The Paper Museum

Natural History, Oct, 1999 by David Freedberg

Ornithology particularly fascinated Cassiano. Besides having established a laboratory and a collection of zoological, botanical, and fossil curiosities at his residence, he kept live exotic birds, including a flamingo and a bearded vulture. As proof of his scientific expertise, needed for election into the Academy of the Lynxes, Cassiano submitted a book about birds, the Uccelliera. Although the author's name is listed as Giovanni Pietro Olina, much of the material was written or assembled by Cassiano himself, who, whether for reasons of modesty or perhaps politics, wanted to minimize his role to the public. Cassiano had commissioned illustrations for the Uccelliera from the artist Vincenzo Leonardi, whose name I discovered in connection with my work on Ferrari's citrus fruit drawings. (Leonardi turned out to have been responsible for the finest drawings in Cassiano's collection.) Additional evidence of Cassiano's interest in ornithology are three small treatises he wrote--on the bearded vulture, a pair of hummingbirds sent to him by a Jesuit from Canada, and the European and Dalmatian pelicans. There is also an exchange of letters between Cassiano and the French polymath Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, in which they discuss everything about the flamingo--from the distinction between males and females to the taste of flamingo tongue, evidently an exceptional culinary delicacy. Their descriptions cover details of the bird's flight, song, behavior, and habitat, as well as describing ways of sewing the skins for specimen preservation.

Cassiano's thirst for knowledge was such that from the early 1630s he enlisted the French painter Poussin not only to make illustrations of birds and to copy antiquities for his Paper Museum but also to prepare illustrations for an edition of Leonardo da Vinci's treatise on painting. At about the same time, Cassiano commissioned Vincenzo Leonardi to draw the wild animals in Cardinal Barberini's live menagerie. These included a gazelle, a porcupine, an oryx, and a civet cat. There is speculation that the civet cat was dissected in Cassiano's own laboratory, which presumably contributed to the unusual accuracy of the drawing.

Cassiano also had a passion for botany, and it may well have been through the cardinal, who subsidized Ferrari's 1633 book, Flora, sive de Florum Cultura (Flora, or On the Cultivation of Flowers), that Cassiano met the Jesuit priest. This volume contains the first published illustration of plant parts seen under a microscope: the seeds and seedpod of the hibiscus, or Chinese rose. Over the next decade, Cassiano helped Ferrari assemble and publish his Hesperides, with its 115 plates and 400 folio-sized pages documenting the exuberant biodiversity of citrus trees and fruits available to Europeans during the Renaissance. He gathered information from correspondents all over Italy and France, again commissioning Leonardi to produce the illustrations. These were the exquisite watercolors that I came upon in 1985 at Windsor Castle.