Collectors and curiosities : Paris and Venice, 1500-1800

L

COLLECTORS AND CURIOSITIES Paris and VeniceJ 15 00-1800 Krzysztof Pomian

Translated by Elizabeth Wiles- Portier

Polity Press

First published as Collectionneurs, amateurs et cuneux, copyright © Editions Gallimard 1987. The essay entitled 'Enrre le visible et !'invisible: Ia collection' copyright© Giulio Einaudi editorie, Torino, 1978. This English translation copyright © Polity Press 1990. Published with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication

Contents

First published 1990 by Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell Editorial office: Polity Press, 65 Bridge Street, Cambridge CB2 !UR, UK Marketing and production: Basil Blackwell Ltd 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK Basil Blackwell, Inc 3 Cambridge Cenrer Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced. stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form ot by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise. be lent. re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Bnttsh Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Pomian, Krzysztof Collectors and curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500-1800. !. France. Paris. Collecting. history. 2. Italy. Venice. Collecting, history I. Title II. Collecrionneurs, amateurs et curieux. English 790.132094436 ISBN 0-7456-0680 -6 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset in 10 on ll 1/2pt Garamond by Witwell Ltd, Southport Printed in Great Britain by T.J. Press Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall

Foreword

1 THE COLLECTION: BETWEEN THE VISIBLE AND THE 1.1 A Collection of Collections 1.2 Collections: the Invisible and the Visible 1.3 Usefulness and Meaning 1.4 Museums and Private Collections

INVISIBLE

2

THE AGE OF CURIOSITY

3

COLLECTIONS IN VENETIA IN THE HEYDAY OF CURIOSITY

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

Collections as Microcosms The Galleries of Antiquities Natural Curiosities Paintings

7 11

20 26 34

45 65

69 78

99 106

4

MEDALS/SHEL LS= ERUDITION/PH ILOSOPHY

121

5

DEALERS, CONNOISSEURS AND ENTHUSIASTS IN EIGHTEENTH-C ENTURY PARIS

139

6

MAFFEI AND CAYLUS

169

7

COLLECTORS, NATURALISTS AND ANTIQUARIAN S IN THE VENETIAN REPUBLIC OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

7.1 Paintings, Drawings, Engravings 7.2 Objec(S from the Natural World 7.3 Historical Monuments

185 192 217 239

8

258

PRIVATE COLLECTIONS, PuBLIC MusEuMs

Notes

276

Index

334

Foreword

The collector? A harmless eccentric, who spends his days sorting out stamps, impaling butterflies on pins or revelling in erotic engravings. Or, quite the reverse, a wily speculator who buys up works of art for next to nothing, only to sell them for fabulous sums, all the while claiming to be an art lover. Or again, a man of good family who has inherited, along with a stately home and antique furniture, a collection of pictures, the finest of which he allows to be admired on the glossy pages of chic magazines. Three different sketches, three very different viewpoints, but all anecdotal, for a collector is only taken seriously when he manipulates large sums of money. Only when a collection is made for investment purposes, is locked up in a bank vault and is worth more than its weighr in gold does it impress; anything else is perceived merely as a narcissistic and slightly frivolous pastime - nothing more than a trifle. The images of private collections and of collectors which are apparently most firmly rooted in French opinion, may vary in degrees of generosity and irony, but none ever attributes to its subject anything more than very minor importance. This is in no way surprising, as srare patronage, whether royal, imperial or republican, has, at any rate since the sixteenth century, been far more significant than private patronage. Royal collections, which fell, with the demise of the ancien regime, into state hands, acquired a status in French cultural history that private ones had neither the means nor the pedigree to rival. Thus it was that the state came to dominate art in France for centuries, not only by overseeing its production and its preservation, but also by undertaking to maintain and care for historical and scientific artefacts. Today, therefore, even museums built around private collections which include genuine masterpieces are looked down upon as the poor relations of state-run ones. Only in the last decades of the nineteenth century did private patronage

2

Foreword

Foreword

begin to help national museums build up their treasures and fill in their gaps, by commissioning works from artists not benefiting from state sponsorship. This same era saw several private collections become state property, usually after the death of their creator. This trend has recently increased thanks to the introduction of new tax laws copied from other countries. There are already some indications that the general public will, in the long run, adopt a different attitude towards collectors. With the increase in the number of donations as well as of museums either created from or considerably enriched by private collections, not to mention efforts made by exhibition organizers and critics to educate the public, collectors may therefore be seen one day as 'central characters in the world of art' (Andre Chaste!) if not that of culture more generally. In countries where everyone is fully aware that the museums, both large and small, have been founded thanks to private initiative and owe their stocks tO private collections and to purchases financed by private individuals and businesses, this opinion is already very widespread. In the United States, for example, the collector is seen almost as a kindly monarch, bestowing works of art or relics of the past upon his or her place of birth, whether it be great or small. What is more, he makes sure that that is where they stay, by presenting this birthplace with museums, institutions serving both an educative and recreative purpose. Virtually every one of these organizes exhibitions, lectures and film showings and functions as a library and source of publications, all of which make them meeting-places where the social fabric can be rewoven. Recognition of the cultural role of collectors can be found much nearer home. Italy, which waited many long years to become a nation state was, from the fifteenth century onwards, particularly rich in private collectors, several of whom gave the public access to their collections very early on. It is in Italy that the role of private collections over the centuries in the crystallization of civic loyalty and national feeling can best be seen. In fact, it soon becomes clear that their role was actually a political one, as they had a very real, albeit invisible, influence on urban life. The same is true today of public museums. It is only due to help from the state, in other words the taxpayers, that they are able not only to keep ticket prices low in order to increase visitor numbers but also to press ahead with the renovation of buildings, with conservation work and with purchases that allow them to keep up with current artistic endeavour. They are, however, equally dependent on private collections which, by helping them to trace the vagaries of taste right up to the present day and beyond, appear to complement them in a quite irreplaceable way.

descriptions of their collections, and these still echo to the admiring rones of visitors. The inventories, often very detailed, provide a glimpse of the royal and ecclesiastical treasures of the Middle Ages, some of which have, miraculously, survived up to the present day. From the fifteenth century onwards, as modern-day collections began to burgeon, a whole body of literature came into existence, which was entirely or ar least in part devoted to them, and which turned out to be very heterogeneous. It included guides for travellers, art lovers and enthusiasts, accounts of journeys, descriptions of collections, art galleries and private museums, written sometimes by visitors, sometimes by the proprietors themselves. As well as these there were biographies of artists, works by local historians, research work carried our by antiquarians and scholars, works on natural history, correspondence often published by its authors during their lifetime, sales catalogues from the beginning of the seventeenth century onwards and, from the 1660s onwards, articles in journals. At the same time, archives became piled high with inventories compiled after the decease of a collector and various documents to do with the trade in art. In the eighteenth century dealers began to put pen to paper with advice on the choice and layout of a collection, dissertations on rhe trade in curiosities and on sales or handbooks intended for collectors. At the same period historians and art critics began to have their say too, sometimes making only passing reference to the collections where they had seen the works they describe, sometimes giving quite derailed descriptions. At a later stage they went on to produce many monographs of collections and of different categories of collectable objects, along with biographies of collectOrs, histories of collections and of museums in certain rowns or countries and research into the art trade. They even made several attempts to come up with an overview. Historians of science, of earth sciences and most especially of natural science later proceeded to follow them down these various paths. This great mass of literature contained a number of documents which dealt only with certain works of art - paintings in particular - seeking to reconstruct all the adventures which befell them between their birrh and the moment when their hisrory became known. To this end, attempts were made to find every trace these works had left, to identify their successive owners and the prices paid for them, as well as to place the restoration work carried out on them in its correct cultural and technical context. Thus, when collections were studied the aim may have been to highlight rheir intrinsic nature, but the interest was far more likely to have been kindled by one or several works they included, and which had caught the historian's eye. This way of proceeding left its mark on all those inventories and catalogues where curiosities, ancient relics, coins and natural history objects are all neglected save those which can further the search for traces of works of art

Astonishment, praise and criticism have been aroused by collections ever since their genesis. In the West, the Greeks were the first to make written

3

4

Foreword

Foreword

or even just of a few masterpieces. Luckily, this type of lopsided publication is becoming rarer nowadays, though it has not died out completely. Identifying the taste of collectors, which can be gauged from their choice of objects, represents a different, and perhaps more important, aspect of the study of collections. It is betrayed not only by the collections themselves but also by artists' commissions, by fa\;ades, interior decor, architectural details, pictures, frescoes, stuccowork, sculptures, furniture, fabrics, china and so on. This explains why the boundary separating the collection from the decor tends to disappear when taste is seen as the overriding concern. As a result, documents are no longer consulted over questions of collection layout, the significance of each piece or the selection of visitors to be allowed a glimpse. This perspective also means that anything which cannot contribute to the identification of taste fades into insignificance. Taste, isolated thus from notions of the past, from religious or patriotic sentiment and from questions of scientific interest, is reduced exclusively to a set of preferences accorded to certain artistic propositions, and imprisoned in the 'aesthetic' sphere, sometimes at the price of flagrant anachronism. It is, moreover, viewed as purely individual. In studies of this type efforts may not even be made to link differences in taste to those in generations, social strata, degrees of culture or indeed in religious, ideological and political leanings, by comparing collectors of the same nationality or age. Nor is it totally unknown for historians to set themselves up as arbiters of taste and to judge the collections under scrutiny according to their own preferences. It goes without saying that in this way they deprive themselves of all means of understanding the choices of those they claim to be studying. When collections are treated solely as the guardians of works of art or as testaments to taste, even if they seem initially to be the object of a study, they will actual! y on! y be used to solve puzzles concerning an entire! y different field. This process remains a perfectly legitimate one, as long as it is remembered that collections play more than these two roles, and that if the others are forgotten collections cannot be fully understood. Similarly, it is quite acceptable to restrict oneself to artistic, scientific or hisrorical collections according to the requirements of the history of those particular domains, as long as it is borne in mind that in this case a multi-dimensional phenomenon is being examined from one sometimes artificially isolated aspect, and that important elements may well be missed. When the choice of collections relevant to a particular viewpoint has been made from collections belonging to a particular town, region or country, and from a specific point in its history, it is obvious that only those characteristics which correspond ro the questions being asked are taken into account. Most of the time, unfortunately, these questions do not originate from theorizing about the collection as an anthropological event but are handed down wholesale from one generation of scholars to the next. At this stage there is

a considerable risk that, rather than approaching the object of study in one's own individual fashion, one will be tempted to impose on it the dividing lines habitually used to segregate the various disciplines, thoroughly mutilating it in the process.

5

The articles contained in this volume are the fruits of nearly twenty years of research, and their approach to collections differs from those described above, in that they treat them as an institution coextensive with man both in terms of space and time. As such, collections become the product of a unique type of behaviour, consisting in the formation of collections, in an attempt to create a link between the visible and the invisible. There is a geographical dimension to this behaviour, in so far as collections are concentrated in religious and political centres and at intellectual, artistic and economic crossroads. To this can be added a social dimension, for collections are generally accessible only to a public satisfying certain criteria, while their actual nature and content depend on the status of the collector himself; rhat is, on the positions he has reached in the hierarchies of power, prestige, education and wealth. This last particular hierarchy also implies the existence of an economic dimension. Precious objects are concrete manifes· rations of wealth, and collection pieces are not only exchanged as gifts, but are also bought and sold, plundered and stolen, with the result thar in civilized societies, wherever a collector goes, robbers and dealers are sure ro follow. As the boundary between the visible and the invisible shifts in time, there is also a historical dimension to collection-building, and objects belonging to neither category come to light, especially observable objects and reconstructible ones. This is the hisrory which is reflected in changes to the contents of collections, to their location and to the context which each category of objects is given, not only by those belonging ro other categories bur also by the language used to describe them. It is reflected too in changes to the way objects are dis pia yed, to their public and, last of all, to the attitudes of displayers and visitors alike to these collections. The collection is thus a unique domain, whose history cannot be consigned ro the narrow confines of the histories of art, the sciences or history itself. It is, or rather should be, a history in its own right, concentrating on 'semiophores', or objects bearing meaning, on their production, their circulation and their 'consumption', which most generally takes the form of mere viewing and does not, as such, involve any physical destruction. As the history of the production of semiophores it intersects with the histories of art, history and the sciences, as semiophores include not only works of art, but also relics of the past and objects found in the natural and exotic world. When the history of their circulation is examined, the history of economics cannot be avoided, especially when it comes to the evolution and development of the marker in semiophores. Lastly, with the

6

Foreword

history of their 'consumption', the history of the classification of objects and of the meaning vested in them, it comes into contact with intellectual history, while the history of those who place them on display and those who come and look at them intersects with social history. Placed at the crossroads of several different currents of thought, the history of collections would seem to offer a valuable line of pursuit to cultural historians. The first article contained in this volume outlines a general theory in which the collection is treated as an anthropological event, while the last one traces the transition from private collection to public museum. They both, especially the first, seek to provide theoretical justification for the approaches employed in the remaining articles, which are devoted to different aspects of the history of collections between the sixteenth century and the end of the eighteenth, centred mainly on Paris and on the territory of the former Venetian Republic. Therefore, while the same object is examined at some points with the aid of a telescope, elsewhere, a microscope is employed, since, in this way, a panoramic view of the phenomenon of collections, from the Palaeolithic to modern times, can be supplemented by studies of particular collections belonging to a specific region, town or even individual, entering at moments into very great detail indeed. This was, it seemed, a good way of avoiding both the Scylla of empty generalizations and the Charybdis of mountains of unrelated facts. All these articles were written between 1974 and 1983. All have been published already, but in works which have not always been readily obtainable. The ever-growing number of students of the history of collections will, I hope, find it helpful to have a volume containing all of them for the first time. If this book leads to a clearer definition of the field of research as well as its relevance to all studies of culture, highlighting the different possible approaches and the wealth waiting ro be discovered, it will have fulfilled its purpose. July 1986

1

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

It would take more than one large tome to list the contents of every museum and private collection, even if these contents were only referred to once, and by category. In Paris alone, there are apparently 150 museums, not only the world-famous art galleries, but also museums devoted exclusively to the army, to nature and hunting, the cinema, counterfeiting, Freemasonry, the history of France, natural history, the history of man, oldfashioned spyglasses and telescopes, the navy, musical instruments, gramophones, speech and gesture, locksmithing, the table, techniques and technology and so on and so on. For their part, private collections often contain the most unexpected objects, whose banality is such as to make one wonder who on earth could possibly be interested in them. One lady in Poland even picks up orange, lemon and grapefruit wrappings. Which all goes to prove that every natural object known to man and every artefact, however strange, will show up somewhere in the world as part of a museum or private collection. This begs the question of how this universe, which comprises so many and such sundry elements, can ever be given an overall definition without the danger of succumbing to simple list-making. Our task is therefore one of finding out what, if anything, they all have in common. The trucks and locomotives lined up in the railway museum carry neither freight nor passengers. Nobody is slain by the swords, cannons and guns on display in the military museum, and not one single worker or peasant uses the utensils, tools and costumes assembled in folklore collections or museums. The same is true of everything which ends up in this strange world where the word 'usefulness' seems never to have been heard of, for to say that the objects which now await only the gaze of the curious were still of some use would be a gross distortion of the English language: the locks and keys no longer secure any door, the machines produce nothing and the clocks and watches are certainly not expected to give the precise time of day.

8

The Co!lectioJl: between the Visible and the Invisible

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

Although they may well have served a definite purpose in their former existence, museum and collection pieces no longer serve any at all, and as such acquire the same quality as works of art, which are never produced with any definite use in mind, but simply to adorn people, palaces, temples, apartments, gardens, streets, squares and cemeteries. Even so, it cannot really be said that museum and collection pieces serve a decorative purpose: decoration is the art of using pictures and sculptures to break the monotony of blank walls which are already there and in need of enhancement, whereas walls are built or specially adapted in museums and in some of the larger collections, for the specific purpose of displaying works. Collectors with more modest means have showcases built, boxes and albums made or else clear a space somewhere for objects to be placed, the aim every time seemingly being the same, namely that of bringing objects together in order to show them to others. Museum and collection pieces may be neither useful nor decorative, yet enormous care is nonetheless lavished on them. The risk of corrosion caused by physical and chemical factors is reduced to a minimum by careful monitoring of variables such as light, humidity, temperature and levels of atmospheric pollution. Damaged objects are always restored to their former glory whenever possible, and every effort is made to ensure that the public's only contact with them is visual. The existence of a market where these objects circulate at sometimes astronomical prices emphasizes their great value; indeed when a self-portrait of Rembrandt was sold on 29 November 1974, at the Palais Galliera in Paris for the sum of 1,100,570 francs, one of the expert journalists found this figure completely derisory. 1 A black market, fed with stolen goods from private collections and museums, operates alongside the official one, and in 1974 alone, 4785 old masters went missing. 2 Besides these, thieves also go for objects which, although less spectacular, are nonetheless valuable in the eyes of the collectors, which means that along with museum curators, they too are constantly faced with a major security problem. The presence of a police station within the precincts of the Grand Palais in Paris, where the most prestigious works are exhibited, exemplifies the extent of the surveillance system which has been set up. Put in simple terms, collectOrs and curatOrs alike are forced to act as if they were guarding treasure. Given that this is the case, it might seem surprising that treasures like these should still be on show to the public, unlike those which languish in bank safes and strongrooms. Even more surprising is the fact that as often as not their owners do not profit from them financially. True, some collections are built up with a purely speculative end in mind, and most private collections are dispersed upon the death of their owners, to the benefit of their heirs. Yet this is by no means always the case, and one could cite dozens of examples of collections which have been turned into

museums. In Paris, the Cognacq-Jay, Jacquemart-Andn~ and Nissim de Camondo Museums all started life this way, as did Geneva's Ariana Museum, the Lazaro Galdiano in Madrid, the Federico Mares in Barcelona, the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation in Venice, Boston's Gardner House and New York's Frick Collection. The creation of a private collection cannot, therefore, be reduced to outright and unambiguous hoarding, and the same is, of course, even more true for museums. The objects these latter possess are inalienable, and no move is ever made to sell them off, even when a museum is afflicted by the very worst financial crisis imaginable. The only known exception to this, since the beginning of the twentieth century, has been the sale of pictures from the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad by the Soviet government from 1929 to 1937. 3 Even museums which reserve the right to sell certain pieces in their possession, such as the New York Museum of Modern Art, only do so in order to acquire other works which will widen the range of styles and movements the museum covers. Unlike private collectors, museums do not seek to keep works out of circulation for a limited period of time, but for always. The world of private collections and museums seems to be one of endless diversity, and yet the few remarks which have just been made, albeit provisionally, reveal a certain unity, certain points in common shared by every single one of those extremely heterogeneous objects which are amassed in such great quantities in private homes and public buildings alike. These remarks enable one to gain a clearer definition of the particular institution which concerns this volume, namely the collection, an institution which must satisfy the following criteria: a set of natural or artificial objects, kept temporarily or permanently out of the economic circuit, afforded special protection in enclosed places adapted specifically for that purpose and put on display. This definition is obviously rigorously descriptive, and one which immediately bars all exhibitions from the category of collection, since they only represent the very briefest of moments in the process of circulation or production of material goods. Excluded roo are the piles of objects which chance alone has thrown together, as well as all hidden treasures, regardless of their other characteristics. On the other hand, the same definition does include most libraries and archives in the category of collection, alongside museums and private collections, though this does require a distinction to be made straightaway between archives and mere repositories of documents which remain part of the administrative and economic circuits of activity. The Polish dictionary of archives does, in fact, furnish a view coinciding with our own definition: 'an institution called upon to guard, collecr, sort, preserve, keep and render accessible documents which, although they are no longer useful on a daily basis as before, and are therefore considered superfluous in offices and stares, nonetheless merit being preserved' 4 Libraries pose a slightly more complicated problem.

