible in a lecture theatre; male and female genitalia rendered in spectacular detail; and a human torso ripped open to reveal what lies beneath the skin.

Most of Loudon’s collection is on show here, bar the 75 books he owns, two turtles in a 19th-century jar and another containing conjoined piglets. “I couldn’t send them, because they’re in alcohol,” he says. When I suggest the latter might not seem suitable to present sensibilities, I get the impression that he might not much care about that.

His collection, he says, is predicated on the beauty that he finds in these remarkable artefacts. He has always collected — it started at prep school with hammers and screwdrivers mounted on a board. The impulse, surely, is the same as that underpinning Morel’s wunderkammer: a desire to hunt things down, to acquire and accumulate, alongside another to understand the world around us. And in the times of Instagram, when most people demonstrate their curiosity, or perhaps lack of it, with images mosaicked on a screen, it’s certainly more stimulating to be in the world of three-dimensional objects.

To May 11, museiveneto.cultura.gov.it