The Paper Museum

Natural History, Oct, 1999 by David Freedberg

Early in the seventeenth century, Cassiano dal Pozzo made an attempt to gather a comprehensive visual record of the natural world.

In 1985, in a cupboard in Windsor Castle, I found a cache of several hundred of the most beautiful natural history drawings I had ever seen. I was astonished by both their quality and their range. There were drawings of animals, birds, fishes, plants, fungi, fossils, gems, and minerals. They included drawings that magnified animal and plant parts, as well as representations of many unexpected species, from lowly grasses to puzzling mollusks and curious mushrooms. The drawings also showed a few recently discovered plants and animals from the New World. I seemed to be in the presence of a vast attempt to catalogue all of nature. But where had those drawings come from, who had made them, and why had they been done with such extraordinary intensity and closeness of observation?

What led me to that cupboard in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle was a book I was writing about a Jesuit priest by the name of Giovanni Battista Ferrari (1585-1653), who had roused my interest because of his unusual career--unusual even by the standards of many of the brilliant members of that enterprising and controversial religious order. At first a professor of Hebrew at the Jesuit College in Rome, Ferrari soon gave himself over to his chief passion: gardening. When Urban VIII became pope in 1623, Ferrari was taken on as chief horticultural adviser to the papal family, the Barberini. This was the same family that would soon form an alliance with the Jesuits against Galileo. Ferrari himself had been present on that famous occasion in 1611 when Galileo first explained his use of the telescope to the very Jesuits who, within a few years, became his fiercest opponents. No one had written in any detail about Ferrari's life or about his lovely books on horticulture and botany. I was particularly interested in his last book, the Hesperides seu de malorum aureorum cultura (Hesperides, or On the Cultivation of the Golden Apples), published in Rome in 1646. Its engravings depicted more than 150 varieties of citrus fruit, and I went searching for the original drawings. Eventually I found more than a hundred of them--watercolors of citrus fruit in every imaginable shape and form--at Windsor Castle. On that same serendipitous day, mixed in with those drawings I found an unexpected number of natural history watercolors.

My research on the documents relating to these works led me to archives and libraries in London, Paris, and Rome. It turned out that I had stumbled upon one part of the Museo Cartaceo (Paper Museum), a huge collection of drawings of everything under the sun, from ancient Roman artifacts to unusual mollusks and bizarre mushrooms, assembled by a contemporary of Ferrari's, Cassiano dal Pozzo. Made at the same time as Galileo's pioneering investigations into astronomy, mathematics, and physics, these watercolor drawings, which later made up a significant part of the Paper Museum, have remained unknown to the vast majority of historians of science and are absent from almost every account of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. The collection is encyclopedic in terms of size, comprehensiveness, and accuracy. Unlike the fantastic monsters, prodigies, and wonders that populated the pages of earlier natural history books by Conrad Gesner and by Cassiano dal Pozzo's contemporary Ulisse Aldrovandi, almost every specimen included in the Paper Museum actually occurred in nature.

But who was Cassiano dal Pozzo? Born in Turin in 1588, Cassiano (as he is known in the world of art history) was raised by his father's cousin, the archbishop of Pisa. He studied law and later moved to Rome and set up a household with his younger brother. He became part of a cultured and scholarly circle centered around Federico Cesi, the duke of Acquasparta and founder, in 1603, of the Academy of the Lynxes. This first modern scientific academy (described by Stephen Jay Gould in "This View of Life" May and June 1998) was named after the sharp-eyed animal that could then still be found in the forests of the Umbrian hills. Cesi and his companions, dissatisfied with the conventionality of the universities of their day, were intent on studying nature through direct observation and experiment. In 1611 the group welcomed Galileo, who was by that time challenging the old Ptolemaic views of the universe. Cassiano was elected to the academy in 1622, a year earlier than his benefactor, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, a powerful patron of the arts and sciences and the nephew of Pope Urban VIII. Cassiano, who served as the cardinal's secretary, played a very active role in the Academy of the Lynxes. In addition to collecting paintings, he conceived the extraordinary private initiative of employing artists to make a visual record of the antiquarian and natural worlds, calling the project his Paper Museum.

Art historians have long been familiar with Cassiano in his roles as a patron of Nicolas Poussin, an admirer of Diego Velazquez, and a passionate collector of antiquities. Brat even most specialists had no idea of the flail extent of the collection of drawings that formed part of his Paper Museum, which was housed in the residence he shared, in the via dei Chiavari, with his brother Carlo Antonio and Carlo's family. Contemporary visitors described a huge library of some 9,000 items: manuscripts, printed books, drawings, and miscellaneous objects. The bound sets of drawings were kept with the relevant printed books on shelves labeled ad naturalem historiam. Cassiano greatly enhanced the Paper Museum when he bought the contents of Federico Cesi's library after the duke's untimely death in 1630--a library containing not only books and instruments but also specimen drawings commissioned by Cesi during the earliest days of the Academy of the Lynxes. When Cassiano himself died in 1657, he owned, in all, approximately 7,000 drawings relating to architecture, mosaics, ancient sculpture, and natural history. Although he had corresponded with scientists, antiquarians, poets, and scholars from all over Europe, only a tiny fraction of the letters were published, and Cassiano, once well known as a patron of the arts and sciences, eventually faded into obscurity.