9

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

Books are, it is true, sometimes regarded as objects, collected for their beautiful bindings or illustrations, for instance, and in this case the issue is simple, just as it is when a library acts as an archive or contains books intended solely for entertainment. Certain libraries, however, only house works of reference needed for the pursuit of some form of economic activity, and these cannot come under the heading of collection. This topic will be discussed later on, as will that of the coexistence in our societies of two types of collections, the private collection and the museum. The descriptive stage, which had enabled the collection to be defined, appears otherwise to be something of a cul-de-sac, though it does harbour an implicit paradox which now needs to be discussed, for it is an undoubted paradox that objects which are kept temporarily or permanently out of the circuit of economic activity should even so be afforded the kind of special protection normally reserved for precious objects. The fact is that they are precious objects, yet they paradoxically have an exchange value and no practical or usage value. Indeed they could have no practical value as they are bought not to be used but to be displayed. This could in itself be seen as a very particular use, but at that point the term 'use' might end up devoid of all meaning altogether. Any and every object can be used in many different ways of course, but it seems important to maintain the difference between these uses, however strange, and the very special behaviour reserved for certain objects, when they are simply looked at and admired. This is the fate of every item purchased for a collection, and even when it is carefully preserved or repaired, the sole aim is to render it more presentable. It must be remembered that when a work of art enters a museum or a collection, it loses its usage value, if one is of the opinion that its ability to decorate constitutes such a value, for it no longer serves that purpose in such an environment. It can now be taken as read that objects which become collection pieces have an exchange value but no practical value, yet the origin of this exchange value still needs to be elucidated, and our next task is to establish exactly what it is that makes these objects so precious in our eyes. Answers to this puzzle are frequently based on a sort of primitive psychology which can conjure up any postulation it needs, such as the existence of a property instinct or a tendency to hoard inherent in certain individuals and probably all civilized beings, if not in the whole of mankind. More seriously, it is claimed that certain collection pieces are sources of aesthetic pleasure, and that others, or indeed the very same ones, constitute the key ro greater historical or scientific knowledge. Lastly, it is observed that their possession confers a certain prestige on their owners, since they serve as proofs of their good taste, of their considerable intellectual curiosity, or even of their wealth and generosity, if not all these qualities at the same time. It is hardly surprising, or so the argument continues, that there are a

number of people who seek to own such pieces and are willing to sacrifice some of their fortune in the process, while other similar individuals, this time without sufficient means, seek at the very least the right to view them. This in turn creates demand, which attributes value to potential collection pieces rhe purchase of which gives rise to a new market. It also leads to pressure being exerted on the state for it to provide visual access to these objects for those who have nor the wherewithal to purchase for themselves the aesthetic pleasure, the historical and scientific knowledge or even the prestige they afford. This explanation has its merits, but remains unsatisfactory. Aesthetic pleasure is left undefined, the reason behind the urge to acquire historical and scientific knowledge is not explored and we never learn precisely how rhe possession of certain objects confers prestige. Even if all these answers were given, an explanation would still need to be found for the presence of collections in societies different to our own. The existence of a collection in contexts differing slightly from those of private collections and museums would immediately render the above explanation inapplicable, even if we were fully to understand and accept it. In this case, it would, at the very best, apply only to a local modification of a more general phenomenon; at worst, it would be entirely irrelevant, and would turn out to be a very secondary explanation of the behavioural trait which consists in considering collection pieces as precious, and whose true motives remain a total mystery to us. Accordingly, the real truth can only be ascertained if we leave the confines of our society and embark on the quest for collections elsewhere.

10

11

1.1 A COLLECTION OF COLLECTIONS

The quest is not an arduous one. Piled up in tombs and temples are sets of natural and artificial objects, kept temporarily or permanently out of the economic circuit, afforded special protection and placed on display, and it is time to take a closer look.

Funeral objects Though not universal, the custom of burying the dead along with their possessions is extremely widespread, and the existence of funeral objects, sometimes precious, sometimes less so, has been proved as far back as Neolithic times. In the most ancient city to be discovered so far, C::atal Hliylik in Anatolia, which flourished between 6500 and 5700 BC, the contents of the tombs already differed widely according to the gender and

12

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

social status of the person buried there. 5 These differences were reinforced later on in many civilizations, where tombs were filled with various different examples of tools, weapons, articles of toiletry, jewellery and ornaments, tapestries, musical instruments, works of art and so on. Accounts of digs and exhibition catalogues provide countless descriptions of the decoration and contents of tombs. An example from China, and a particularly spectacular one at that, the description of the tomb of Princess Tong-T'Ai dating from AD 706, will suffice to give a good idea of this.

considerations: the tendency to hold on to what could still be of use. However, this is a specious argument, as the replacement models were often more difficult to execute than the original objects, and the materials used often far rarer and therefore more precious. The advent of replacement models would seem thus to have been dictated not by economic motives but rather by the belief that funeral objects were not to be used but perpetually gazed upon and admired.

The tumulus measuring some twelve metres high, rose up from the tomb ":'hich was in turn some twelve metres below ground. A slope measuring Sixty metres m length, and decorated on each side by four recesses three metres deep gave on to a corridor which opened on to an antechamber ten metres further on, and this antechamber was linked by a passage more than six metres long to the funeral chamber. A stone sarcophagus had been placed within this chamber. Overall, the tomb measured some fifteen metres long by five metres wide. It was excavated from August 1960 to April 1962. It was noticed, as is often the case, alas, with the large tombs, that it had been visited by thieves ... In spite of the pillage, it still contained over a thousand objects: eight hundred and seventy-eight funeral statuettes, a great many vestimemary ornaments, ceramics, eight objects made from gold in the passage, which the thieves must have dropped as they left, around one hundred bronzes, one hundred and five door embellishments, roughly thirty iron objects, including pieces of harness, as well as a dozen jade pieces, also found in the passage. Seven hundred and seventy-seven statuettes were made of painted terracotta; sixty had 'Three Colour' glazing, while thirty more were made from wood ... No less exceptional were the murals decorating the walls of the tomb and corridor. G Two further facts need to be underlined. First of all, a whole series of measures was taken to protect the tombs from pillage, that is the reuse in this life of what is intended to remain with the dead forever in the life beyond. Attempts were made to disguise the location of the tomb or to make intruders lose their way, by building mazes or digging false graves. Divine assistance was sought in the form of curses invoking heavenly wrath upon the heads of possible robbers or profaners. Inspection and monitoring systems were set up. Secondly, and very importantly, the objects were placed in the tombs to be seen by those living in the next world. It is hard to believe that the Chinese or the Scythians really expected their sacrificed slaves to perform the usual tasks for their masters and their slaughtered horses to carry horsemen. Moreover, it is a fact that human and animal sacrifices were replaced almost everywhere by statuettes, and objects in actual use by models. This phenomenon is explained by invoking economic

13

Offerings Our museums owe their name to the ancient temples of the Muses, though the most famous of these, the Museum of Alexandria, did not owe its fame to any collection of objects, but rather to its library and the team of scholars who formed a community within its walls. There is, nevertheless, more than one similarity between the Greek and Roman temples and our own museums, for it was in these temples that offerings were amassed and displayed. 'The object, which had been given to the god and received by him in accordance with the rites, becomes tEpov or sacrum, and shares in the majesty and inviolability of the gods. Stealing or moving it, preventing it from fulfilling its funcrion or even simply touching it constitute acts of sacrilege.' To talk of use in this context is in fact impossible. Once the object crossed the threshold of the sacred enclosure, it entered into a domain which was strictly opposed to utilitarian activities. Within this enclosure, 'one can neither extract stone, take earth, chop wood, build, cultivate nor live.' Accordingly, objects could only play one single role, and were placed on display either in the sacred buildings which they then adorned, or else in buildings erected specially to house offerings, when these became so numerous that they threatened to clutter up the places of worship. As well as coming to pray, the pilgrims, who were also tourists, visited the temples in order to admire the objects they contained. Indeed, a whole body of literature, the most well-known being the work by Pausanias, was written with the aim of describing the examples which were the most remarkable because of their material, their size, the difficulty of their execution, the extraordinary circumstances surrounding their placing in the temple or because of yet other features which set them apart from the rest. In theory, once an object had been offered to the gods it had to remain forever in the temple in which it had been deposited. Every object was listed in an inventory and protected from theft. Even when they deteriorated they were not disposed of in any old way. If they were made of silver or gold, the following course of action was taken: a decree of the people resulting from a proposal from the priest or

14

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

holy treasurer, in accordance with advice from the council, ordered that the offerings which were in a poor state be melted down into ingots or amalgamated to form one single offering; the same procedure was followed when dealing with all scraps of precious metal. If they proved to be an encumbrance or were broken, less valuable objects were taken from the temple and buried. Their dedication had consecrated them for eternity, and they were in no circumstances to be put back into circulation, so in order to shield them better from all secular use, they were often broken on purpose, if they were not already broken. This accounts for the piles of terracotta or bronze objects to be found in the vicinity of certain sanctuaries, for example at Tegea, Cnidus and Olympia. 7

dazzled public was given the chance to feast its eyes on all the preci~us stones, fabrics, jewels, objets d'art made of precious metals and so on, wht~h had been amassed. This was so not only in oriental monarchies but also 10 European countries during the Middle Ages, and we will come back to this later. We must now turn our attention to Rome, in which a general returning there from a victorious campaign, would be granted the privilege of displaying the men he had subjugated and the treasures he had seized. Thus, 'on the occasion of his third victory over the pirates, Asia, Pontus and the nations and kings listed in the seventh book of this work ... Pompey paraded a chess-board, along with its pieces made from preci?~s stones, which measured three feet wide and four feet long ... three dtmng-room couches, dishes of gold and gemstones, sufficient for nine credence tables, three gold statues of Minerva, Mars and Apollo, thirty-three pearl crow~s, a square mountain of gold with stags, lions an~ fruit o~ every, kind, surrounded by a gold vine, a pearl grotto topped wtth a sundtal . . . . After being carried round in triumphant display, some of the object~ seized from the enemy were offered to temples, where they were put on vtew; Pompey, for example, dedicated wine cups and murrhine cups to Jupiter's temple on the Capitoline. Others remained in the possession of the victorious general. Booty seems to have formed the basis of private collections in Rome. This, at any rate, was the opinion of Pliny the Elder: 'It was the victory of Pompey over Mithridates that made fashion veer to pearls and gemstones. The victories of Lucius Scipio and of Cnaeus Manlius had done the same for chased silver garments of cloth of gold and dining couches inlaid with bronze; and that of Mummius for Corinthian bronzes and fine paintings'. 9 It is patently obvious that the objects which the great Roman collectors (as well as either generals or proconsuls), Sulla, Julius Caesar and Verres, amassed and put on display in their residences or else in the temples wh_ere they had been placed as offerings, were booty; and. the story_ of Ve~res ts a good case in point. Only during the Emptre dtd collectmg gam su~h popularity that when Vitruvius designed a house he would reserve a speCial place for housing pictures and sculptures. . Two features characterizing the Roman collectors sttll need to be outlined. The first of these was their supreme disdain for the usefulness of the objects they amassed, the second their constant efforts to outbid each other, risking in so doing not only their fortunes but also their p~rsonal dignity. The best illustration of this comes in a passage from Plmy the Elder, which is worth quoting despite its length.

Treasures amassed in temples as offerings did sometimes, however, return to the economic circuit, converted, in other words, into money. In spite of the belief that temples should not be touched even in times of war, armies did not always resist the temptation of pillaging the riches of their enemies, even when the enemies in question were Greek. Thus, when the Phocaeans gained control of the sanctuary of Delphi, they sold off the gold and silver offerings they found there in order to pay their mercenary army. This action was looked upon as sacrilege, and when the Phocaeans were in their turn conquered in 346 BC, they were forced to reimburse the temples for all that they had stolen from them. There did exist a legal procedure for lifting restrictions on sacred treasures. This required the vote of the people to whom the temple belonged, and was resorted to when the country was in danger, as was the case when the Athenians borrowed money from their gods during the Peloponnesian War. This was in fact a loan granted by the gods to the city and which had to be reimbursed with interest, and in 422 BC the Athenians had run up a debt of 4750 talents to Athena Polias, 30 talents to Athena Nike and 800 talents to the orher gods, meaning that, taking the interest into account, they owed a total sum of around 7000 talents. 8

Gifts and booty Objects kept out of the economic circuit accumulated not only in temples but also in the seats of power. Tributes and booty flowed in, while ambassadors would come armed with gifts, which would always be shown to the courtiers and sometimes also to the crowds which gathered to witness their official visits. These objects were stored under strict guard in treasurehouses, and were rarely accessible, being exhibited solely during festivals or ceremonies. Funeral corteges and coronation processions proved good opportunities to display the splendour the country possessed, and the

15

An ex-consul drank from a murrhine cup for which he had given 70,000 sesterces, although it held just three pints. He was so fond of it that ~e would gnaw its rim; and yet the damage he thus caused only enhanced tts

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

value, and there is no other piece of murrhine ware even today that has a higher price set upon it. The amount of money squandered by this same man upon the other articles of this material in his possession can be gauged from their number, which was so great that, when Nero took them away from the man's children and displayed them, they filled a private theatre .... When the ex-consul Titus Petronius was facing death, he broke, to spite Nero, a murrhine dipper that had cost him 300,000 sesterces, thereby depriving the emperor's dining-room table of this legacy. Nero, however, as was proper for an emperor, outdid everyone by paying 1,000,000 sesterces for a single bowl. That one who was acclaimed as a victorious general and as Father of his Country should have paid so much in order to drink is a detail that we must formally record. 10

was, and whatever its nature, this object retained all the gr~ce with whic.h the saint had been invested during his lifetime, which explams how a relic was able to sanctify the place where it was situated just as effectively as the saint himself would have done. Some put a halt to the spread of disease and restored sufferers to health; others protected towns and kingdoms from their enemies. All guaranteed assistance from the saints alon~ with prosperity, and all were, not surprisingly, regarded as th~ most preCious of treasures. When Queen Matilda returned to England 10 1125, after the death of her husband, the Emperor Henry V, she brought with her a relic of St James, and the events were described in the. following way by a chronicler: 'Queen Matilda travelled to her father m England takmg the hand of StJames with her and by this she did irreparable. d.amage to t.he regnurn Francorurn.'l3 This was by no means an isolated optmon: FrederiCk Barbarossa embarked on diplomatic negotiations in an attempt to recover the relic, but the English refused to relinquish it. . . Gifts of land were not sufficient in themselves to found a religious establishmen t· relics were also needed. Once they entered a church or abbey, they would o~ly ever leave it as the result of a theft or, most excepti~nally, because they had been given to some powerful figure or other. In thts way they became extremely numerous, and required catalogues to drawn ~1p. The relics were contained in reliquaries, shown to the fatthful dunng religious ceremonies and carried in processions. ~s contact. render~d the miraculous powers of the relics even more effective, the fatt~ful ~td not content themselves with merely looking on, but touched the reltquanes and kissed every inch of them. In northern France, between 1050 and 1550 it was relics that the monks exhibited when collecting donations towards the building of churches and abbeysl 4 Finally, relics were much coveted, often obtained through theft, and this meant that the most famous of them had to be guarded by soldiers.l5 Trading based on relics also. took place,. and the Roman cemeteries functioned, dare one say it, as quarnes from which great quantities of saintly relics were extracted for sale in the rest of Euro~e. 16 As well as relics, churches also kept and put on show other objects, including natural curiosities and above all offerings: altars, chalices, ciboria, chasubles, candelabras and tapestries sometimes retain even today the names of their donors, while certain pictures even include the faces of them and their families. Funeral monuments, stained-glass windows, jubes and historiated capitals should all be added to the list, and doubtless oth~r items too. Thus, besides being places of worship, each church also constlt~t.ed a permanent exhibition of dozens of objects. This, however, IS so famd1ar a subject that it needs no further elaboration.

16

This seems to bear a curious resemblance to the potlatch of the North American Indians, but whereas in Rome dignity was associated with the ability to spend money in exchange for utterly useless objects, dignity for the K wakiutl people, for example, is linked to the ability to give blankets, chests, canoes or food to others without asking for anything in return. This observation in turn raises two further questions. The first concerns the presence of collections in societies which historians of this institution are not accustomed to studying; the second, and more important, concerns the relationship between the collection and competitive behaviour. This will be discussed in more detail further on.

Relics and sacred objects Relics, or objects supposed to have been in contact with a god or hero or to constitute the remains of some great event in the mythical or far-distant past, were equally well known in Greece and Rome. Pausanias describes a great many of them, including the clay Prometheus used to fashion the first man and woman, the rock Cronos devoured instead of his son, the egg from which Castor and Pollux hatched, the remains of the tree at the foot of which the Greeks made their sacrifices before setting off for the Trojan War, and many others besides. 11 Pliny also mentions them from time to time, one example being the sardonyx put on display in the temple of Concord in Rome, and which was said to have belonged to Polycrates of Samos, the hero of a famous tale. 12 It was Christianity with its cult of the saints which was responsible for the cult of relics reaching its apogee. It would be impossible to trace the hisrory of this cult within the covers of this book, and for the purposes of our study we need only repeat that a relic was any object said to have been in contact with a character from sacred history, and whenever possible was an actual part of his body. However minute it

?e

17

18

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

Royal treasures

Hohenstaufen family jewels were given as security, or possibly sold, to a company of merchants and bankers for the sum of 2522 Genoese pounds, the equivalent of two years' wages for a podesta in Genoa, one year's wages for five hundred craftsmen, the price of the largest ship to be built at that time, complete with crew and enough supplies to last for four months, 630 cows or 400 ordinary horses. 20 All these various equivalents, which indicate a treasure much less valuable than that of Charles V, for example, help to illustrate just how much wealth was stored up in the royal palaces. Yet it is impossible to reduce the amassing of precious objects by royalty to the simple accumulation of capital. Indeed, distinctions were apparently made at the time between 'joyaux' and 'epargne' just as a distinction was made between 'joyaux' and 'vaisselle'. In view of this, our task is to determine whether and in what circumstances the jewels were displayed, and in fact the inventories make it clear that they were normally shut away in chests or cupboards, these being placed in their turn in well-guarded chambers. They were taken out mostly for various different ceremonies and festivals: at the death of the 21 king, the regalia were paraded during the funeral procession, while they were also displayed on solemn visits to the different towns of the realm, along with ceremonial arms and armour, decorated harness and richly embroidered cloths covered in gems. Here is King Charles VII of France, entering Paris on 12 November 1437.

