Venice's Natural History Museum Opens Its Cabinet of Curiosities Online

Venice's natural-history museum has opened a richly strange corner of its collection online. The Museo di Storia Naturale di Venezia collection on Google Arts & Culture currently brings together 119 digitized specimens and objects, along with two virtual tours. Fossils, taxidermy, marine life, and artifacts from centuries of scientific collecting can be studied at a scale that rewards close looking.

The museum occupies the Fontego dei Turchi on the Grand Canal, where Venice's civic natural-history collections were consolidated in 1923. Its holdings now number more than two million pieces, spanning zoology, entomology, botany, paleontology, and ethnography. The online portal turns a fraction of that vast archive into an unusually accessible cabinet of curiosities.

Science, Spectacle, and Invention

One of the collection's most revealing objects is a 16th-century “basilisk” fashioned from a small angel shark, possibly by the naturalist Leone Tartaglini. Chimeric specimens like this were once presented as evidence that fabulous animals truly existed. Seen beside scientifically catalogued fossils and animals, it also records an older culture of wonder, commerce, and deception around natural history.

The museum's Ouranosaurus nigeriensis offers a different kind of spectacle. Found in Niger's Ténéré Desert during expeditions in 1972 and 1973, the herbivorous iguanodontid could reach seven meters in length. Its dramatic row of elongated neural spines gives the skeleton a silhouette unlike nearly any other dinosaur in the galleries.

A preserved Japanese spider crab, collected between 1887 and 1889, pushes scale in another direction. The species is the largest living arthropod; the claw span of the biggest males can approach four meters. The digitized record lets viewers move from the theatrical reach of the animal's legs to the specimen's catalogue history in a few clicks.

A Museum as a Record

The quietest images may be the most evocative. Drawers of 19th-century crustaceans from Dalmatia, still paired with handwritten labels, show how a museum preserves not only species but the methods, networks, and priorities of past researchers. Together, these records make the collection a long environmental history of Venice, the Adriatic, and expeditions far beyond them.

Browse the full Google Arts & Culture collection, enter through the museum's official virtual-tour page, or find current visitor information through Venezia Unica.