This monumental cabinet comes from the Dom Church. It was built in the first half of the sixteenth century using very high quality oak wood and furnished with hinges, handles and locks of wrought iron. The board at the centre of the cabinet can be folded open and used to lay books and papers on.

The cabinet was probably built for the administration and the archives of the five collegiate chapters in Utrecht. These ecclesiastical boards managed the estates of the collegiate churches: the Dom, the Sint-Salvator church, the Sint-Pieter church, the Sint-Jan church and the Sint-Maria church. The Dom chapter held a central position, for instance chairing the meetings. The chapters were abolished in 1812, after which the cabinet was transferred to the museum. A second archive cabinet owned by the chapters ended up in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.

Large cabinets were very rare in the Middle Ages. The majority of people owned little more than a few chairs, a table, a bed and some chests to store things in. A lot of furniture was lost over the course of time. The Dom Cabinet is unique in this respect, and is considered a top item internationally. The cabinet probably owes its preservation to its important function.

When the city archivist Samuel Muller was given the cabinet in loan for the city collection, it had been painted a red-brown colour and fitted with an extra door and a cornice. Parts of the cabinet were decayed or damaged, and the lid was split in half. Muller had the cabinet restored so thoroughly that we no longer know for sure what it looked like originally. Traces of paint on the inside suggest that it may have been painted. Muller wanted the Utrecht museum to show how people had lived in the town throughout the ages. To this end he built a number of period rooms, starting in the Middle Ages and ending in the nineteenth century. His collection policy for applied arts was aimed at furnishing these period rooms as fully and authentically as possible. However, his criteria were not the ones we hold today. He placed the Dom Cabinet in the gothic style room, with medieval ceramics on the open shelves. Yet in a true medieval living room this massive archive cabinet would have looked decidedly out of place.

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