The objects gradually accumulating in the residences of those in power have already been alluded to in our discussion on gifts and booty. Gifts and booty were, however, not the only things to be found there. The Attalids of Pergamum, to quote a well-known example, prized sculptures and pictures, and they were not alone in doing so. However, we have chosen a number of inventories from the Middle Ages in order to highlight the contents of the homes of princes and kings in ancient times, as they give a fairly accurate picture. The first striking feature of these inventories is that most of the objects they list had some kind of use. In the case of regalia, rings and belts, the use was a ceremonial one; in the case of crosses crucifixes images reliquaries, altars, chalices, crooks, mitres and copes a ~eligious o~e, whil~ dishes, knives, seat covers and so on were all part of secular life. From time to time, natural curiosities and various odd instruments, such as astrolabes and globes, find their way into these collections, and it becomes obvious that we are not dealing here with objects kept out of use and out of the economic circuit. Two features should, nevertheless, prevent any rapid assumptions being made. The first is the sheer number of objects: the inventory of King Charles V of France, lists 3906 items, and such a huge quantity could not possibly have been used all at the same time, however extended the court may have been, and must therefore not have served any function at all. The second is that in general, the objects were made from the precious metals gold and silver, and decorated with precious stones such as sapphires, rubies, onyx, amethysts, emeralds, diamonds and pearlsY This would appear robe a further reason for supposing that most of these objects would never be used in everyday life. Involvement in the economic circuit does not necessarily mean an object has to serve some practical purpose, since it can also stem from the accumulation of objects where the aim is to build up capital. It cannot be denied that in times of need princes dipped into their stares of treasure: when Charles V had part of his collection of dishes taken to the Mint he was neither the first nor the last to make use of this expedient. The inventories themselves contain references to sales made in order to finance royal expenditure elsewhere. The authors of the inventory of the jewels of King Charles VI of France wrote the following caption concerning a certain small gold crown with thirteen flowerets: '117 pearls were extracted from this crown and given to a silversmith by the name of Charles Poupart, in payment for a number of doublets and jewels he had made for the king for his journey to St Orner where the King of England himself was to be present.' ts And several other events of this kind could be cited. Philippe de Valois sent a famous piece known as Le Grand Camee from the Sainte Chapelle to Pope Clement VI as security for a loan, 19 and in 1253 the

19

Le roy estoit arme de toutes piesses, sur ung biau coursier; et avoit ung cheval couvert de velloux d'azur en coullour, seme de fleurs de lis d'orfaverie. Er devant luy, son premier escuier d'escurie monte sur ung coursier couvert de fin blancher couvert d' orfaverie semee de serfs [sic] vollans. Et estoient quatre coursiers tous pareulx, dont il y avoit trois chevalliers avec l'escuier, leurs coursiers pareillement couverrs que l'escuier, et eulx en armes de tous harnois; et porroit !edit escuier, sur ung bas ton, le harnois de teste du roy; et sur !edit harnois, une couronne d' or; et au milieu, sur Ia houppe, une grosse fleur de lis doublee de fin or moult riche, er son roy d'armes devanr luy porrant sa corte d'armes moult riche de veloux azure a trois fleurs de lis de fin or de brodeure (et estoienr les fleurs de lis brodees de grosses perles;) et ung autre escuier d'escuerie monte sur ung genest, qui porroit une grande espee toute semee de fleurs de lis de fin or d'orfaverie ... _22 The scene which has just been described is in no way exceptional, and it is clear, even without constant reference to source material, not only that the jewels were put on show, bur also that this was their chief function. Our case rests here, even if it does seem to rest on a mere assortment of

20

The Co!lection: between the Visible and the Invisible

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

bric-a-brac. The so-called collections which have been described so far differ in almost every aspect from ones which exist today, as well as from each other. Established in widely differing locations, and of different natures and origins, even the behaviour of their visitors or viewing public differs. True, in each case there is a set of objects which, subject to certain reservations, satisfy the conditions stipulated in our definition of a collection, yet by assimilating such heterogeneous sets we perhaps risk resembling the madman, created by the novelist Julio Corrazar, who firmly believed he was surrounded by collections. For him, an office was nothing but a collection of clerks, a school a collection of pupils, a barracks a collection of soldiers and a prison one of prisoners. The moral of this anecdote is that no comparison of institutions can be valid unless it is based not on external appearances but on functional similarity.

ritually destroyed, and if this was deliberately done to dedicate them to the gods, they remained true offerings. Herodotus recounts how Croesus 'burnt on a great pyre couches covered with gold and silver, golden goblets, and purple cloaks and tunics; by these means he hoped the better to win the aid of the god of Delphi', to whom he also sent rich gifts. 24 Offerings also formed parr of the exchange process, therefore, and along with prayers and sacrifices guaranteed the favour of the divinity for whom they were intended. When objects were intended for gods or for the dead, they did not necessarily have to be put on display. Funeral objects were not, nor were offerings, except in certain societies, and this, of course, poses a problem, as we have defined the collection as a set of objects ... put on display. But for whom? We had implied that they were intended for the eyes of the living, yet the inhabitants of the world beyond also had visual access to them, at times when it was barred to the former. One possibility would be to disregard the non-human gaze and to limit discussion to sets of objects displayed to human eyes. This seems unnecessary, even though it does complicate the picture somewhat, since objects remained visible to the gods and even to the dead after having been physically destroyed, crushed and burned. However, funeral objects and offerings should, in our view, be considered as collections, as the important factor is not that they were intended for gods or for the dead, but the acknowledgement of the existence of a potential audience, in another temporal or spatial sphere, implicit in the very act of placing the objects in a tomb or temple. This is the belief, which could be expressed in actions alone, but which words have often been used to describe, that another kind of observer can or does exist, who should be allowed to rest his eyes on objects belonging to us. We should now look more closely at what happens when the objects intended for the gods, namely the offerings, are placed on public show. As well as serving as intermediaries between mortals and immortals, they also came to represent to visitors the fame of the gods, since they were proof that this fame reached all four corners of the world: after all, even the Hyperboreans sent offerings to Delphi .... In the same way, they represented peoples who lived in far and remote if not fabulous lands. For present-cia y visitors they were a reminder of past benefactors, along with the circumstances surrounding the sending of offerings, and even of groups and individuals who had been involved in bygone events. Some of the offerings were testaments to the ability of certain craftsmen, sculptors or painters to produce extraordinary works the likes of which are no longer seen today. The weirdest, strangest, most spectacular offerings stood out from the ranks of more commonplace articles, exciting the curiosity and imagination of the visitors by challenging them to go beyond the simply visual and co listen to or read more on the subject. Thus it was that stories

1.2 COLLECTIONS: THE INVISIBLE AND THE VISIBLE

The objects which are shut up in tombs are, to the living, sacrificed. As gifts to the dead, they should remain in their possession forever. No matter how this sort of proceeding is justified - and it has been variously justified by successive societies and in successive periods -the relationship between the living and the dead has always and everywhere been perceived as an exchange: the living give up not only the use but even the sight of certain objects, in return for the benevolent neutrality, if not actual protection, of the dead. Pursuing this idea to its extremes, the ancient Chinese invented special offertory currencies, which 'constituted from the very outset exchange values for use with the world beyond. As early as Neolithic times, there existed imitations of stone and bone cowries, and tombs dating from the third century BC contain considerable quantities of clay slabs symbolizing gold'; paper money appeared later on.23 Obviously, this exchange presupposed the division of human beings into two groups, those in this world and the others in the next. The same can be said of offerings, although in this case the dividing line ran not between the living and the dead but between man and god. This difference did, however, become blurred as the gods were actually deified men while ancestors benefited from almost divine status. Whatever the case, the important thing tO remember is that offerings placed in the temple became the property of the gods. The gods stipulated that these objects should not leave the sacred enclosure once they had entered it, except in the very special circumstances discussed earlier on. It was therefore possible to bury them in the /avissae, the pits where the objects cluttering up the temple were deposited, as in this way they continued to be the property of the gods. Moreover, instead of being sent to the temple, objects could be

21

22

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

or anecdotes, some of which have come down to us through the works of Herodotus, Pausanias, Pliny the Elder and several other authors, revolved around offerings of this kind. These offerings could continue to function as intermediaries for this world and the next, the sacred and the secular, while at the same time constituting, at the very heart of the secular world, symbols of the distant, the hidden, the absent. In other words, they acted as go-betweens between those who gazed upon them and the invisible from whence they came. Objects found in places of worship, especially painted or sculpted images of gods or saints, also played this role, by representing normally invisible personages, living on the other side of the boundary separating the sacred from the secular. These images were representative in that they were supposed to be flat or three-dimensional replicas of features, giving the onlooker an opportunity to associate a name or perhaps even a life history with a face. In fact, the link between a model and its image can be considered as being much stronger than that which consists merely of resemblance, and images were therefore attributed a certain power, which gave them a direct role in all that was sacred, and the capability to represent not only the features of a person but also the active force that was his. Phenomena of this sort are not hard to find: one only has to think of all the miracle-performing Madonnas populating European churches and all those images and statues from which miracles are still awaited. It is also an accepted fact that objects did not need to resemble a sacred personage in any way in order to represent him. This was particularly true of relics, which owed their significance to having either been in contact with a saint or constituted part of his body. However, relics represented not only the sacred but also the past, or more exact! y they represented the sacred because they were supposed to have come from a personage belonging to sacred history. This explains why they were always accompanied by authenticating documents, either sealed certificates attesting their origin or small strips of parchment bearing brief explanations. 2 5 While those who saw these images followed up this experience in the composition of a new theology or hagiography, those who had studied relics went on to write history and, from the twelfth century, when Guibert de Nogent wrote his De pignoribus sanctorum, critical history. In short, images and relics too were intermediaries between those who looked at and touched them and the invisible. We arrive at the same conclusion when we analyse the objects hotly fought over by wealthy Romans. There is no point in embarking on yet another discussion of statues and paintings, of images that is, since it is obvious that they represent the invisible. Indeed, the same can be said of precious stones and pearls, of Corinthian vases, crystal ladles and dishes, engraved silverware and so on. Gemstones in particular simultaneously represented several different aspects or domains of what has been termed

en bloc the invisible. They encapsulated the whole of nature; 'Hence very

23

many people find that a single gemstone alone is enough to provide them with a supreme and perfect aesthetic experience of the wonders of Nature.' 26 As well as being at the heart of many a legend associating them with mythical heroes or events, they also came from far-distant places, not only from the Orient as in the case of murrhine and crystal, but also from India and Arabia in the case of pearls. They possessed health-giving powers: ' "Adamas" prevails also over poisons and renders them powerless, dispels attacks of wild distraction and drives groundless fears from the mind.' 27 For their part, the Corinthian bronzes were a reminder of a casting method forgotten by the Romans and of an historical event: the fire which followed the taking of Corinth by Roman troops. 28 All these objects were, once again, intermediaries between the onlooker and the invisible, with statues representing gods and ancestors, pictures scenes from the lives of the immortals or historical events, precious stones the power and beauty of nature and so on. It now only remains to be said that various different traditions surrounding stones thrived during the Middle Ages in Western societies, and rhat these stones were also believed to have certain powers. The inventory of Charles V's jewels spoke, for instance, of a 'stone which cures gout', 29 while gold and silver were considered to be extraordinary substances, the very purest and, as such, the most representative products of the earth. They were noble and extraordinary substances used to produce or decorate images, reliquaries and more generally everything the king used, including his dishes, clothes, furniture, weapons, armour and regalia, in short, everything which represented either the realm as an undivided whole or else the power and wealth of its sovereign. Put another way, the contents of the treasurehouses belonging to kings and princes represented the invisible firstly because of the materials from which they were made, secondly because of the forms they were given, such as the crown, as these were the legacy of an entire tradition, and lastly because they had been acquired from a particular individual and thus constituted a reminder of past events, or else were either very old or came from exotic places. Yet again, we find ourselves dealing with objects mediating between their admirers and the invisible. It now seems clear that the collections which have just been discussed have not been compared uniquely on the basis of external likenesses. In spite of their apparent disparity, all these collections consisted of objects which were in certain respects homogeneous. This homogeneity sprang from their involvement in the exchange process which took place between the visible and invisible worlds. While funeral objecrs and sacrificial offerings moved from the first to the second of these worlds, other objects moved in the opposite direction, sometimes directly, sometimes by depieting elements of

24

25

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

the invisible world in sculpted or painted images. It will be shown later on that it was the role forced upon them, the role of guaranteeing communication between the two worlds into which the universe is cleft, which kept these objects out of the economic circuit. Yet it will also be seen that it was this very same role which caused them to be attributed such a high value and meant that there was always a considerable temptation to reintroduce them into the circuit, in return for usage values and goods, which is why they had to be afforded special protection. Needless to say, they could not guarantee communication between the two worlds unless they were displayed to the inhabitants of both: only when this condition was met could they become the intermediaries between their admirers and the world they represented. To avoid any misunderstanding, it must be emphasized straightaway that the opposition between the visible and the invisible can take many and diverse forms. The invisible is spatially distant, not only beyond the horizon but also very high or very low. It is also temporally distant, either in the past or in the future. In addition, it is beyond all physical space and every expanse or else in a space structured totally differently. It is situated in a time of its own, or outside any passing of time, in eternity itself. It can sometimes have a corporeity or materiality other than that of the elements of the visible world, and sometimes be a sort of pure antimateriality. At times it will be an autonomy vis-a-vis certain or even all the restrictions placed on the visible world, at others it will be an obeying of laws different tO our own. Even so, these are, of course, merely empty compartments capable of containing the most diverse of beings, from ancestors and gods to the dead and to people different to ourselves, as well as events and circumstances. The objects going from one exchange partner to another between the visible and the invisible vary greatly according to the identity of these partners. Just as the ways of transmitting messages to the invisible can take varying forms, such as human and animal sacrifices, offerings, libations and prayers, so the phenomena representing the invisible can greatly vary, including heavenly apparitions, meteors, animals and plants (sacred cows in India, and the Romans' sacred forests), striking changes in the relief, such as mountains, and rivers. Collections, or at any rate those which have been examined here, as we have yet to interpret modern-day ones in Western societies, only represent one of a number of measures adopted in order to guarantee communication between the two worlds and the unity of the universe. This enables us to understand more clearly why there is such diversity in the objects making them up, in the places in which they are located and in the behaviour of their visitors, as it reflects the diversity in the ways the visible can be contrasted with the invisible. This diversity by no means rules out an equivalence of functions, but rather is a symptom of it. All rhe collections

which have been discussed fulfilled one identical function, that of allowing the objects they contained to play the role of intermediaries between their onlookers, whoever they might be, and the inhabitants of the world to which the former did not belong: the visible world, if the onlookers were invisible and vice versa. However, this function diversified into a multitude of equivalent functions, and for those reasons which have just been outlined. The term 'collection' immediately implies the grouping together of a certain number of objects. In this very work, the genus proximum is given as 'a set of objects'. Yet how many objects are needed to form a collection? In an abstract sense, it is clear that a question of this kind cannot possibly have an answer, and with the exception of one or two special cases, which need not be discussed here, such quantitive considerations do not need to be bothered with. This is because the number of objects going to make up a collection depends on several different factors, including the place where they are amassed, the type of the particular society, the state of its technology and its way of life, irs production capacity and ability to stock the surplus, and the importance it attaches to the use of objects to establish communication between the visible and invisible. This means that the number necessarily varies considerably in time and space and can only be used in very exceptional circumstances to distinguish a collection from a mere heap of objects. It is its function which is the really important factor, and the one which is expressed through observable characteristics which were listed in the definition of the collection. Given this fact, we are forced to accept that collections are also present in so-called primitive societies, and to extend our discussion tO cover the churinga of the Australian Aborigines and the vaygu'a of the Trobriand Islanders, which Malinowski rightly compares to the crown jewels in Europe,3° as well as examples of tools which are apparently conserved in Bambara villages and shown to adolescents during initiation ceremonies and, of course, the statuettes, masks, blankets and large items of copperware belonging to the peoples of the north-west coast of America. All these objects are kept temporarily or permanently out of the economic circuit, afforded special protection in enclosed spaces adapted specifically for that purpose and put on display. All, without exception, act as intermediaries between those who can see them and an invisible world mentioned in myths, stories and accounts. Even without a large number of examples, we can therefore show that the collection is a universally widespread institution, though this should come as no surprise, given that the opposition between the visible and the invisible is a universal phenomenon.

