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Cassiano dal Pozzo: Museo Cartaceo

General Editors: Dr J I R Montagu, FBA, and Dr A MacGregor Managing Editor: Miss K Owen Project Co-ordinator: Miss R Alexandratos Contact: Cassiano.Project@sas.ac.uk Website: http://www.sas.ac.uk/warburg/pozzo/default.htm The 'Museo Cartaceo', or 'Paper Museum', is a collection of more than 7,000 watercolours, drawings and prints, assembled during the first half of the seventeenth century by the renowned Roman patron and collector, Cassiano dal Pozzo (15881657). It represents one of the most significant attempts ever made before the age of photography to embrace all human knowledge in visual form. Documenting ancient art, archaeology, botany, geology, ornithology and zoology, the collection today constitutes a visual database that provides us with a significant tool for understanding the culture and intellectual concerns of a period during which the foundations of our own scientific methods of research and classification were laid down. Related pages: Academy Research Projects homepage | Research funding

The Museo Cartaceo or Paper Museum, a collection of over 7,000 drawings assembled by the great seventeenth-century antiquary and natural scientist Cassiano dal Pozzo, constitutes one of the most remarkable projects in the history of collecting. While part of the collection is a significant record of classical and medieval antiquities, the 3,000 or so representations of natural history subjects provide the visual evidence for some of the most crucial developments in the modern study of palaeontology, mycology, botany and zoology.

Henrietta Ryan and Carlo Violani Royal Collections, Windsor

Recreating a 17th-Century Paper Museum

The Paper Museum of our title is the Museo Cartaceo of Cassiano dal Pozzo, patron, collector, scientist and antiquarian, born near Turin in 1588, died in Rome in 1657, whose collection was left at his death to his younger brother, Carlo Antonio dal Pozzo, who continued to add to it. The Paper Museum, consisting of around 7,000 drawings, and probably as many prints, passed via the Albani family to King George III in the mid 18th century, and became part of the British Royal Collection. The major part of it is still in Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Cassiano dal Pozzo was elected to Europes first scientific society, the Accademia dei Lincei, of which Galileo was the most famous member, and he became secretary to Cardinal Barberini, nephew of Pope Urban VIII. He and his brother amassed a collection of paintings, and other art works, a library, a museum of antiquities, animal artefacts and curiosities, and they kept a collection of live birds in the courtyard of their Roman palace. Most notably they created their museum on paper or visual encyclopaedia a collection of drawings and prints concerning every branch of knowledge of the man-made and natural worlds. Very little of this Paper Museum was published by Cassiano, although the collection was visited by artists, scholars, collectors and men of letters. Once in the Royal Collection, the Paper Museum was excluded from the catalogues of the Old Master drawings published by curators of the art collections, because of both the obscurity of much of the subject matter and the difficulty of identifying the artists who had made the drawings. In 1986, however, a committee was set up with the aim of publishing the Paper Museum in its entirety for the first time, in the form of a fully illustrated multivolume catalogue raisonn, divided into two series: antiquities and architecture, and natural history. Six volumes have so far been published; another three are currently in production with over twenty more to come. The present speakers are the joint authors of the volume to be devoted to the ornithological drawings (and Henrietta McBurney is also Assistant General Editor of the whole series). They present their collaborative experience as a case study of the tasks of reconstruction facing the project as a whole. First there is the task of reconstructing the extent, contents and order of the original Paper Museum, one of the most difficult tasks because of the dispersal of the contents over the years, and the lack of inventories or descriptions of the contents made by the different owners. Clues have had to be found here and there, and what has amounted almost to detective work is still being undertaken. Examples: how and where dispersed drawings have been found. Secondly there is the problem for both series of finding specialists able to identify the subject-matter. In the case of the natural history drawings, even if specialists are found,

