Early Modern cabinets of art and curiosities were intended to provide a view of the entire world and to reflect it in miniature form. The leitmotif was 'a macrocosm in a microcosm'. According to this concept, a collection thus also represented a cosmological order. A vast array of objects was located in it and each of these was thought to relate somehow to every other object in a manner that made cosmological sense. To fulfill this aspiration, appropriate techniques and methods of categorisation, as well as accessories and instruments were needed. The process of ordering and reorganising a collection to manifest these particular connections was ongoing and demanding. In a sense, it was never-ending since a collection was intended to expand knowledge of the world – through objects – and, at the same time, this perspective influenced the way in which knowledge itself was ordered and conceived. Cabinets of art and curiosities were, therefore, dynamic sites of global knowledge acquisition, which were always in flux.