26

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible 1.3 USEFULNESS AND MEANING

The invisible owes its existence to language, in the sense that it is language which allows individuals to communicate their separate fantasies to each other, turning into a social event their innermost convictions that they have been in contact with something concealed from the human eye. In addition, simply by shuffling words around, utterances can sometimes be formed which, though understandab le, nevertheless designate something that nobody has ever glimpsed. Most important of all, talk of the dead as though they were living, of past events as though they were present, of the very distant as though it were nearby and of the hidden as though it were visible all becomes possible, or rather inescapable, as language seems to induce this in a most natural and spontaneous way. Because of the need to safeguard the passage of linguistic communicati on from one generation to the next, the old transmit all their knowledge to the young, and this includes a whole set of utterances which inform the next generation of things they have not yet and rna y never witness. In a world alive with fantasies, where deaths and transformatio ns constantly take place, language constitutes the source of the invisible, since the very way it functions forces the belief upon us that we only see part of that which actually exists. The contrast between the visible and the invisible constitutes first and foremost the cleavage between that of which we speak and that which we see, between the universe of discourse and the world of visual perception. The origins of language remain a mystery. Specialists situate its advent at widely differing dates which range from the period of the australopithe cines to a period some hundred thousand years ago, or even later. Whatever the case may be, without the medium of language, the notion of assigning to any entity the unique role of representing a second entity which was, and always had been, invisible would be utterly inconceivable. Obviously, 'A represents B' is the equivalent of saying, 'A is a part of B' or 'A is close to B' or 'A is a product of B' or 'A resembles B'. There are unlikely to be other equivalents than these to 'A represents B', and in any case, the objects which were discussed during the descriptions and analyses of collections each have at least one of these four types of relationships with elements of the invisible world. It should be noted that 'A represents B' is only a convenient form of shorthand, and that it would be more accurate to say 'A represents B according to Cjin C's eyes' or something similar, as the exact representative role always depends on the individual observer. In this light, the next task is to determine exactly which conditions are required in order that a group accepts that A represents B, given that B is invisible. Obviously, the existence of a B must first of all be accepted, and as B is invisible, this can only be done by relying on an utterance which speaks of it. Speech, however, cannot sway belief on its own: it can be false, erroneous or

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

27

arbitrary, and must therefore be validated in some way or other. This is not the place to go into the various ways speech is rendered convincing and apodeictic; suffice it to say that, if B is invisible, a visible A can only be accepted as its representativ e if there exist utterances which speak of it. The presence of language alone cannot, however, explain the way in which objects and phenomena in general on the one hand and elements of the invisible world on the other come to represent each other. Relationships of this kind can only be formed and become long-lasting if some sort of permanent force drives mankind to interest itself in phenomena which are not necessarily vitally important to it and compels it, to return to our particular case, to amass, care for or even produce objects representing the invisible. A clue to the exact nature of this force has already been given. We have seen how rhe use of language inevitably causes the visible and the invisible to be set in opposition to each other, language functioning as a link which creates one of the two terms it both places in opposition and unites. The speaker himself is completely unaware of this operation, and only perceives its result, namely the cleavage of the universe into two domains, the first of which is only accessible via speech, the second above all via sight. If the visible were to be subordinated to the invisible in every aspect, any element of the visible, which appeared to be linked to the invisible through participation , proximity, descent or similarity, would automatically be favoured more than those which seemed bereft of such a link. The belief that the visible is, in some way, subordinated to the invisible, seems to be a constant and well-docume nted feature of all mythologies, religions and philosophies , as well as of science. It would, in fact, be surprising if this were nor the case, as the invisible is, by definition, that which cannot be reached and cannot be mastered in the way the visible normally is. What is more, the most banal of experiences leads one to attribute a certain power of fertility to the invisible: it is the source of all phenomena, as well as their ultimate destination. Accordingly, two moments have special significance in the passage in time of each phenomenon : the moment of its appearance, when it crosses over from the invisible to the visible, and that of its disappearanc e, when it moves from the visible to the invisible. When it comes to the conservation of traces left by the hominids, it is no accident that the most ancient remains testifying to an interest in our possessions were used in funeral rituals, which have been attested as early as the Neanderthal period. The opposition between the visible and the invisible, the inevitable product of the function of language itself, not only allows, but also encourages us to subordinate the visible to the invisible and to attribute a certain power of fertility to the latter. It excites in us an interest in anything which somehow seems linked with the invisible, and more especially in those objects which are supposed to represent it. Providing, of course, that

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

once the group, part of a group or even a single individual, has procured through its economic activities sufficient means of subsistence, it has enough time left over to amass, care for or even produce objects representing the invisible. Many centuries passed before these conditions were met. The history of artefacts begins around three million years ago. This is the date palaeontologists have given to the most ancient tools found on the surface, while those found in place on sites are estimated to be two million five hundred thousand years old. 'From the very outset, tools are used very extensively; there are several different types, and these types can all be reproduced on a large scale.' Man, meaning all the representatives of the genus Homo, is from the very beginning a maker of things, not only tools but also habitations. The most ancient of these were discovered in Olduvai in Tanzania, in levels daring from a period one million eight hundred thousand and one million seven hundred and fifty thousand years ago, and in Melka Kamoun~, in Ethiopia, in a level one million five hundred thousand years old.l 1 Man would seem to have acquired mastery of fire about seven hundred thousand years ago. The history of things, like the history of mankind, is measured in geological time. The history of man's interest in objects which are not just things is nonetheless incomparably shorter, though still measured in the same time-scale. True, the first signs of concern with the non-utilitarian seem to be very ancient indeed. A fragment of red ochre and a piece of green lava discovered in Olduvai are probably proofs of this, 32 as well as finds made in cave no. 1 at the Mas des Caves in Lunel-Viel (Herault departerne1lt, France). Searches yielded 'several splinters of bone, along with limestone pebbles, bearing incisions which were apparently made deliberately with stone tools. These graphic signs on bones and pebbles constitute the most ancient non-figurative lines known of today.' However, these objects, which are estimated to be four to five hundred thousand years oldll remain, for the moment at any rate, exceptions. Only when the climate became warmer, between forty and sixty thousand years ago, did the first fragments of red ochre appear, and even then they were very few and far between. In the levels corresponding to the last phase of the warmingup of the climate, Andre Leroi-Gourhan had discovered

all the more striking; right up to the Magdalenian culture, artists continue to collect the bric-a-brac of their open-air museum: lumps of pyrite, shells, fossils, quartz and galenite crystals. There is certainly a connection between this collecting of strange specimens and religion, but this by no means lessens its aesthetic implications, since natural and man-made shapes both have the same religious overtones, whether they be the wallpaintings at Lascaux or the small pendants made from a fossiJH

28

a series of curios collected by the dwellers of the Grotte de l'Hyene (Arcysur-Cure, Yo nne departement, France) during their expeditions. These comprise the large spiral shell of a secondary period mollusc, a round polypary from the same period, strangely shaped lumps of iron pyrite. They can in no way be considered works of art, but the fact that the shapes of these objects from the natural world should have attracted the attention of our zoological predecessors is already a sign of a link with the aesthetic. The absence of any noticeable interruption after this makes it

29

U mil proof of the contrary is found, the inhabitants of the Grone de l'H yene at Arcy-sur-Cure must therefore be given the title of the first known collectors. The natural curiosities which they had gathered and cared for were kept out of the circuit of economic activities, a circuit which at that period consisted solely of tool-making and looking for food. Moreover, they were given special protection, which explains why they could still be found tens of thousands of years later. Lastly, in view of the particular characteristics of the curios, which in particular possess strange forms which men of that period would not have been capable of producing, there can be no doubt whatsoever that they were put on display. They therefore present two different qualities: they are eye-catching and a source of wonderment, while their presence can only be explained with reference to the invisible. Be this as it may, we are not primarily interested in origins as such, and the very distant past has merely been examined with a view to determining the date, albeit approximately, when objects representing the invisible first appeared. Our real aim is to demonstrate the consequences on man's general mode of existence of this upheaval - and upheaval is no exaggeration - which constituted perhaps the greatest of all those which followed the mastery of fire. Even if one agrees with Andre Leroi-Gourhan that 'their technical skill is merely a zoological event to be counted as one of the specific characteristics of the anthropoids' J5 - and this point of view is certainly not without foundation - the gathering and above all the production of objects representing the invisible constitute proofs of the emergence of culture in the true sense of the word. Animals have been observed making use of tools in the wild, but nobody has ever seen them paint or sculpt without having first of all been provided with the means ro do so. Whether or not one agrees with this likening of technical ability to a zoological event the fact remains that the change which came about during the Upper Palaeolithic must be seen as fundamental. Before then, the material existence of man had been entirely restricted to the visible, the sole link with the invisible being language, and possibly also funeral rites; if other links existed no traces of them remain. The invisible and the visible, two distinct domains, therefore remained on parallel and non-converging planes. From the Upper Palaeolithic onwards, however, the invisible was

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

'projected' into the visible, being represented at the very heart of the latter by a specific category of objects, not only natural curiosities but also everything that was painted, sculpted, carved, shaped, embroidered and decorated. This meant that the cleavage was now to be found within the visible itself. On one side, there were things, objects which were useful in that they could be consumed, could provide a means of subsistence, render raw materials fit for consumption, or even act as protection from the vagaries of the climate. All these objects were handled, all underwent or brought about tangible modifications, and all gradually wore out. On the other side were ranged the semiophores, objects which were of absolutely no use, according to the above definition, but which, being endowed with meaning, represented the invisible. They were put on display instead of being handled, and were not subjected to wear and tear. The production effort therefore now had two very different goals, one situated in the visible, the other in the invisible, the aims being to maximize either usefulness or meaning. Although these two goals did draw nearer to each other in certain very special circumstances, more often than not they were located at opposite points of the compass. A closer look at the relationship between usefulness and meaning in objects will help ro elucidate this point. There are three different possible situations: a thing has usefulness but is devoid of all meaning; a semiophore possesses only meaning, of which it is the vector, and has no usefulness at all; or an object apparently has at the same time both usefulness and meaning. Neither usefulness nor meaning can exist without an observer, as they merely characterize the links which groups or individuals have, through objects, with their visible or invisible environment. If one assumes this to be the case, no object can possibly be simultaneously thing and semiophore for the same observer, as it is only a thing when it is being used, and in such a situation its meaning is of no account. If its meaning is given priority, its usefulness dwindles to mere potentiality. While the formal features of an object which enable it either to be useful or else bear meaning can coexist, they imply two different and mutually exclusive types of behaviour. In the first case, it is the hand which establishes the visible relationship between this object and other, visible, objects, which it hits, touches, rubs or curs. In the second case it is the gaze, given a linguistic extension, either tacit or explicit, which establishes an invisible relationship between the object and an invisible element. While the thing fulfils itself by modifying that to which it is applied, and by becoming gradually worn out, the semiophore reveals its meaning when it goes on display. This leads to the formulation of two different conclusions: firstly, a semiophore fulfils its ultimate purpose when it becomes a collection piece; secondly and most importantly, usefulness and meaning are mutually exclusive, as the more an object is charged with meaning the less useful it is, and vice versa.

An object is given value when it is protected, cared for or reproduced, and our next task is therefore to attempt to identify the conditions it needs to satisfy in order to obtain this value, a task made easier by the observations contained in the previous paragraphs. In effect, if an object is to be attributed value by an individual or group, it needs to be useful or have meaning, nothing more, nothing less. Objects satisfying neither of these conditions are valueless, mere scrap, in fact, not even objects at all. The paradox, which had emerged at the beginning of this article can thus finally be resolved: it is the meaning of collection pieces that determines their exchange value. They are precious, that is they are assigned a value, because they represent the invisible and therefore have a share in the superiority and fertility it is unconsciously endowed with. In their capacity as semiophores, they are kept out of the economic circuit because only in this way can they fully divulge their meaning. So far so good. However, the existence of a double basis for valuing does in itself pose a problem, as one has to ask which conditions must prevail in order for things to be exchanged for semiophores, given that these two categories are completely dissimilar and apparently cannot possibly be compared. This is not the place to go looking for answers; suffice it to say that societies do exist where exchanges of this kind are inconceivable, ancient China being a good example. In an article which did not deserve to be forgotten, Franz Steiner had, moreover, attempted to develop a theory, based on his studies of various so-called primitive societies, to account for economies where semiophores (he talks of 'personal treasures') are not exchanged for things.36 These examples show just how real a problem this is, and provide additional justification for distinguishing things from semiophores. The latter can only gain a semblance of usefulness if one accepts that they can be exchanged for the former. Once this happens, the objects regarded by one group as semiophores, and accordingly kept out of the economic circuit, can be perceived by another group within the same society as potential usage values, a fact which encourages this group to try and return them to the economic circuit, through theft or pillage if need be. The rule outlined earlier, which stated that the greater the meaning the less the usefulness, seems in this light to become invalid, as the more an object is charged with meaning the greater its value, and this value is now expressed as the quantity of things which could possibly be obtained in exchange. However, it does retain a certain validity, as when one group sees something as a semiophore, another, or indeed the same group but at a different moment, sees it as a potential usage value. The more an object is attributed meaning, the less the interest which is taken in its usefulness. This phenomenon is not limited to objects. The pursuit of meaning and the tendency to establish and strengthen links with the invisible always take place to the detriment of usefulness. This can eventually lead on to suicidal

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The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

behaviour, as in the case of 12,000 Tupi Indians in Brazil, who left for the 'land without evil' in 1539, and arrived at the end of their journey ten years later, a mere 300 strongY Such situations are only possible because the invisible imposes itself on men with as great a force as that of the visible, if not more, via language and semiophores of every sort. Obviously, such extreme cases where one term of opposition is sacrificed to the other are rare as an effort is normally made to strike a balance between the two extr~mes. However, this balance is necessarily unstable, especially in societies where the choice between usefulness and meaning becomes the necessary outcome of a conflict. The division into the useful and the meaningful, into things and semiophores, where the former are subordinated t? the latter, because :hese have links with the invisible, is not confined to objects. The same applies ro human activities which are themselves classified according to the rung they occupy on the ladder stretching up from utilitarian activities .to those w?ich uniquely produce meaning. Man himself thus finds he 1s ~l~ced. m a hierarchy or in one of a number of hierarchies. At the top there lS mev1tably a man or semiophore-men who represent the invisible: gods, God, ancestors, society taken as a whole, and so on. At the bottom, on the other hand, are thing-men who have at the most only an indirect link with the invisible, while between the two extremes are those in whom meaning and usefulness are to be found in varying degrees. This hierarchical organization of society is projected onto space, as the residence of the semiophore-man, be he king, emperor, pope, grand pontiff or president of the republic, is seen as a centre from which one cannot move without also being increasingly distanced from the invisible. It goes without saying that although attention is drawn in these pages to one aspect of social hierarchy no attempt is made to ascribe every other aspect to it, while all the problems associated with the exercise of the monopoly of violence or of economic constraint are deliberately left to one side. This choice enables us to return to the empirical observations made earlier via theoretical reflection, and this is the sole aim of these remarks. How does a man allotted the role of representing the invisible carry it out? By abstaining from all utilitarian activities, by distancing himself from those who are forced to carry these out, by surrounding himself with objects which are not things but semiophores and by displaying them. In general, the higher a representative of the invisible is placed in his hierarchy, the greater the number of semiophores he surrounds himself with and the greater their value. In other words, it is the social hierarchy which necessarily leads to the birth of collections, those sets of objects kept our of the economic circuit, afforded special protection and put on display. These sets of objects are, in fact, quite simply manifestations of different centres of social importance where the invisible is transformed into the visible to

various and hierarchized degrees. This is true even in so-called primitive societies, where the social hierarchy is reduced to criteria of age and gender; thus the initiated have exclusive right to the churinga. This explains why collections in extremely hierarchized societies accumulated in the tombs of those who had occupied a place at or near the top, in temples or palaces, during their lifetime. It is now possible to say that they accumulated there not because the inhabitants of temples and palaces were the only ones to possess a 'taste' for them, but because the position of these people in the hierarchy left them no choice to do otherwise. In traditional societies objects were not amassed by individuals who had a liking for them but were generated in centres of social importance. This is seen most clearly in ancient China: 'Pearls are the yang of the yin: they dominate fire; jade is the yin of the }'ang: it dominates water. Their transforming force is like that of the divine powers. Let the son of the sky hoard pearls and jade; let the feudal lords hoard metals and stones; let the grand officers keep dogs and horses; let the subjects hoard cottons and silks. If not, he who is brave will command and he who is wily will win all.' And the author from whom we have borrowed this quotation from Ta Tai Li Ki (around 100 BC) makes the following remark: To avoid any confusion between the different ranks, everyone must treasure the values suited to his rank. The social hierarchy is inseparable from the hierarchy of values.' 38 Obviously, a system of this kind can only be maintained if things cannot be exchanged for semiophores, nor semiophores of greater value for those of lesser value. In places where these exchanges are authorized, access to elevated social positions is possible if things, or the currency representing them, are sacrificed in order to obtain semiophores. Violent or coercive means in these circumstances can be employed to obtain objects whose possession enables someone to occupy a coveted position. The greater the sacrifice in terms of usefulness, the higher the position to which one accedes. This explains the conflictual behaviour of which we gave examples when discussing ancient Rome. Clearly, collections and collectors cannot be studied solely from the standpoint of individual psychology, which uses notions such as 'taste', 'interest' or even 'aesthetic pleasure' ro explain everything. What actually needs to be explained is why the question of taste is only relevant ro certain objects and not others, why interest is taken in this object but not in that, and why only certain works give pleasure. Individual personalities and varying degrees of sensitivity only come into play if the organization of the society provides opportunities for expressing individual differences. Before assessing this aspect, it is first of all necessary to clarify the way in which the society in question, or the groups which go to make it up, draws the line between the visible and the invisible. Once this has been accomplished, it is possible to establish exactly what that society sees as meaningful, which objects it prizes the most and what type of behaviour these demand from

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The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

collectors. When this has been accomplished, it is possible to draw up a 'map' indicating the places where the invisible meets the visible and which are inhabited by those who, because of their roles as representatives of the invisible, amass and display semiophores. We must now turn our attention back to museums and to private collections in order to clear up a certain number of problems relating to their history and functioning in the light of all that has just been said.

except for one or two exceptional works which had been held as relics and had, as in the case of ancient cameos, found refuge in the treasure-houses of churches or princes. Formerly, therefore, these remains had been neither meaningful nor useful, and more often than not did not have a place in the daily affairs of man but languished somewhere beneath the earth. Now, however, they were given meaning, as they were seen in relation to the texts which had come down from antiquity, texts to which they were meant to provide the key, and as such they ceased to be relics and mimbilia and became objects of study instead. The vague meaning they possessed because of their origins became more concrete thanks to research where they were compared and contrasted with each other and examined, without exception, with reference to texts dating from the same period. It was therefore not simply a question of new objects coming to light but of a new class of semiophores consisting of objects used for study purposes joining classes which already existed. There was, in addition, a whole new social group which functioned as a vector for the interest in this new category of semiophores. This group consisted of the humanists, as they became known at the end of the fifteenth century, and these men did not in fact fit in with any other previously existing group, as they were defined neither by the exercise of similar professions, nor by the membership of the same organization, name! y the clergy, but by the cult they developed of bonae litterae, litterae antiquiores. The birth and proliferation of collections of antiquities mirrored the growth and spread of this group, first in Ita! y, then in the rest of Europe. Only later, and because of the influence of the humanists, were collections of this kind formed in the royal courts, in the Medici and d'Este courts, the papal and cardinal courts in Italy, the court of Matthias I Corvinus in Hungary, those of the kings of France and England and elsewhere. In the second half of the sixteenth century the fashion for collecting antiquities spread to every European country, and in very different circles, including merchant circles, if Claude Faucher is to be believedH Between 1556 and 1560, Hubert Goltzius, a Belgian collector and engraver, made several journeys to Belgium, Holland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and France. On his travels, he visited all the collectors of antiquities who lived in the towns through which he passed. The list of these men runs to 968 names, and includes those of the pope, of cardinals, and of the emperor, as well as of kings and princes, theologians, lawyers and doctors, scholars and poets, priests, monks, officers and artists42 In England, which Goltzius omitted ro visit, the Society of Antiquaries was founded sometime between 1584 and 1586, and at the beginning of the next century antiquarians had already joined the ranks of the social types used as butts in pia ys 4 l From the initial core of Italian humanists the passion for antiqumes spread to every geographical and social sphere. However, new attitudes

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14 MUSEUMS AND PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

New attitudes towards the invisible, and towards the past, towards unknown regions of the earth and nature in particular, first began to appear in Western Europe in the second half of the fourteenth century. The first image to be challenged was the traditional one of the past. With the assimilation of Aristotle's works into university teaching, the opposition between the sacred and the secular seemed to have been overcome, at least in its simplified form, namely the opposition between the Christian and pagan past. However, it was precisely this first opposition which now returned to the centre of controversy. Several scholars now considered that what had been seen as an amalgam of the sacred and the secular, of theology and philosophy, of Aristotle and St Augustine in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was in fact a nonsensical hash which neither those speaking in the name of a return to the purity of faith nor those dreaming of a revival of true antiquity really wanted. Attempts were frequently made to enjoy at the same time both a faith restored to its original vitality and an antiquity which had shaken off the dust of ages, yet despite the wishes of certain individuals, these two different movements never converged and any alliance was doomed to be transitory. In the domain we are studying, the first of these movements meant that the churches were purged of any object which might distract the attention of the faithful away from the divine word, leading to an iconoclasm of which there were numerous examples during the Reformation and especially during the wars of religion. 39 The second movement, however, encouraged the search for manuscripts of works by the ancients, manuscripts which were discovered in libraries where they had lain forgotten, copied out and then published. In addition, ancient inscriptions were recorded, medals collected and works of art and all the other relics of antiquity were unearthed. 40 Objects which had been absent for many centuries therefore began to resurface in ever-increasing quantities. It is worth pausing for a moment ro reflect on this phenomenon, for in a most interesting process scrap was being turned into semiophores. For many centuries the remains of antiquity had been regarded as rubbish,

