Art historian Barbara Maria Stafford has described how years ago the Wunderkammer, or "cabinet of wonders," stimulated the popular imagination by projecting a macrocosm into a microcosm: “compressing something into a box makes things more special than they are in and of themselves, producing a network where objects speak to each other and us across time and space."
Above, a Wunderkammer of a more modern & personal sort--a shaving shelf that the ever-perceptive Hillary Johnson delightfully likens to a Buddhist altar.
Very cool. I came to look because of a link in a comment to this post on my blog.