Article: Two Philadelphia shadow-box grottoes.

From ancient times, people have enjoyed shells for their beauty, usefulness, and symbolism. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were among the natural specimens collected by virtuosi, or amateur scientists, who kept their collections in specialized moms known as cabinets of curiosity. Curiosities in the seventeenth century were "things which rewarded especially scrupulous attention, or presented themselves as items upon which care and pains had been bestowed." (1) The word curiosity also "signaled things strange, odd, unusual and ingenious." (2) Ladies' shellwork is a feminine extension of the cabinet of curiosities. In eighteenth-century England, ladies of ...

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