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The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

towards the invisible were not only expressed through the gathering of antiquities. Travel, which burgeoned from the fifteenth century onwards, with the results which are well known to all of us, is proof of the belief that the boundaries of the invisible can be moved in order to reach places traditionally considered to be inaccessible. The texts and maps guiding travellers and showing them which routes to take also fall into this category. The real and the fabulous, which had been inextricably mixed in medieval representations of the inhabited world began to separate out, as expeditions returning from far-distant lands brought back with them not only highly profitable merchandise but also a completely new brand of knowledge. And new semiophores too. Fabrics, gold plate, porcelain, garments made of feathers, 'idols', 'fetishes', specimens of flora and fauna, shells and stones also flooded into the collections of princes and scholars 44 Whatever their original status, these objects became semiophores in Europe, collected not because of their practical value but because of their significance as representatives of the invisible comprising exotic lands, different societies and strange climates. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, they did not enjoy the same status as the antiquities. Seen more as curios than study objects, they were attributed a lesser value, even though they were actively sought, especially by scholars. Out of all of them, medals, that is ancient currency, were, in France at least, collection pieces par excellence until the mid-eighteenth century. After this date, they were supplanted by natural history objects. 4 l A third category of semiophores which, while not actually new did attain a greater degree of dignity in the fifteenth century, was composed of pictures and modern works of art generally. Works of art owed their new status to their link with nature, perceived as a source of beauty which alone was capable of bestowing on man-made objects features enabling them to last for a long time; the works of the ancients which had withstood the ravages of time owed their survival entirely to nature. In the language of that period, the term 'nature' did, of course, cover many different, even mutually exclusive concepts, and there was a great debate as to the exact place of nature, given the opposition between the visible and the invisible. There were countless different ways of conceiving nature as well as differences over the role of art, which some thought should only be used to visualize the invisible while others felt it should simply depict what the artist saw. All agreed, nonetheless, that art alone could turn the transient into the lasting. In other words, while the subject of the representation sooner or later became invisible, the representation itself remained. The artist was thus seen as a privileged being, in that he was able to conquer time not through a leap into eternity but within the secular world itself, by being the creator of works which were simultaneously visible and longlasting, providing that they were in harmony with nature. This made him

an irreplaceable instrument for a prince aspiring not only to everlasting life but also to glory, that is, to fame here below amongst his fellow men, a fame which, if gained through heroic feats in battle alone would be but fleeting, since these feats were rapidly forgotten. Only artists, whether painters, sculptors or engravers, could render fame lasting. In a world where the invisible was seen less as an eternal phenomenon than as a future one, it was a positive duty of all princes seeking true glory to protect the arts. As a result, they became both patrons and collectors, the place they occupied requiring them to manifest good taste, attract artists to their court and surround themselves with works of art. All those who occupied the upper echelons of the hierarchy, and not just those of royal blood, were forced to play the same role, their particular preferences showing through within the confines imposed on them by their positions, so that if some took a special interest in art, others had a preference for literature or the sciences. Some revealed more traditionalist tendencies, others felt the desire to nurture and foster innovations, and parsimony and generosity prevailed to varying degrees. 46 Whatever the case, the duty of all who occupied positions of power was to try and make the highest bid possible for objects which included not just the works of artists but the artists themselves, whose price was measured in degrees of meaning, and this meaning was guaranteed if they could succeed in engaging artists and surrounding themselves with their works. A fourth category of semiophores need only be mentioned here. Making its appearance in the seventeenth century, it too became a source of collection pieces, and comprised scientific instruments. These instruments obviously owed their existence to a change in attitude towards the invisible, when man attempted to move back irs frontiers in nature, and in so doing developed a whole new language to describe it. This was the language of mathematical theory, which was to enable man, on the basis of what he could see, to arrive at infallible conclusions on rhar which he could not. Here too, a new social group formed, consisting of scientists; connections sprang up between branches of this group scattered in various different countries, academies sprang up, spontaneously at first and later under the auspices of the powers that be, who were anxious to become patrons in this domain too. The facts are, however so well known that no extra rime need be spent on them.

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37

In the Middle Ages collections gradually accumulated in churches and royal treasure-houses. They consisted of relics, sacred objects, mirabilia and gifts, along with works of art whose material was often considered more precious than the beauty of their execution. In other words, two groups, the clergy and those in power, monopolized semiophores, determined the degree of access the public had to them and used them in order to reinforce rheir

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The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

position of domination. In the second half of the fourteenth century, a process was set in motion which in the end would destroy this system and replace it with another. New social groups sprang up, which owed their existence to the monopoly they exerted over certain areas of knowledge and know-how. The humanists were particularly skilled in the use of Latin, the antiquarians possessed the greatest knowledge of the lives of the ancients, the artists were most knowledgeable in the production of works of art and scholars had the monopoly of the sciences. New semiophores, including manuscripts and other sundry remains of antiquity, exotic and natural curios, works of art and scientific instruments, began to come into circulation and were absorbed into collections. To the members of these groups they represented not only objects enabling them tO acquire new knowledge or learn new techniques, in the way that artists study the works of their predecessors, but were also emblematic of their social rank. This explains why collections now began ro be found for the first time in the libraries and studios of those men who were founts of both art and knowledge. In addition to this, and for the reasons outlined above, the men at the top of the power hierarchy were required to manifest their artistic tastes, possibly even their interest in the sciences, whether they were genuine or not. They roo founded collections, therefore, or else ordered their servants to do so in their stead, these collections being a mark of their superiority and of their prominent position in the domain of meaning. They were encouraged to do so by the artists and scholars themselves, both groups being unable to operate properly withour support from those in power, with the artists being especially dependent on official commissions. Nor was this all, since the authorities liked to have these founts of art and knowledge under their control for political ends, particularly for what we would call propaganda today. Patronage and collection-building admirably satisfied these various different requirements, albeit ambiguously, given that when the great and powerful commissioned artists, supplied scientists with research subjects and writers with the themes for their works, they gave them the material conditions to carry out not only these commissioned works but also those which had not been. The material conditions necessary to artistic, scientific or literary production not only took the form of pensions and stipends given to proteges, but also consisted in the provision of access to all the semiophores necessary for the exercise of their profession, and which were to be found in private collections of curios, picture and sculpture galleries, libraries and deed registries. While, to both intellectuals and artists, collections represented tools and the emblems of social rank for the members of the intellectual and artistic milieu, those in power regarded them as proof of their superiority, as well as the means by which they could dominate this milieu.

So far, the most important weapon in the battle for semiophores has only been mentioned in passing. The time has now come to give it its proper share of attention- the lion's share. We are, of course, talking about money. Its importance springs firstly from the fact that those in power who sought to engage the services of artists and scholars as well as own collections had to pay for the privilege. However, it also derives from the emergence, alongside the twin hierarchies of power and of sacred (the clergy) and secular (artistic and intellectual circles) knowledge, of a hierarchy of wealth, which did not correspond to these first two. All three were themselves arranged in a hierarchy, with power dominating knowledge, sacred knowledge struggling to maintain its pre-eminence and domination over its secular counterpart, while within the latter, different professions were given different statuses. Wealth was situated at the very bottom, as it consisted solely of the instruments of economic constraint, namely money and the means of production. Once again, usefulness was subordinated to meaning. In this light, it is easy to understand why the acquisition of semiophores, the purchase of works of art and the founding of libraries or collections, represented one way of turning usefulness into meaning and of enabling someone occupying a lofty place in the hierarchy of wealth to attain an equivalent position in the hierarchy of taste and learning. As we have already seen, collection pieces were emblematic of social rank, if not of superiority, and this meant that admission ro this exclusive milieu, which depended on the withdrawal of part of one's wealth from the utilitarian circuit, could be obtained through the purchase of semiophores. Thus assured of demand, a market in works of art, antiquities and diverse curios gradually developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Alongside sales by private agreement between collectors :1nd others arranged by specialist dealers, public auctions made their appearance. These were better suited to the specific nature of the merchandise in question, that is, collection objects, since they gave free rein to combative behaviour in these encounters, where each bidder exposed simultaneously his taste, his capacity to sacrifice wealth in order to satisfy it and the exact extent of this wealth. The public auction of collection pieces thus constituted a privileged place where the different hierarchies made their presence known, and where that which was utilitarian was changed into meaning. Hardly surprising, therefore, that the major sales where the contents of famous collections were dispersed, as happened in Paris in the eighteenth century, became highly fashionable occasions, commented on in letters and in the press of the day. One of the most important stages in the development of the system of public auctions was marked by the appearance of printed catalogues of the objects to be sold. The first work of this kind was published in Holland in 1616. It proves that there was, first on a local, later on an international

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The Collection: between the Visible and tbe Invisible

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

scale, a substantial number of people interested in collection pieces who could only acquire them through purchase. It also signified the emergence of a new profession in direct communication with the collectors, namely that of the auctioneers and experts responsible for establishing the authenticity of the objects put up for sale. Lastly, it consisted of a type of discourse which, till then, had been reserved for inventories, but which now began to infiltrate the language, as objects now had to be classified and named with accuracy. According to calculations based on the number of catalogues printed, Amsterdam was the main auction centre up to the mid-eighteenth century, this centre then shifting to London and later to Paris. 4 7 However, Italy was the country which supplied most of the modern works of art and the antiquities, having a virtual monopoly of the latter, while its monopoly of paintings was challenged first by Holland, then by France. But in Italy trading in an and antiquities did not take place in the auction room but in the shops of the dealers. As for the objects, they came not only from the breakup of established collections and contemporary artistic production, but also from finds (especially in the case of hoards of money which turned up almost everywhere), from journeys and expeditions, and from excavations, which became increasingly popular from the eighteenth century onwards. Lastly, new collection pieces were created when objects, providing, of course, they were not demoted to the rank of rubbish, were elevated to the rank of semiophore for the first time. The most dramatic example of this transformation was the case of medieval works which, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were collected solely by students of the history of the Middle Ages, and therefore, given that they were denied all aesthetic value, enjoyed the status of historical sources at the most. Only at the beginning of the eighteenth century in England, and around one hundred years after this in France and Germany, did interest grow in medieval works of art, an interest reflected in the growth of countless collections specializing in objects from this period, as well as in a corresponding increase in prices. The ever-increasing role of money in facilitating the ownership of semiophores had a great many consequences. Certain categories of collection objects, and first and foremost pictures and ancient works of art, soon became inaccessible to anybody without sufficient means to make high enough bids. Accordingly, these people fell back on less costly pieces, such as medals, prints, drawings, exotic curios and specimens of natural history. However, each time a category of semiophores began to appear in the collections of artists and intellectuals the rich and powerful also began to take interest in them, resulting in a rise in prices and causing these particular semiophores to become increasingly, if not entirely, inaccessible. This led to the birth of a mechanism encouraging the transformation of despised objects and items of rubbish into semiophores. These included medieval artefacts, ones produced by non-European peoples, popular works

of art and objects used in societies distant in either space or time. The market mechanism is, of course, not the only thing which determines which of these objects should change in status and monetary value, and mere! y encourages constant searches for new ones, with changes in historical and scientific knowledge as well as in ideological presuppositions favouring one category of objects rather than another. It is in this context that the new disciplines of archaeology and its many branches, of palaeontology, the history of an and of ethnography were born. These disciplines developed research techniques designed to unearth fresh objects and at the same time constructed theories enabling them to classify, date them and elicit from them information of every sort. There was an additional consequence of this growth in the role of money in providing greater access to semiophores. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a whole section of the population found itself cut off from the contents of flourishing private collections, which were opened only to those whom their proprietors chose to admit, namely, people of similar social rank, and the artists and scholars who were given permission to study objects which they needed for their work but did nor actually own. The only collections which remained accessible to everyone were those owned by the churches. The display of modern secular art, of antiquities, exoric and natural curios was restricted to the privileged few who presided over the hierarchies of power, wealth, taste and knowledge. The people who had no access to the new semiophores were the members of the 'middle classes', whose lack of finance stood in the way of their ambitions to become fully-fledged collectors, and their number increased in step with economic growth and the spread of schooling. It was they, or their spokesmen, and in particular the scientists, writers, scholars and artists who had not yet gained the favour of the rich and powerful, who started to press for the opening up of the collections which housed the various different semiophores (books and manuscripts, historical sources, objects) they needed when exercising their professions. And it was to their request that private individuals and those in power responded, firstly by setting up public libraries in the seventeenth century, later by opening museums, even if a certain number of them were, in fact, morivated by religious considerations. The first of the big public libraries was the Bodleian, inaugurated in Oxford in 1602 and open to all the members of the university. The second one, the Ambrosiana, was founded in Milan by Bishop Federico Borromeo, and opened its doors in 1609. In 1620 it was the turn of the Angelica in Rome, founded by Bishop Angelo Pocco. In Paris the first public library, or more accurately a private library open to men of letters, belonged to De Thou, while the first truly public one was founded by Cardinal Mazarin. The number of institutions of this kind was to grow in the latter half of the century, and it was at this time that the first museum made its appearance:

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The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

in 1675 Elias Ashmole left his collections to Oxford University for the use of its students, and access was given to them in 1683. In 1734 a papal foundation, the Museo Capitolino, was opened to the public, and in 1743, Anne-Marie-Louise de' Medici offered the state of Tuscany the collections which had been amassed over three centuries by her family, on condition that they should be inalienable and always remain open to the public. Collections bought from Sir Hans Sloane formed the basis of the British Museum, which was created in 1753 by the British parliament, and from then onwards the movement gathered momentum and spread to other European countries. Before dealing briefly with the effects of this, however, we should mention that the third institution of this type, namely archives, only appeared later on. The Archives Nationales in France, which were for a time the first and only such institution, were founded by the Convention by decree in 1794. The chief characteristic of museums is their permanence. Unlike private collections, which are generally dispersed after the death of their creators and suffer the consequences of any financial problems the latter may meet, museums survive their founders and normally lead a peaceful existence. The reason for this is that whatever their legal status, they are public institutions; private museums are simply private collections which have borrowed a title associating them with something they are not. They may owe their existence to donations, state purchases of private collections, the nationalization of former royal, noble or ecclesiastical properties, as was the case in France during the Revolution. They may arise from the creation of non-profit-making foundations, as was the case of the major American museums, but every great museum started out as the result of a decision made by the public authorities or by a community. These are the bodies which either directly fund the conservation of the objects, see to their display, ensure the replenishment of their stocks or else supervise them indirectly by making sure they do not break the law. The fact that these public museums are open to everybody also distinguishes them from private collections. True, there are not many countries where museum entry is completely free, but even when a charge is made for entry, it stirs up many a guilty conscience, as if there was a firm belief that the access to semiophores should be entirely free. This is why reductions are given to certain categories of the population, depending on the particular country concerned, and why at least once a week museums can be visited free of charge. In this light, the price of the admission ticket is paid not so much in return for a service but rather as a sort of donation, and there is no better example of this than the Metropolitan Museum of New York, where each visitor is told: 'Pay what you wish, but you must pay something.' The relationship between visitors and museums therefore falls into the category of the 'gift economy' and not simply that of the market economy. Gifts

have, moreover, played an extremely important role in the actual birth of museums, as well as being largely responsible for the growth and enrichment of their stocks. In some countries, museums even enjoy the right of pre-emption when purchasing items in auctions, which means that they do not necessarily have to make the highest bid. We have emphasized the role of the pressure, exerted by people unable either to own collections or to visit those belonging to the privileged few, in the creation of libraries and museums. Had it not been the expression of a far more profound requirement, however, this pressure would have had much less effect. In order for the various subsets of society to be able to communicate between each other, they must, among other things, all have potential access to semiophores of the same kind. The reason for this is that when the objects in one particular category of objects rather than another are seen as semiophores and not as objects possessing only usage value, or even just as rubbish, they are generally held, though often tacitly, to represent the invisible. Where this happens, it is also accepted that the invisible world they represent is a reality and not a fiction. It goes without saying that everyone must agree on the nature of the particular invisible world held as a reality, in other words, the same semiophores must be given the same meaning. This is easier said than done: an antique cameo was a semiophore for those who saw it as a relic as it remains one for those who see it as a specimen of ancient art, yet because this means that the same cameo has two different meanings, communication between the holders of these two separate attitudes becomes difficult, if not impossible. Differences of opinion over the meaning of objects and consequently over the nature of the invisible can lead to social conflict: when, to quote a trivial example, the sacredness of objects used in religious acts of worship is refuted, this is, whether we know it or not, tantamount to denying the foundation of the privileged position of the clergy, which accordingly loses its rai.ron d'etre. On the other hand, if particular value is placed on objects from the past, from other societies or from nature, it justifies the activities of all those involved in unearthing, collecting, conserving and studying such objects. Viewed from this angle, the museum can be seen as one of those institutions whose role is to form a consensus of opinion around the technique of opposing the visible and the invisible, which began to take shape towards the end of the fourteenth century, and consequently around new social hierarchies, where a place at the top required the enjoyment of a privileged relationship with the invisible in its new definition. In other words, the museums took up where the churches had left off, functioning as places where all the members of a society could participate in the celebration of the same form of worship. Accordingly, their numbers grew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries at the same pace as the disaffection of the populations, especially the urban ones, with traditional religion. The

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The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible

nation has now become both the subject and rhe object of this new cult, which has superimposed itself on the old one, no longer capable of catering for the whole of society. The nation gives perpetual homage to itself by celebrating every aspect of its past, each and every one of irs social, geographical and professional groups which it believes has contributed to the general prosperity, and all the great men born on its soil and who have left lasting works in every domain imaginable. Even objects from other societies or from nature render the narion which has collected them more illustrious, since this action shows it has recognized, via its artists, scholars, explorers, even its generals, their value and has even been able to make sacrifices in order to acquire them. It is precisely because a museum is the repository of everything which is closely or loosely linked with its nation's history that its contents should be accessible to all. This is also why they should be conserved. They have come from the world of the invisible, and that is their ultimate destination. However, the invisible world to which they are destined is not the same as that from which they come. It is located elsewhere in time, and set in opposition to the past, to the hidden, to the distant, since no object can possibly represent it. This new invisible world, accessible only in and through discourse, is the future. By placing objects in museums one puts them on display not only to present but also to future generations, just as, in the past, other objects were displayed to the gods.

