The Paper Museum

Natural History, Oct, 1999 by David Freedberg

How did parts of Cassiano's Paper Museum end up in London and Paris? A century after his death, the entire contents of the Paper Museum entered the collections of the rich and powerful Albani family in Rome. When Cardinal Albani needed cash in the 1760s, he sold many of the folio volumes to George III of England. In the 1780s, some 200 folio volumes from Cassiano's Paper Museum were amalgamated into the Royal Collection, reordered, and rebound. Eventually the Royal Collection was stored at Windsor Castle. After World War I, a royal librarian, perhaps unaware of the importance of the natural history drawings from Cassiano's collection, sold many of them to a London secondhand bookseller. They were then dispersed and are only now being tracked down. The volumes in the Institut de France in Paris also originally came from the Albani family but were sequestered by the French forces in Rome at the very end of the eighteenth century. Publication of a multivolume catalog of Cassiano's collection is now in progress under the auspices of the Royal Library, the British Academy, the Institut de France, and the Academy of the Lynxes (the present-day successor to the original academy). The first volume, on citrus fruit, has already appeared, while one on fossils is imminent.

Cassiano's Paper Museum provides the visual evidence that Cesi and his fellow academicians were carrying out research in natural history. The watercolor drawings are remarkable for their range of subject matter and their precision, refinement, and analytic intensity. In 1664 Cassiano's biographer, Carlo Daft, wrote: "With the true eye of a lynx, Cassiano was not content with the simple description and history of nature, but went beyond, in order to study its very anatomy" Cassiano dal Pozzo has preserved the work of a pioneering group that was intent not only on recording every aspect of nature but also on looking into the interior of things that until then had been portrayed only from the outside.

David Freedberg ("The Paper Museum"), a professor of art history at Columbia University in New York City, is editor of the multivolume catalog of Cassiano dal Pozzo's natural history drawings being published by Harvey Miller Publishers under the auspices of the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. As a result of the fortunate accident described in his article, the author discovered that Cassiano was not only a patron of the visual arts but also a passionate investigator of the natural world. Freedberg's best-known book is The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (University of Chicago Press, 1989). The Eye of the Lynx, his forthcoming book from the same publisher, examines the role of Galileo and his associates (including Cassiano) in creating the modern field of natural history.