the marrying of scientific and art historical expertise presents a challenge. Communication between the two disciplines can be difficult because both the descriptive language and way of looking at material are very different. (In the catalogue of ornithological drawings, the problems are fortunately less than is normally the case!) The matter of identification is not always straightforward. Examples: the fossil wood corpus; a puzzling experimental study; sponges, corals or fungi; extinct, invented or real birds. A further dimension of expertise is needed in the interpretation of the subject. Questions need to be asked such as: how accurate are the drawings done from the life; is there evidence of a taxonomic or classificatory order; what contribution is made by the discorsi or accounts written to accompany some of the drawings? Examples from the birds: anatomy of the barn owl ear; syrinx of the white pelican; from the plants: use of the microscope. Not all the Paper Museum drawings were drawn directly from nature or from the objects themselves. Some were derived from other images, such as other sets of drawings or manuscripts or from illustrations in books. Part of the reconstruction process therefore involves identification of sources, sometimes leading to connections with other unidentified or unpublished groups of drawings. Examples from the birds: Jacopo Ligozzis paradise whydah, versions done for the Medici Grand Duke and for Aldrovandi and manuscript copies in Bologna and Natural History Museum, London; Giovanni da Udine: drawings for, or copies from fresco schemes and versions in the Uffizi, Paper Museum and Chatsworth. This leads on to more art historical problem of identifying artists. Example: Giovanna Garzoni, artist of fruit, fishes, and perhaps birds? Another task concerns examining the influence of the Paper Museum images on later natural history illustration. Unlike Aldrovandis comparable collection, much of which was published as woodcuts in books during and after his lifetime, the fact that the greater part of Cassianos collection was never published meant the majority of the images remained unknown to later natural history illustrators. Exceptions were the drawings of citrus fruit, published in Ferraris Hesperides (1646) and the group of drawings of birds that formed the models for the etched plates in Olinas Uccelliera or Aviary (1622). By contrast these images had a significant influence on later botanical and ornithological illustration. Examples: Olinas plates being used in publications from Jonstons Historia Naturalis de Avibus (1650) and Ray and Willughbys Ornithologia (1676) to Buchoz, Le Trait des Oiseaux de Volire (1774); Linnaeus also using Olina, especially for those birds not seen in Sweden. Such examples suggest that, had more of the Paper Museum images been accessible through publications, the course of later 17th and 18th-century natural history illustration might have been different. Various tasks remain in the recreation of this collection with which the speakers would like to invite collaboration: help with identifications; looking out for dispersed drawings; ideas re marketing the books and possible sources of funding. Copies of the published volumes, prospectuses, and profiles of future volumes will be available at the conference. Back to [TOP] of page

In Galileo's Orbit
Brian W. Ogilvie The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History. David Freedberg. xii + 513 pp. University of Chicago Press, 2002. $50. In the first decades of the 17th centuryso the old story goesGalileo Galilei led a struggle to replace the sclerotic natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, entrenched in European universities and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, with a new science based on mathematics and observation, not blind adherence to authority. In 1611, Galileo was invited to join a small scientific society, the Academy of the Linceans (Accademia dei Lincei). Founded in 1603 by Federico Cesi, this society would be almost unknown today had its handful of members not decided to stand by Galileo as his telescopic observations, and the conclusions he drew from them, became increasingly controversial. Members of the academy helped plan Galileo's strategy for dealing with the Roman curia; they celebrated his victories, consoled him in his setbacks and cautioned himusually unsuccessfullyto be prudent. His condemnation as a heretic in 1633 was a defeat for the society, not merely its most famous member. But the Linceans were far more than Galileo's sidekicks. In a book that is part art history, part history of science and part detective story, David Freedberg has uncovered the vast range of the Linceans' scientific activities. His detective work began in 1986, when he discovered a large collection of 17th-century natural history drawings at Windsor Castle. These led him to their original collector, Cassiano dal Pozzo, a Lincean, and thence to several other collections of natural history manuscripts that once belonged to Cesi or other members of the Academy. On the basis of these manuscripts and the few Lincean works that saw the press, Freedberg has reconstructed the world of Lincean scientific thought. At the center of that world was natural history. Cesi and his fellow click for full Linceans devoted countless hours to carefully observing and image and meticulously describing the plants, animals and minerals that they caption found on their journeys throughout Italy and the rest of Europe. They employed talented, sometimes brilliant, artists to record those observations in the albums that originally drew Freedberg's interest. They focused their attention not only on the surface appearance of things but also on their interiors, particularly the organs of fructification and generation. And they went beyond 16th-century predecessors such as Conrad Gessner, who also drew and dissected the parts of plants, by employing a new instrument: the microscope, which Galileo introduced to them. His telescopic observations forever changed how we understand the heavens; the Linceans hoped that their microscopic observations would do the same for the terrestrial world.