2 The Age of Curiosity

One of the most significant works of Pierre Borel (1620-71), a doctor from Casrres, is a description of the Antiquitez, Raretez, Plantes, Mineraux et autres chases considerables de fa ville et du comte de Castres, which includes a 'Catalogue des chases rares' contained in the author's museum.' An 'Inscription qui est sur Ia porte du susdit Cabinet s'adressant aux curieux' and quoted in its entirety in this catalogue sets out the philosophy which determined the nature of this museum. For Borel, his museum was a microcosm or a resume encompassing every single rare thing ('microcosmum seu rerum omnium rariorum Compendium'). Or then again a cemetery because it contained several corpses. After some reflection, however, he decided it would be more accurate to call it the Elysian Fields, as the dead were brought back to life through a licit form of necromancy, and conjuring up an even more impressive metaphor, he compared the objects in his study with the trophies of Hercules, referring to the presence of the remains of snakes and the bones of giants. The museum did not merely comprise the works of God and of nature, but also examples of the liberal, mechanical and chemical arts. Specimens from every corner of the globe were equally to be seen, America providing the exotic items and Africa the monsters. The roll-call was answered by all the continents and every element: 'lei, la mer t'offre ses poissons les plus rares, !'air ses oiseaux, le feu ses ouvrages et Ia terre ses mineraux.' Lastly, the study contained a number of rare monuments from antiquity which nothing could destroy. All these things were kept in a fairly limited space where the fish inhabited the air, or less poetically where their skeletons were suspended from the ceiling, and where enemies jousted one against the other. How did Borel organize the various rooms of his museum, or rather the different categories of his catalogue, given that the latter very likely did not

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The Age of Curiosity

The Age of Curiosity

respect the actual layout of the objects? The 'Raretez de !'Homme' were listed first of all, the other categories being dealt with in the following order: 'Des bestes aquatre pieds', 'Des Oyseaux', 'Des Poissons et Zoophites de mer', 'Coquillages' and 'Autres choses marines', 'Insectes et Serpens', 'Des plantes et premierement des bois et racines', 'Des feuilles', 'Des fleurs', 'Des gommes et liqueurs', 'Des semences ou graines', 'Des Fruits rares', 'Autres fruits et semences', 'Des mineraux et premierement des pierres', 'Choses changees en pierre', 'Autres mineraux', 'Des antiquitez' and 'Chases artificielles'. Obviously, this list was intended to encompass all things and all beings, and divided them up into three implicit major categories: men; animals, plants and stones; and artefacts. That is to say, into works of God, products of nature and works wrought by human hand. Countless other divisions could be made, as one could claim that the list reflects a different system of classification whereby things and beings are divided up between the four different elements. All inanimate beings, and possibly plants too, if not insects and snakes, would rhus represent the element earth; fish and the 'chases marines' the element water; birds and quadrupeds the air, while man could easily be associated with fire, given that fire is always inextricably linked with art. It is more than likely that several different classifications actually overlap one another, none actually intended to interrupt rhe continuum of the hierarchy of beings where man is placed at the summit and objects produced by art, that is, accidental forms, lower down. If one wanted to be more faithful to the text, one would in fact talk about the hierarchy of rare things, given the predominance of the words 'rare' and 'rarity'. However, it is not simply a question of words, as closer study of rhe contents of the different categories reveals that Borel's museum actually was full of rare, or supposedly rare, objects. We discover that the 'raretez de l'homme' included the bones of a giant, a two-headed monster and fragments of a mummy- all the ingredients of a truly fabulous and magical anthropology. The same applies to the zoological specimens, which included a two-headed cat, 'une piece de vraie corne de Licorne' and some bezoars, and even more so to all rhe marine animals, with such evocative names as the sea cow, sea cucumber, sawfish, hammerhead, dogfish, razor-shell and devilfish, to name but a few. The 'remore qui arrete les navires', was also represented, while the shells included one 'mediocre tres rare, et couverte naturellement de Characteres Hebrieux, Syriaques, Grecs, Latins et de routes les autres langues'. Borel's sea was not very distant from Pliny's, whose ideas were resuscitated by sixteenth-century naturalists such as Cardan, who believed that 'All the forms and shapes of animals are to be found in the sea, and nor just of animals but also of instruments'; while in his book on fish, which was considered the standard work on the subject, Rondelet made the following observation: 'Pliny writes that the sea contains the shapes not only of

animals but also of things of the earth, such as clusters of grapes, razors and saws.' 2 Borel's museum therefore offers a glimpse of nature prior ro the scientific revolution. In it, the pia y of analogies, correspondences and resemblances facilitated the passage from the visible to the invisible, where a stone could reveal 'deux yeux semblables naturellemem avec leurs prunelles' or 'un pa'isage remply d'Arbres'. Even then, however, modern science was beginning to make its presence felt, with 'lunettes a puce ou microscopes qui grossissent fort les objets' (microscopes). Both the 'lunettes de multiplication et pour approcher les objets' (telescopes) and 'un triangle de verre pour voir l'Arc-en-ciel' (prism) represented a new approach to nature, an approach which ultimately would totally transform its image. In Borel, however, the interest in instruments of observation, the plurality of worlds and the life of Descartes went hand in hand with the search for books on hermetic philosophyl and rare objects. Despite attempts to observe nature, Borel continued to see it as a principle of infinite variability and diversity, seen most clearly at work in that which was exceptional, singular or even unique. The reason for this is clear: if nature is said to be governed always and everywhere by the same laws, then logically it should be reflected in the common, the repetitive and the reproducible, but if, on the other hand, no laws can be seen at work in nature, rare things alone are seen to be capable of representing nature properly. The same applied to hisrory. Antique rarities, such as vases and urns, including one supposed to come from Corinth (another reference to Pliny), statues of the gods, medals, coins, engravings and weapons 'du temps passe', were present in the same numbers as these modern ones: 'un plat d'escorce de cocos, un gobelet de !a chine tres artistement agence et verni dedans de couleur d'or', 'un thermometre. Plusieurs autres sortes d'instruments de musique, comme une lut d'iuoire, une harpe, etc.', some globes, 'une perspective dans un coffret, plusieurs raretez sur verre et autres matieres. La poudre de simpathie'. Fifty portraits in oils should be added to this list, not to mention sixteen miniatures and twenty other pictures of 'histoires nudites, hommes illustres, fruitages, pa'isages, etc.', and the contents of this part of the catalogue can best be explained by Borel's overriding interest in events and in rare, if not unique happenings which for him represented history. This explains the importance of the portraits of great men, as placing them in chronological order was the best method of making the whole of history unfold before one's eyes. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of private museums like Borel's in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Borel himself knew of sixtythree in France alone, and forty-four in twenty-eight different foreign towns scattered between Spain and Lithuania. While it is true that some of those he listed were no longer extant when he was alive, even in the light of

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The Age of Curiosity

The Age of Curiosity

our meagre knowledge his list seems highly incomplete, a defect common to all the other lists drawn up at that period too. As reliable statistics do not appear to have been drawn up for any country, we would paint a misleadingly accurate picture if we were to reel off a whole set of partial facts, and any attempt to make a critical analysis of them would distract us from the matter in hand. Suffice it to say, therefore, that the contents of these museums differed substantially, and those of Borel's were by no means typical of them. Some comprised predominantly pictures, while others concentrated more on numismatics or antiquities. Completely homogeneous collections seem, however, to have been exceptions, and the varying proportions of objects from different catalogues to be found in museums which were in fact contemporaneous apparently reflected differences in wealth, education or social rank between their owners, as well as the distance separating them from the centres where new fashions were born and nurtured, and not to mention national, categorial and individual differences in interest and taste. There is enough material here to sustain sociological and geographical research into erudite culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the students willing to embark on it have yet to be found. The museums resembling Borel's were sufficiently numerous at this period to constitute in themselves an important socio-cultural phenomenon. Although they had made an appearance some time prior to the period we are studying, they seem only to have entered into their phase of expansion in the latter half of the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, they were already on the wane, even if some could still be found, and after the 1750s they became very few and far between indeed. With the great surge in passion for natural history, the very different kind of interest which had been shown in rare things died down, and exhibition rooms accordingly changed in appearance. 4 Traditionally designated as a Kunstund Wunderkammer 5 this type of museum, exemplified here by Borel's, therefore reached its apogee in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It remains to be seen whether these Kunst- und Wunderkammern had any real significance, and whether the vogue for them can justifiably be regarded as symptomatic of major tendencies in erudite culture at that time. Many pictures of the seventeenth century, especially from Antwerp, depict rooms full of pictures, statues, antiques, medals, exotic objects (the weapons and clothing of 'savages') and natural objects (corals, shells, minerals), and some were supposed to reproduce the layout of private museums which had actually existed and been known to the artists. 6 Many hours could be spent analysing such documentation. Each collection resembling Borel's own was, like his, a veritable 'microcosm', a 'compendium of the universe'. When one of them was represented in a picture, it meant that it was possible to take in the entire universe at a single glance, as this universe had been reduced to

the scale of the human eye. Yet though there was reduction, there was also attention to detail and concern for the accurate rendition of all the objects, and more especially of the pictures, which made it possible to identify them. There seems to have been a desire to miniaturize the constituent parts of the world in such a way as to allow the eye to take them all in at the same time, without losing any of their most intimate features.

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Compendium of the universe An Art Lover's Gallery by Frans Francken II (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Antwerp) shows a wall decorated with pictures, and below it a table bearing an album of drawings, small pictures, medals with the effigies of famous men, some coins, a small casket, shells and stones. Here, as in other similar cases, 7 we are put in the place of the spectator facing natural specimens and works of art. The latter reproduce nature in the form of landscapes, introducing at the same time historical and religious dimensions which invite the eye to extend its gaze inwards towards thought, transcending the visible to reach the invisible, the present tO reach the past and the here below to reach the beyond. A much richer spectacle is offered by pictures of museums enlivened by a bouquet of brightly coloured flowers being visited by men and women occasionally accompanied by animals such as dogs, monkeys and parrots. Somerimes, as in the case of The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest, by Willem van Haecht (Rubens' House in Antwerp, since 1969), and very likely that also of Rubens' Studio by Cornelis de Baeilleur (Pitti Palace, Florence),8 figures from history are depicted in the gallery they are known to have visited. At other times the figures remain unknown to us, as they are in Hieronymus Janssens' Picture Gallery visited by Dilettanti (Musee Girodet, Montargis),9 but this difference has no bearing on our particular viewpoint. What is important here is the fact that all these types of pictures depict the major categories of beings and objects which together encompass the entire contents of the universe: the sacred and the secular, the natural and the artificial, the animate and the inanimate, the far and the near. And equally important is the fact that besides illustrating these categories with objects which exemplify them, they show them being looked at by people. In this way, the gaze becomes itself an object to be looked at, just as the pictures representing something become in their turn represented objects. Both gaze and representation are thus multiplied by two, with the result that the image of a gallery, be it the most realist of images, turns into an allegory of mao's apprehension of the works of art and nature. At the outset, interpreting pictures as allegories when they claim to be realist, would seem an extremely hazardous enterprise. Yet their artists did

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Tbe Age of Curiosity

The Age of Curiosit)'

not hesitate to correct reality, by placing in rooms pictures which we know they did not contain or else bringing together in another room people whom we know paid visits there on different occasions. It would seem that the aim was not so much to create a faithful portrait of a particular room on a particular date, but rather to convey the very essence of such a room, showing it as a place where the universe, considered as a whole, became visible through the intermediary of objects intended to represent the major categories of beings and things, and even the classes subdividing these categories. In other words, it is here that the universe became visible as a single entity, for although it retained every single constituent part, it underwent a process of miniaturization. Just as the still lifes painted with the greatest respect for the physical aspect of the objects were nonetheless heavily symbolic, so the representations of galleries were both realist and endowed with allegorical meaning. This view is borne out by the existence of numerous pictures which so meticulously portray rooms that each separate object is exactly reprod.uced, only_ tO introduce into them allegorical, mythological or legendary figures. This IS the case of the American savages planted in the centre of a room, surrounded by animals, birds and fish mostly from their native New Wo~ld. Present ro_o are American artefacts with, it is true, several foreign additions, along With specimens of American fauna and flora depicted in the pictures decorating the walls, some of which also portray scenes from the lives of the Indians, and statues of these latter placed in the niches (America. Jan van Kessel the Elder; Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen, Munich). There can be no doubt whatsoever that this is an allegory of America incarnated by the female savage seated in the foreground and surrounded by symbols of wealth, and in fact this picture was one of a series depicting the four contments. 10 Another and even more exuberant room, full of ancient busts, pictures, scientific instruments including globes and a telescope, and medals, harbours a half-naked nymph whom some say is meant to be Venus, oth~rs a Muse, and who is accompanied by a Cupid. This picture is an allegory of Sight, and the same couple reappears in three other pictures of the same series, painted by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan 'Velvet' Brueghell, and dedicated to the Five Senses (Prado, Madrid). In the allegory of hearing, the nymph sings and plays, listened to by the Cupid and by a stag, in a different room to before where we can see several musical instruments and scores next tO the pictures, globe and clock. In the allegory of the sense of smell, she is seated with her companion amid the flowers of a garden, while in the allegory of taste, we see her eating, fully dressed this time, in a room full of eccentricities where she is served, in the absence of the Cupid, by a satyr. Lastly, the allegory of touch is portrayed by the nymph giving a tender kiss to the Cupid in one of Vulcan's caves, piled high with pictures, weapons and armour and instruments. II

Two further pictures by Jan 'Velvet' Brueghel deal with the theme of the five senses: Sight and Smetl and Ta.rte, Hearing and Touch, which once more feature nymphs and Cupids surrounded by objects (Prado, Madrid). 12 The same painter also created a series depicting the Fottr Elements, where one picture, The Allegory of Fire (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lyons), shows Venus, along with a Cupid, in Vulcan's forge, 'sorte de "cabinet d'amateur" heteroclite, a Ia fois precis et irrealiste' 13 A different series of paintings by the same Brueghel, and on the same theme also exists, where although Venus does not figure in the work entitled The AllegorJ' of Fire (Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan), Vulcan's forge does continue to resemble a museum full of bric-a-brac. The same type of museum, all its features intact, is portrayed by]. van Kessel in a painting which just happens to represent The Four Elements (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg). 14 A comparison of Johannes Georg Hainz's Mu.reum of Curiositie.r (Schloss Friedenstein, Schlossmuseum, Gotha) with The Great Vanity by Sebastian Stoskopf (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg) 15 will prove convincingly just how difficult it is at times to distinguish between the representation of a museum and an allegorical picture. It would seem, however, that it is precisely this difficulty which is important, as it is due to the fact that in both cases realism, if not illusionism, in the execution of detail gives, thanks to the choice and organization of this detail, an allegorical meaning to the whole. As we have seen, a picture which portrays a private museum portrays it as a place where one can see the universe as a whole. This is even truer of pictures of the same kind which form part of a series intended to express this very concept of totality in visual form. For geographers of the period, there were but four continents, and so these four represented the whole of the inhabited world. Thus, when a continent was embodied not only by an allegorical figure but also by examples of its native peoples, animals, plants, minerals and artefacts, it was in fact represented by all the main categories of objects. The entire series therefore presents us with a sort of pictural inventory of the world intended to be exhaustive not only in a geographical sense but also in the way objects are apportioned to the different categories, all of which are depicted. Similar remarks could be made about the series on the five senses. With the risk of stating the obvious, the five senses signify all the means and all the senses a human being has at his disposal for apprehending the objects of the physical world, objects which can be divided up according to the way in which they act on our organs. Painting the five senses, however, introduces more oppositions, most notably that which operates between that which is stable, discernible through the senses of sight and touch, and which resists time, like ancient statues, and all that is transitory, such as sounds, tastes, smells. It should perhaps not be forgotten that flowers and musical instruments often figure among the 'vanities' 16

52

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The Age of Curiosity

and that Rubens' and Brueghel's Tbe Allegory of Hearing features a clock in the foreground. Finally, all the categories and classes discussed in this chapter can be represented within the framework of the four elements (or the four qualities which constitute them). This is a particularly ancient and flexible framework, and one which not only enables beings and things, temperaments, climates, seasons, ages of man and so on to be divided up in a logical and exhaustive manner, bur also accommodates virrually all types of classifications. 17 Hard! y surprising, therefore, if it often dictated the Ia your of museums. It remains to be seen what the figures of Venus and Cupid signified and why they were used in preference to others. It also remains to be seen why artists chose to portray these museums, for the desire to show off their virtuosity by painting perfectly recognizable miniatures of pictures, objets d'art and natural artefacts is not in itself sufficient reason, just as the wish to liven up the allegories cannot adequately explain the presence of an unclad woman in their midst. This presence can, however, be justified fully in a painting by Willem van Haecht, Apelles' Atelier, which at first glance only resembles our allegories because it, too, depicts an opulent gallery full of fine pictures from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, natural curios and globes (Maurirshuis, The Hague). The scene is that of Apelles busy painting the portrait of Alexander's favourite, Campaspe. Neck and shoulders bared, and one breast revealed, she stands before the painter, surrounded by her followers, while Alexander watches both the artist and his model. This extremely complex picture represents nor simply rhe objects amassed in the gallery and admired by Alexander's courtiers, but also the very act of representing and its end product, the emerging painting. Above all, however, it represents desire.

museum. This interpretation may seem a little far-fetched, but the same theme of desire reappears in Frans Francken II's painting, Ulysses recognizing Achilles from among the Daughters of Lycomedes (Louvre, Paris), which plays on how masculine and feminine characteristics oppose yet complement each other. Here, Achilles betrays his true nature by taking hold of the sword and shield, while the daughters of Lycomedes only have eyes for the jewels. The scene takes place in a gallery where pictures, a vase of flowers and various other different objects can be seen, and desire is explicitly directed towards objects but not personified. Personification does seem to take place in the two paintings of Tbe Toilet of Venus by J. van Kessel (Baron Coppe Collection, Brussels; Fr. Sheid Collection, Cleydael Castle, Antwerp), where Venus, half-naked, is accompanied by a Cupid and stands amid shells, minerals, scientific instruments and pictures, with a backdrop of shelves bearing busts and statues. All this immediately brings to mind the allegories discussed above, but this time there is nothing to suggest that allegory is involved. Even so, having just drawn comparisons between Apel!es' Atelier and Ulysses recognizing Achilles from among the Daugbters of Lycomedes it is difficult to avoid reaching the conclusion that Venus, of whom Campaspe is but an avatar, can only be performing her toilet in such an unlikely place as this, in the company, what is more, of a Cupid, because this is the only way that the desire responsible for bringing together rare objects in a cabinet can be represented allegorically. The placing of the personification of desire in the midst of such objects, shows that it is towards them that the desire is directed, and that it is this desire which fuels the urge to seek out and amass them in order to form a microcosm. The same applies to other female figures placed in the same setting: it applies both to the Venus from the Lyons Allegory of Fire, and to the nymph in the allegories of the five senses, who consequently represents not only individual senses (a role which could have been filled by any figure portrayed looking, playing an instrument or eating) but also incarnates and makes visible the desire which is implicit in all openness to things and beings and in every sensory or intellectual apprehension of the universe.

When he ordered ["Apelles] to paint him a portrait of the nudity of Campaspe, the most beautiful of all his concubines, and one he greatly loved, certain obvious signs made it clear to Alexander that as he studied her closely, Apelles had fallen in love with her beauty. This is why he showed him the full measure of his affection and gave her to him, as if, having been the friend of a king - and of King Alexander, too - it was right that she should become the friend of a painter. Some thought that the very famous Venus Dione was the portrait of this beautiful womaniB The illustration of this legend, Apel!es' Atelier, is a hymn to the glory of painting, an art capable of reproducing all things and all beings, and far nobler than all the other arts. It is also an apology for desire, of which Campaspe is at the same time both the object and the personification. This is the desire to see and possess, desire channelled through the woman and aimed at all the beings and all the things collected by Apelles in his atelier-

The quest for totality Totality and desire, two themes which, though independent, often overlap in the paintings included in our rapid survey, also crop up in the names which, in French at least, are given to those who attempt to amass objects and create museums. 'AMATEUR, s.m., Qui aime quelque chose. II ne se dit point de l'amitie, ni des personnes. II est amateur de l'estude, des curiosites, des tableaux, des coquilles, amateur de !a Musique, des Beaux-Arts, le peuple est amateur de nouveautez.' 19 A little later, Furetiere's gloss was followed

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by that of the Academ ie which, in its diction ary, subord inated the noun 'amate ur' to the verb 'aimer' and explain ed: 'AMAT EUR. s.m.v. Qui aime. II ne se dit que pour marqu er I' affecti on qu' on a pour les chases , et non celle qu'on a pour les person nes. Amate ur de la vertu, de Ia gloire des lettres, des arts, amateu r des bans !ivres, des tableau x, amateu r des nouvea utez.' 20 Not only did the Academ ie's diction ary not give the word amateu r full autono my, a status first grante d in the 1717 edition , but it also ignore d curios and shells, as well as studies, which headed Furetie re's list of examp les. This is an import ant differe nce and reflects the conflic t betwee n the intellig entsia and the literary spokes men of the court, who accused the former of being pedant s. 21 In particu lar, those whose interes t in curios and shells was favourably looked on by Furetie re, since he design ated them as amateu rs, were cruelly ridiculed by La Bruyer e in a chapte r of his Caracteres, of which more later. The Academ ie tacitly refused them the title of amateu r, which it reserve d for lovers of paintin gs, that is, objects not used for study. In the Academ ie's and in Bruyer e's opinio n, people taking an interes t in shells and simila r things of that nature were merely curieux. CURIEUX, EUSE. adj. et subst. Celuy qui veut tour s and Antiqu arians

205

drawn up in the same year,l 05 while the Serpini collection included just two Zuccarelli landscapes.l 06 As for Giovanni Girolam o Orti (1769-1845 ), the proud owner of a 'scelta raccolta de quadri modern i tra i quali uno di Gio Batta Tiepolo', 107 the compos ition of which is unfortu nately unknow n to us, it is possible that he did own a few other Venetia n paintin gs. Let us add that in the portrai t collection belonging to Rafaelle Mosconi (1671-1730), which went to the Gazola family after his death, where it remain ed until the ninetee nth century, eightee nth century paintin g was represe nted by portraits by Fabio Canal, Lazzarini, P. Longhi, Pittoni, Sebastiana Ricci, Trevisa ni and Visentini, and althoug h this collection was only comple ted after the death of its founder, the quantit y and quality of absent painter s is nonetheless impressive. tos The impress ion that the Veronese did indeed turn their backs on eightee nth century Venetia n paintin g was borne our by subsequent events. In the art gallery belonging to Giovanni Albarelli (1765-1821), for instance, which was catalogued in 1815, only two out of 300 pictures, an Amigon i and a Lazzarini, were Venetian. 109 The Pompe i collection is said to have contained a Pittoni, 110 but this figures neither in the invento ry drawn up in 1835 after the death of Alessandro Pompe i nor in that drawn up in 1850 after the demise of Giulio Pompei , even though both do list several Venetia n works. The earlier one counts five out of a total of seventy -five, including two 'vedute "della maniera de Guardi" ', two more 'della scuola de Canaletto' and a landscape 'sullo stile de Zuccharelti'. 11 1 This figure rises to twenty- one out of 247 in the second catalogue, with six by or attribut ed to Longhi, three by Marco Ricci, including one attribut ed to Salvato r Rosa, four copies of Zuccarelli, five views of Venice, including three anonym ous works and two others painted 'ad imitazione del Canaletto', and two 'piccole vedutine' by Guardi.l 12 All this is unimpr essive in terms of both quality the Venetia n works are minor ones, often of doubtful authent icity and appear only to have been seen as part of the decor - and even quantity , especially if the Pompe i collection is compared with the Vianelli or Silvestri ones. The flagrant under-r epresen tation of eightee nth-cen tury Venetia n painting in the Pompe i collection becomes even more so when this collecti on is contras ted with one in Verona owned by Antoni o Tanara ; dating from the same period, this one contained three works from Sebastiana Ricci, Rosalba Carriera and Zuccarelli, two from Amigoni, Canaletto, Piazzetta, Marco Ricci and Tiepolo, and single works from Bencovich, Lazzari ni and Pellegrini: a grand total of twenty-five Venetia n paintin gs our of 162.1!3 The Tanara collection was not, however, formed in Verona, but arrived there in 1825 in the shape of a legacy from Vicenza, where it had belonge d to the Balzi Salvioni family. This is the likely explana tion for its profile's being so very differen t from that of Verone se collections in the first half of

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the nineteen th century, whether they be those of Giulio Pompei, Andrea Monga (four Venetia n works out of 185) or of Cesare Bernasconi (eight out of 152). 114 What lay behind this rejection of Venetia n painting ? A lack of interest in artistic innovati on in general or instead latent hostility towards Venice? Both, in all probability, though in what measure it is impossib le to say. Without any doubt, a backward-looking tendency prevaile d in a large proporti on of Verones e collections in the latter half of the eighteen th century, if not as early as the 1730s, which saw the demise of the last survivin g member s of the generati on of collectors for whom dal Pozzo acted as spokesm an. In 1732, in his Verona illustrata, Maffei passed no commen t on the ten or so art galleries he mention ed, as if seeking to imply that nothing new could be said on the subject. In addition, he showed a definite preferen ce for painters such as Balestra, Tiepolo, Marches ini and the very young Cignaroli, proof of a resolutely contemp orary taste and an indication to his fellow collectors of the path he would have liked to have seen them follow.m All the evidence seems to show that this attempt at renewin g Verones e artistic culture was anything but crowned with success. Of the forty-one interiors containi ng painting s listed by dalla Rosa, only two are said to contain 'quadri moderni et antichi' while the expressi on 'raccolta de quadri antichi' appears seven times. 116 What is more, those modern painters whose works were to be found in private houses, were Balestra, Simone Brentan a, Marchesini, Solimena and Torelli, all of whom were active at the beginnin g of the century and dead by 1745. None of their successors was represen ted, except for Giambe ttino Cignaroli, mention ed in several places as the author of frescoes, though his painting s are referred to only once, and Francesco Lorenzi, while the works of Pietro Rotari, who took up residence in St Petersbu rg in 1756, were kept in his family home. 117 The artists working in Verona itself in the eighteen th century do not, therefor e, seem to have been given any greater represen tation in the private collections there than their colleagues from Venice, an impress ion borne out by the small number of inventor ies we know ofl 18 This backward-looking tendency was not necessarily the result of a conscious decision. Rather, it was the almost inevitable consequence of collections being inherite d by people who conserved them and handed them down in their turn without adding any contemp orary works to them. Neverth eless, the dearth of commissions, especially of public commiss ions made to Venetia n painters , leads one to suppose that the almost total absence of contemp orary pieces from private collections was the result of a climate which, in Verona, was not particula rly favourable to them. In the absence of any in-depth research into collections of painting s in Verona in the eighteen th century, we will confine ourselves to the conclusion that contemp orary painting , whether Venetia n or Veronese, primaril y attracted

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207

the member s of families which previous ly had never taken any real interest in art. These included the Emilei al Pigna, who commiss ioned two painting s from Cignaroli, the Orti, the Serpini al Duomo, owners of the largest collection of ancient and modern prints in Verona and of a substant ial collection of drawings, and the Spolverini al Giardino, whose residence was decorated with modern painting s, notably one by Lorenzi. 11 9 In this respect, the situation in Verona therefor e resembl ed that described by Francis Haskell, though in a more exaggerated form, given the undoubtedly lower number of new art lovers. On the mainlan d, Rovigo and Verona represen t two diametrically opposin g attitudes to contemp orary Venetia n painting , one of acceptance, one of rejection. The remainin g towns were somewh ere between the two. Brescia resembles Rovigo, as does Bergamo, where collectors fell into raptures over Zuccarelli and where Count Giovann i Carrara, the town's most influential art lover, was in contact with Tiepolo. 120 Vicenza would have to be situated somewh ere towards the centre, though perhaps a little closer to Rovigo. It is there that a work by Pirtoni was described as being in the possessi on of Pietro Caldagno, while Angelo Vecchia's 'superbe galeria' containe d one by Tiepolo,l21 who also carried out several commiss ions for public buildings and painted frescoes to decorate a number of private palaces. 122 Other, later, signs of the presence of contemp orary Venetia n painting in Vicenza, include the Balzi Salvioni collection, mention ed above, and the legacy made in 1825 to the municipal museum by Paolina Porto Godi who, out of eighty-n ine pictures, left at least two by Pittoni and two by Marco Ricci. 12 3 Padua also appears to occupy a central position. Howeve r, while its private collections resembl ed those in Verona rather than those in Rovigo in terms of contents , the men who financed commissions for decorating public buildings, the Santo in particular, had a differen t attitude to contemp orary Venetia n painting.t24 Obviously, our map of tastes is anything but simple. Contem porary Venetia n painting provoke d differen t reactions in every town, reflected in the varying proporti ons of dilettant es and collectors who accepted or rejected it. Just to complicate matters, the same person might commission frescoes yet feel unable to order painting s from an artist, as if he accepted the painter wearing his decorato r's hat, but was unwilling to include his works in his collection (illustra ted by the Canossas' dealings with Tiepolo in Verona) , while trends in private collections were not necessarily reflected in public commiss ions, even within the same town. Lastly, the changes occurring over this period should not be neglected as much as they have been here, even if, taking Verona as an example, their effects seem to have been far from spectacular. If they were properly taken into account, it would be possible to trace the gradual fading, if not the complet e disappea rance, of the initial incompa tibility between certain painters , which made such a

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strong impress ion in the first half of the century that Canalett o dilettant es were prevente d from liking Tiepolo and vice versa. This incompa tibility gave way to a sort of retroacti ve kinship which grew from a common sense of belongin g to a finished era. It goes without saying that a collector active in the closing years of the century perceived painting s in a differen t way to his predeces sors in the 1730s, for example , who continue d to feel keenly oppositi on which had since vanished . Howeve r, we have not been able to take changes such as these into account in this study. Despite these reservat ions, the fact remains that contemp orary Venetia n painting created divisions between dilettant es and collectors just as much in Venice as in the mainlan d towns, reflectin g there disagree ments which conflicting choices operated on a single corpus of works expresse d more clearly than any discourse could. The fact also remains that there was a clear dividing line between towns whose numerou s collections were formed in a sometim es very distant past and where interest in contemp orary painting was restricte d to newcom ers to the art world who accordingly had but little influence, and towns where it was the latter who had a decisive say in matters thanks to their number or wealth, or quite simply to the absence of any competi tion. Also apparen t, though this time concern ing the republic as a whole, was the division of collections into two classes. Haskell drew attention to this in Venice, and we have already noted its presence in all the mainlan d towns. This division concerned the difference between collections handed down as legacies and others built up by their present owners. A town of inheritor -collecto rs, Verona therefor e offers a strong contrast with Rovigo, a town dominat ed by art collectors of recent date.

Historical collections of paintings Many promote rs of contemp orary painting were promine nt figures in intellect ual circles, whateve r their official social status. Member s of these circles also included those foreigne rs who had made a substant ial contribu tion to the recognit ion of contemp orary painting during the first half of the century, even if they had never written a single line in their entire lives. A frequent importe r of books setting out new ideas, and G. B. Pasquali 's partner in several publishi ng ventures , often large-scale ones,] oseph Smith was in contact with Maffei, Algarott i, the two Zanettis , Poleni and others, of which more later. 125 In his more modest fashion, a certain Sigismo nd Streit made the acquaintance of professo rs at the Univers ity of Padua (where he moved in 1750) and of Vallisnieri the Younge r in particula r, to whom he left his natural history collection in 1758. 126 It was in this same milieu, with its opennes s to intellectual artistic innovati on, that two new ideas were born, ideas which were eventual ly adopted on such a universa l

Collectors, Natttralists and Antiquarians

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scale that they affected both the contents and characte r of art collections

su~or?inating them to a historical perspect ive and causing them to includ~

pamfmg s by the 'primitiv es', the link between these two ideas being obvious. In the Venetia n Republic the oldest collection to have been oro-anized on historica l lines seems to have been the one belongin g to Carlo Lodoli ( 16901761 ), a _Franciscan, architec tural theorist and educator. His pupils included Algarow and Andrea Memmo ( 1729-93 ), who described the life and outlined the ideas of his master in a book publishe d twenty-f ive years after the latter's death. This is what he has to say on the subject of Lodoli' s collection. To give an example of his conception of those arts which I have no hesitation in calling the younger sisters of architecture - since they are nothmg more than imitation and their chief purpose is to provide decoration for it- I will describe what his gallery contained in the way of them. This will also help to prove that it was impossible for him not to possess the same exquisite taste in architecture too, and that he could !dentify each stage in the development of this art and judge the merit of ItS artiStS. Being only a poor brother, he could never have managed to purchase a set of works by the most famous painters; unfortunately for those who are nor wealthy, they fetch such extravagant sums that we must often be content with admiring them in other people's houses. He therefore decided to form a collection which would be different to those ro which we are accustomed, but perhaps more useful, in the belief that pictures should show each stage of the progression of the art of drawing from its Renaissance in Italy as far as Titian, Raphael, Correggio, Buonarotti and Paolo Veronese ... _m L~doli collected two types of objects, painting s and the 'srone pieces of archJtecture he had amassed in order to further knowled ge either of the manner of differen t periods or else of some new and unusual inventio n, regardless of whether it was sensible or quite outrageous'I28 The stones were kept in the garden, while the painting s had been arranged by Lodoli according to t~eir schools and in chronological order. 'His collection opened wJth the remams of a work by some Greek artist', followed by the works of the 'very earliest Venetian s who had learnt the art of painting from the Greeks' and which were anonym ous. The true beginnin gs of the Venetia n school were represen ted, among others, by Gentile de Fabriano the Vivarinis, Carpaccio and the three Bellinis. In another room, one ~ould follow the 'develop ment of the Lombard school', starting with a rare work by Squarcione. There were also 'several pieces' from the Florenti ne school notably by Cimabue and Giotto, as well as works in smaller numbers fro~ the Roman, Bolognese, German and Flemish schools.I29

Collectors, Naturalists and Antiquarians

Colfecton, Naturali.rts and Antiquarians

Memmo presents the idea of creating such a collection as a makeshift solution forced upon the 'povero frate', by the lack of the necessary wherewithal to purchase masterpieces. Moreover, he explains that Lodoli managed to acquire the pieces in his collection because those who had the benefit of his advice on architectural matters, 'feeling themselves to be indebted co him as a result, gave him drawings or paintings in order co enrich and, as he put it, sweeten his gallery' 1 ' 0 Without wishing to cast doubt on this account, we should not forget Lodoli's well-documented friendship with Maffei, who was well known for advocating a historical approach to art and for his ami-Vasari stance. This was reflected in his insistence on the continuity of Italian artistic history and in his toleram attitude to the works of the Middle Ages, which he believed should be judged in the light of the ideas of that period and with regard to their relevance to the 'primitives'. 1l 1 Nor should we forget the links he had with a whole cultural milieu in Padua, of whose deep interest in history, especially the Middle Ages, we will see evidence later. His collection was therefore the product of scholarly curiosity combined with a passion for art, both for the ancient art he studied in his visits to churches and palaces and which 'provided him with knowledge of every single piece of sculpture or paiming, even if it was hidden away in private, almost lowly, dwellings' and for contemporary art, as 'it pleased him to watch at work famous painters with whom he had established friendships.' 132 Seen in this light, lodoli appears simply to have put into practice the teachings of Maffei, that historian of ancient art and critic sympathetic to the art of his contemporarIes. It was within this very same Paduan milieu that another collection was formed, based on the same principles as Lodoli's. Its founder, a historian of the University of Padua, named Abbot Jacopo Facciolati ( 1682-1769), was a friend of his, and a fellow habitue of Smith's palazzo. 135 When Grosley visited him at his home, he saw

membra picturae', Grosley was obviously ill at ease when he met this divergence between historical and artistic criteria, where the first attributed value to objects to which the second did not. Nor was he the only one to have had this problem, which was resolved later, with the discovery of the beauty of the 'primitives' and of medieval art in general, following lengthy examination of it and much explicative work. 1 " In 1771, ten years after Lodoli's death, Anton Maria Zanetti the Younger made the hisrorical approach to Venetian painting official, if one can put it that way. Even though the title of his book on the subject does not itself indicate its historical nature, the preface could nor possibly be more explicit on this matter.

210

a collection as scholar! y as it is singular. It is a series of pictures which, so as to speak, traces the history of painting since its renaissance in Europe. It commences with Greek paintings, the imitation of which formed the apprenticeship of the very first painters in Italy. They depict Madonnas copied in a base fashion, with no taste for drawing, the aridity and platitude of their execution matching in every way that of the crudely illuminated wood-block prints our peasants use to decorate their huts. This art develops little by little in the following painters, and after Giotto, Mantegna and the Bellinis we finally come to Raphael and Titian ... 111 While emphasizing the superiority of Facciolati's collection compared with other Italian collections where he claims one sees only 'disiectcl

211

I shall try to be a good historian and follow the example of the very best historians by introducing comments on the various different styles of our painters from time to time, trying to analyse as clearly as I can each part separately, in order that it may be of some use. My work is a history of Venetian art and artists, in that it deals with this an and this art onlyHG The structure of the work is just as explicit. The first book opens with the mosaics in St Mark's and goes as far as the end of the fifteenth century. Book II begins with Giorgione, 'the first of our citizens to raise painting up from the lowly status it had previously been confined to', 137 and he is joined by Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese andJacopo Bassano, Book III being reserved for the disciples and successors of these great masters and Book IV for the mannerists, whose works which were characterized by a distancing from nature and tradition, were symptomatic for Zanetti of the decadence of art. 08 Last of all, the fifth book deals with contemporary painting, whose summits were, according to Zanetti, reached by Tiepolo, the final representative of the grand style. Zanetti's overall position was made up of several different components, which others have already shown to be interdependent.119 These included the rejection of mannerism, the reinsertion into history of the 'primitives', whose works he considered to be in accordance with reason, yet at the same time incapable of providing either pleasure or amazement,Ho one further illustration of the discrepancy between historical and artistic criteria - and the re-evaluation of contemporary painting seen from an almost neo-classical viewpoint. As far as our particular topic is concerned, it is also important to underline his role in the publication of two volumes Delle anticbe .rtatue g1·eche e romane cbe nell'antiJala della !ibtetia di San Marco, e in a!tri !uogbi pubblici di Venezia si trovano, which made a substantial contribution to the spread of the cult of ancient sculpture.t41 First conceived by Anton Maria Zanetti the Elder as early as the 1720s, and one of the finest jewels in the crown of Venetian publishing in the eighteenth century, the book was actually written by the two cousins, who

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executed the drawings of the statues chosen for inclusion and accompanied these with scholarly commentarie s. 142 Thirty years later, the author of Della pittura t'eneziana recalled in his preface: 'I spent my youth studying ancient statues, and in rime I began to master the art of good drawing quite sarisfactorily.' 14 ; This helps us to understand his critical attitude ro mannerism, as well as the praise he lavished at the end of his book on the collection of casts of ancient statues amassed by a Venetian patrician, Abbot Filippo Farsetti (1703-74) - yet another of Lodoli's pupils 144 - and housed in his palace.