click for full Their efforts generated thousands of illustrations. The Lincean corpus image and contains at least 2,700 drawings, some of which are reproduced, for caption the first time, in the pages of Freedberg's book. It dwarfs other contemporary collections of natural history illustrations. The pictures range in subject from the prosaic to the exotic, from the normal to the monstrous. Yet the long series of ferns, fungi, strange fossil woods and other peculiar objects reveal Cesi's obsession with what he called "middle natures," objects that appeared to combine the characteristics of two different natural kinds. Fossil wood was an example: It had the form of a plant, but it was made of stone. Cesi hoped that these ambiguous objects would be the test cases for an authentic classification of nature. But the more Cesi looked at images, the more he came to realize that their welter of detail ran counter to his classifying impulses. In The Assayer (1624), Galileo taught his fellow Linceans that real science required penetrating the surface appearance of things not with the microscope but with the mind. Cesi concluded in his later works, few of which were ever published (he died in 1630), that observation was only one moment in the process of scientific investigation, and that it had to be disciplined by knowledge. To observenot merely to seeone needed first to know which characters were essential and which should be ignored. Cesi thought hard about how to tell them apart, but he never succeeded. Freedberg is at his best when, like the Linceans, he is absorbed in details and engaged in close analysis. This is a long book, but it is carefully written, and the slight repetition serves only to remind the reader of important elements in the argument. Each of the 172 illustrations contributes to Freedberg's analysis; although they are often beautiful, they are not mere decoration. The Eye of the Lynx delivers on its promise to offer the first book-length study of the Linceans in English, and it does so with sympathy and empathy for its subjects. Freedberg is less successful at placing the Linceans in the context of the Scientific Revolution as a whole. He sometimes exaggerates how innovative they really were. By paying attention to visual detail and the variety of nature, the Linceans were continuing a 16th-century tradition, although they addressed problems their predecessors had neglected and used a new instrument. But Freedberg has little sympathy for 16thcentury science, which he characterizes as reactionary, occult, confused and anthropomorphic. The difference between the old and the new is epitomized for him by the difference between Galileo, the sixth Lincean, and his immediate predecessor as a member, Giovanni Battista Della Porta. Galileo's science was based on experiment and mathematics; Della Porta's was a pseudoscience based on surface appearance and vague similarities between objects. When the Linceans veered in Della Porta's direction, they were backsliding. But why was Della Porta invited to join the society in the first place? The answer reveals a more nuanced view of Renaissance science. Like Galileo, Della Porta opposed the Aristotelian science that dominated the universities of Renaissance Europe. Renaissance Aristotelians offered a qualitative explanation of the way Nature behaved in general. They simply threw up their hands when confronted with "occult qualities" and "jokes of nature," apparent exceptions to nature's regularities. In contrast, Della

Porta, the German alchemist Paracelsus, Girolamo Cardano and other 16th-century antiAristotelians focused their attention on natural particulars: the way Nature behaved in specific instances, often those that seemed to reveal her most subtle workings. They recognized that a new science would have to account, somehow, for these exceptions to the way the world normally worked. Cesi's fascination with middle natures fits in with this aspect of Della Porta's concerns. But Cesi also learned from Aristotelians: His emphasis on the role of reproductive organs in classification drew heavily on the work of Andrea Cesalpino, whose On Plants (1583) was firmly in the Aristotelian mold. Like Galileo, Cesi in his mature work strove to combine the Aristotelian commitment to theoretical explanation with Della Porta's commitment to the careful investigation of particulars. Galileo would succeed by radically restricting the particulars to be explained to those qualities that were amenable to mathematical analysisweight, extension and motion. Cesi would fail, but he was working on the right problem. His faith in pictures led him to recognize the problem, even though recognizing it ultimately destroyed his faith in pictures. As Freedberg tells it, the Linceans' story is full of tragedy. But by telling it with grace and empathy, he has also revealed its enduring element of triumph.

Reviewer Information
Brian W. Ogilvie is assistant professor of Renaissance history and director of the Religious Studies Certificate Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is at work on a book titled The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe, forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. Article Tools printer friendly request classroom permission Scientists' Bookstore e-mail this article

The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History Sigma Xi members and American Scientist subscribers: To receive a discount, first login at upper left. in association with

This illustration of the orchidi testiculati (Ophrys incubacea bianca ex. Tod.) is taken from one of eight volumes of Lincean drawings in the Institut de France, many of which sexualize the morphology of plants in human terms. In the center is the whole plant, showing the usual testicular shapes of the roots; at left, a microscopic study of the interior of the flower, with two pollinia projecting from the gynostemium; and at right, a pollinium with tail and retinaculum. From The Eye of the Lynx.

The Melissographia, an engraved broadsheet prepared for Pope Urban VIII by the Linceans in 1625, shows three bees (a reference to the coat of arms of the pope's Tuscan family) viewed under magnification from above, from below and from the side. Other parts of the bee are displayed across the scroll at the bottom of the page. This broadsheet was the first printed natural history illustration made with the aid of a microscope and is unusually large, measuring 41.6 by 30.7 centimeters. From The Eye of the Lynx.