Pictures by the 'primitives' and ancient statuary From the sixteenth century onwards, Venetian painters had often been reproached with paying only scant attention tO ancient statuary, of which their city had no examples. Some of them, including Boschini, replied to this criticism by asserting that the imitation of living nature was more important than that of ancient masterpieces, copies of which were in fact to be found in Venice 145 Before the arrival of the Farsetti collection in the 1760s, however, it cannot have been an easy task to track them down, as when Zanetti hailed its arrival, he exclaimed: 'Foreigners will no longer be able to tell the Venetians that they would be better if they had seen the statues in Rome, as he [Farsetti] has obtained copies taken directly from the originals, and not just the ones in the Capitol's large collection but others too from all over Rome and from the highly renowned gallery in Florence too.' 146 According to Zanetti, the study of these 'erudite forme' (a significant term) would enable young Venetians ro learn 'how to use good drawing ro render nature itself, perfecting its already flawless beauty'. He explained what he meant by these words by making it clear that the aim of this study was tO succeed in 'faithfully imitating the symmetry and grace of the contours of these figures: the form of the heads and other extremities, in order to go on, armed with confidence and a solid grounding, to the freer and more animated studies which are the crowning glory of our school'. 1·17 These are the essential features of the academic teaching programme of the fine arts. The Farserri collection did indeed justify both the enthusiasm of its visitors who, like Goethe, felt themselves transported back to the splendours of ancient times, 148 as well as the panegyrics lavished on irs creator both during his lifetime and well after his death 14 9 Its 253 plaster casts, which included ninety-three statues, thirty-three busts, twenty-nine heads, sixty-three figured bas-reliefs, thirteen ornamental bas-reliefs and twentytwo figurines,]j 0 brought Venice reproduction s of the most famous works of ancient statuary, such as the Laocoon, the Medicis' Ven11s, the Apollo,

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Antinous and Torso from the Belvedere, the Wrestlers from the Uffizi, as well as Satyrs, Fauns and Centaurs. The same collection also contained 178 terracott.a objects, several bronzes and marbles, along with copies of mast~r~Ieces of modern sculpture, most notably Michelangelo's Redeemer, Bermm s Neptune and Giambologna 's Mercury.l5l The 125 paintings which also formed part of the collection were of but little interest. Nearly half of rh~n:, sixt~-one, were Flemish, and the rest were Italian, twenty-eight re!Igwus pictures acc~unring for the majority of these, and twenty-four l~ndscapes, flowe.r, frurt and animal studies constituting rhe largest propor~wn of the Flemish works. Eighteenth-c entury Venetian painting was not I? favour, and there were only five specimens of it, two by Carlevaris and smgle works by Lazzarini, Marco Ricci and Zuccarelli.t52 F~r r_oughly forty years, beginning in the lifetime of Filippo Farsetri, contiOUI?g under the watchful eye of his heir, Daniele Farsetti (1725-87), and endmg under that of the latter's son, Anton Francesco, who left forSt Pet~rsburg in 1804 after having sold the family collections,l53 the casts of ancient statues constituted the most precious element of these collections and played an important role in artistic life in Venice. In 1805 they wer~ purch~se~ the Empe:or of Austria and donated to the city's AcademyJH The sigmficance of thrs role, to which the Farsetti collection owes its reputation, stemmed from the fact that it functioned somewhat as an art school,. in that. artists :-vere given the opportunity to study and copy the works It contamed. This accounts for Zanetti's hope that there would be a rebirth of the fine arts in Venice. Although this turned out ro be a forlorn h?~~· one very gre~t artist, Canova, did acquire at least part of his skill by vtsttln~ the Farsettt p.al~ce. His very first works were bought by Filippo Farserti and went to )Om the casts of the ancient works, at least two of which, the Wrestlers and the Belvedere Antinous, he copied.t55 Zanetti was not the only one who sought both the reinsertion of the 'primitives', and even of works from the Middle Ages, into rhe history of art and the. promotion of ancient statues to the level of models for contemporary arttsts. Other people shared the same aims, including Maffei and Caylus.~ 56 O~ly in the 1820s did they turn out to lead to incompatible aesthetiC choiCes. When, in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, colle.ctors b~g.a? to abando~ one or other of these aims, it was chiefly due to the Impossibrllty of amassmg both paintings and antiquities with artistic worth, except in the case of particularly wealthy individuals. In other words thi_s concentration on a single aim was quite simply dictated by the prices of ObjeCtS. . Among the ,Venetian collections organized according to historical dtc.tates, let us first .mention the one owned by John Strange (1732-99), a Bmon who was resident there from 1774 to 1790, and whose links with a whole group of Venetian naturalists we will come to later. Formed with the

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help of Giovan Maria Sasso, whose services he employed, Strange's collection of paintings was, according to Abbot della Lena, 'fa storia visibile della Pittu1·a Veneziana', the 'primitives' being especially well represented. 1' 7 Della Lena also talks of the 'Storia visibile detl'Arte' with regard to the print collection belonging to Count Durazzo, the imperial ambassador to Venice between 1764 and 1784. 158 Later on, in the 1780s, Girolamo Manfrin (d. 1802), a nouveatt riche businessman, 'opened a gallery comprising several rooms filled with paintings by the most renowned artists, ranging from the very earliest painters to those of the present day: he had hoped, providing death did not strike him too soon, to display works from different periods according to their different schools and dares, so that we might recognize at a glance the faults and splendours of this art throughout the different periods.' m The aim once more was therefore to make the history of arr a visible one. A similar aim appears to have been behind the activities of Giovanni de Lazara who, from 1776 onwards, set about building up a collection of around 2000 prints arranged chronologically 160 It is, however, the sole collection of this type that we know of outside Venice. In Padua, on the other hand, there was obvious interest in the 'primitives', as their works were to be found there in several collections, most notably in that of the Capodilistas. 161 The same was true of Vicenza, witness the legacies of Paolina de Porto Godi (1825) and Carlo Vicentini dal Giglio (1834), 162 and of Rovigo, where Bartoli describes, though wrongly attributes, a painting by Quirizio de Murano in the Campanari collection. 16 3 It is in Verona, despite rhe presence of a large number of their works in that town, chat the 'primitives' seem, however, to have aroused the least interest in collectors in the last decades of the eighteenth century. We should add, however, that towards 1820, the Canossas' gallery, which was apparently arranged in historical order, did contain a certain number, as did the gallery, newly formed by Francesco Caldana, which housed 'a set of examples of the school of Verona from its beginnings to its decline'. 164 The majority of the collections of antiquities which were to be found in the Venetian Republic during the eighteenth century were not expressions of taste, and owed their existence not ro a specific aesthetic viewpoint but rather to that curiosity which is peculiar to historians. The minority did, however, include the collections of engraved stones belonging to Joseph Smith and Anton Maria Zanetti the Elder, of whom more later, while that which belonged to Girolamo Zulian ( 1730-95 ), a Venetian patrician, who most notably served as his city's ambassador to Rome and Constantinople, could without hesitation be considered to be neo-classical. During his time in Rome, Zulian had amassed around seventy ancient vases, which were later joined by engraved stones, marbles and bronzes, all of which were placed in the archaeological museum of the Biblioteca Marciana in 1795, in

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215 165 accordance with his will. These objects were important because they belonged to the same collection as the plaster casts of Canova's statues, to which a special room in the Zulian palace in Padua had been given over.l66 There were, in addition, several original pieces by this artist, and their number would certainly have been greater had their price not soared far beyond Zulian's reach. 167 It is this integration of ancient and contemporary art, characterized by considerable admiration of Canova, who became his protege during his very first stay in Rome, that makes Zulian an example of the neo-classical collecror. Alongside a historical approach to painting, which embraced rhe work of the 'primitives', Zanetti showed a tendency to promote the aesthetic qualities of ancient sculpture, henceforth considered as the only model of perfect beauty. In general, however, these traits were rarely reflected in the same collection, although they did both surface in the one owned by Tomasso degli Obizzi (1750-1803). This was kept in his Catajo castle near Padua and subsequently, in accordance with his will and after numerous adventures, fell into the hands of the Habsburg archdukes, a fate which led to its dispersal. 168 A man of many interests, especially in the fields of numismatics, history and the natural sciences, Tomasso degli Obizzi, who was in correspondence with several scholars, artists, collectors and dealers, including P. Arduino, A. Fortis, L. Lanzi, T. Correr, ]. Morelli and A. Canova, to name but the best known, was certainly a most unusual individual. Sometimes portrayed as a feudal lord completely behind the times, content with managing his inheritance and with no apparent tastes of his own, 169 he has recent! y been accorded a place in the museological avant-garde of his time 170 In the absence of the monograph he so much deserves, we will simply give a few facts here which it would be difficult to dispute. While it cannot be denied that Tomasso degli Obizzi did inherit numerous objects which he included in his collection, he did make some additions to ir of his own, devoting, in fact, much of his rime to enriching and shaping it. Even before 1776 he had received a sarcophagus, complete with mummy, from Edward Wortley Montagu,t 71 and he went on ro organize his own excavations in search of inscriptions, 172 and made several purchases. Letters sent to him by Giovan Maria Sasso show him to have been in contact with other dealers in art and curios, in particular Abbot della Lena, 173 and as we shall see, these were not his on! y partners. Out of this great acquisitive drive sprang a mighty collection, comprising more than 100 statues, twelve torsos, 182 busts, thirty heads, more than thirty urns, sixty-four bas-reliefs and 125 inscriptions. In addition, there were fifteen chests containing minor objects, including several thousand medals, cameos and rings, lamps, fibulae, vases and ivory, bronze and alabaster staruettes. 174 Alongside these were objects associated with Christian worship

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such as candlesticks, crosses, censers, reliquaries, sometimes complete with relics, altar cloths, ciboria, chalices, as well as around 200 musical instruments, armour, keys, iron gauntlets, horse visors, ancient pistols, halberds, swords, rifles, lances, hunting horns and so on. Nor should we forget to mention the paintings - including 104 portraits of famous men - the engravings, vases of porcelain and various different types of ceramic, and natural objects.m The collection established by Tomasso degli Obizzi only reflects encyclopaedic ambitions on the surface, and does not bear the slightest resemblance to a Kunst- und WunderkammerY 6 In actual fact, it was basically the collection of a historian interested in the relics of the past, not unlike that of Teodoro Correr, of whom more later. Including it in a survey of different attitudes to art has nonetheless not been an entirely pointless exercise, even if we do return ro it when we come tO discuss hisrory, as it illustrates the meeting of the 'primitives' and ancient sculpture, brought about by a new esteem for medieval objects (easily discerned among those listed above) which in no way diminished the interest in antiquities. Thus it is that the medals belonging to Tomasso degli Obizzi dated not only from ancient times but also from every subsequent period, including the late Empire, Byzantium, Venice and the Venetian Republic, and continuing right up to modern times. 177 It will become apparent later on that at the end of the eighteenth century a series of this kind was by no means uncommon. The presence of a fairly large number of works by Tuscan and north Italian 'primitives', some of which dated back to the fourteenth century, among the Catajo paintings was uncommon, however. 178 It is not known whether they were purchased by Tomasso degli Obizzi himself or whether he inherited them. Annoying though this gap in our knowledge may be, it is of no great consequence. Far more important is the fact that they were put on display, as we know from the catalogue written by Filippo Aurelio Visconti, who visited Carajo in 1799 or a short rime afterwardsY 9 Elsewhere, in the castle's church, where the altar was adorned by a Madonna 'alia Greca', were to be found '23 quadri di pittura Greca incassati nel muro'.tso Whether these were recent icons or far older pictures painted on gold is only rarely specified in the inventories. We can therefore conclude that Tomasso degli Obizzi readily tolerated this type of painting, as he would have been at complete liberty to rid himself of them had he wished. Moreover, we know that he was interested in illuminated manuscripts and the work of the 'primitives' as late as 1802, when Sasso, seemingly in reply to a question, explained to him: 'These old paintings by Vivarino are of more value to art historians than to dealers. Even so, they please me since my mind i~ not constantly taken up by business but often turns to pleasure and to the love of art.' 181 In 1787 Tomasso degli Obizzi offered to exchange his old paintings for some works belonging to Gavin

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182

Hamilton, while in 1795, he charged Canova to look for ancient marbles for him in Rome, and more especially to buy pieces which had belonged ro Piranesi 183 In short, his interests in rhe 'primitives' and in antiques surfaced at the same time, and he made room for both in his collection, the former serving as reminders of the past history of art, the latter as incarnations of the beauty intended ro inspire both present and future generations.

7.2 OBJECTS FROM THE NATURAL WORLD

Living and dried plants, minerals, fossils, shells, specimens of fauna, machines and scientific instruments: before 1750 the collectors interested in such objects in the Venetian Republic could be counted on the fingers of one hand. After this date, however, their numbers began to grow, reaching over sixty in the last decades of the century, no other group of collectors ever increasing at such a pace. What is more, this is taking into consideration only those who occupied centre stage, for a further cohort remained in the wings because of the modesty, and thus invisibility of their collections, just as the case had been for the owners of small collections of coins and medals a century earlier. This growth in the interest in natural hisrory was marched by rhe definitive end to its monopoly by doctors and pharmacists. By the end of rhe century these accounted for rough! y only a quarter of all collectors of natural objects, new recruits now being drawn mostly from high society or from the ranks of the clergy, some of whom were actually professional naturalists. They devoted most of their time to collecting, preserving, studying and describing natural objects, activities which were henceforth accorded a recognized and respected social role, just as the role of antiquary had been a century before.

Natural history, sociableness and politics Being a naturalist involved spending most of one's rime examining nature, either by carrying our experiments in a laboratory or by travelling to see things in their natural habitat and surroundings. A genuine boran y dilettante collected plants wherever he believed he would find unknown specimens, which is why Jean-Franc;ois Seguier (1703-84) covered the length and breadth of the area around Verona, dogged by exhaustion and appalling weather, braving slippery and vertiginous paths on the edges of precipices, as well as the hostility of shepherds who suspected him of indulging in dangerous magic practices. As the seasons changed, return visits were also made to these spots by Seguier, in order to identify species

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which flowered at different timesl 84 Similarly, two geologists, Giovanni Arduino (1714-95 ) and Alberto Fortis (1741-18 03) scaled steep mountain sides in order to determin e the composit ion of the rock and bring back maps or sketches, as well as specimen s of stones, minerals, fossils and, in their notes, observati ons on the lifestyle of the local inhabitan ts, especially in the case of journeys to distant parts. In short, as Fortis put it, 'naturalis ts ... are today's errant knights.' IS) More often than not, these botanical or geological excursions were not undertake n alone. In 1737 Seguier collected plants in the company of Giacomo Spada (1680-17 49), the priest of Grezzana in the Verona region, and of Giovanni Antonio Cavazzini, a 'speziale' in Verona, while in later years he was assisted by Caspar Bordoni and Giulio Cesare Moreni, yet another Veronese pharmaci st. 186 In 1764 a doctor and owner of a printing press in Verona, by the name of Antonio Turra ~ 1730-96) , organized a plant collecting expeditio n on Monte Baldo, ":Jth Marco Guiseppe Cornaro (1727-79 ), then Bishop of Torcello, and appomted to the see of Vicenza in 1767.18 7 In 1785 Fortis and Giovanni Battista Gazola (1757-18 34) from Verona even went as far as to take a number of ladies with them into the mountain s in search of fossils. 188 For nature had become fashionable, and botany was now a topic of conversat ion in the salons. 1 89 Indeed, the 'vi!legiature', ridiculed by Goldonit9o as periods of futile amuseme nt, also presented opportun ities for collecting natural objects in the nearby countrysi de, 191 discussing geological topicsi92 and writing works on natural history. 19.3 ~ new knowle~ge of nature was thus gained against a background of soCial mtercours e, wh1le the collections, pieces of fresh informati on, discoveries and hypothes es wh~ch resulted from travels far away or excursions into the local countrys1de provided subjects for both oral and written exchanges. Th~ patterns of these exchanges formed the basis of the networks along whKh travelled bor~ texts and objects, and which we shall be discussing a little later. T~ts knowledge was all the more importan t in that a fair proportio n of the soCial elite of the Venetian Republic saw natural history as much more than .a mere distractio n or the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity, even if thts aspect never disappear ed. It had gained an almost political character , seen as a means of improvin g living condition s and fighting prejudices, and would now be required to play both an economic and an educative role.. . .. The best proof of this is the title of the journal launched by Gnselm1 m 1764: Gioma!e d'Ita!ia spettante aile scienze natura!i, e principa!mente al!'Agricoltura, a!l'Indttstria e a! Comercio. This s~ows that while never complete ly dissociated from medicine, the natural sciences were hencefort h bound particular ly tightly to the productio n of goods. Their usefulnes~ to specific individuals and, in particular , to their health, tended to fall mto second place, the emphasis being put instead on their role in the increase of public contentm ent. Accordingly, a special place was now reserved for the

narural sciences on the map of knowledge, which accounts for their gradual restructur ing, where botany was forced to cede its dominan t position to mineralog y, which itself was steadily changing into geology, while zoology, previousl y pursued by only a very few, aroused increasing interest. Here were both new disciplines and new objects, including the cultivatio n of plants, the rearing of animals, peat bogs, thermal springs, the riches of the subsoil. With the waning attraction of the exotic came a new interest in what Ia y at one's very own doorstep 1 94 In the preface introduci ng his natural history of the Euganean Hills to the public, Antonio Carlo Dondi Orologio (1751-18 01) wrote: 'We uavel in foreign lands yet do not know our own. Foreigner s come and collect all kinds of fossils in our hills and yet we refuse to let ourselves be persuaded that a journey amongst our own people, in what we might refer to as our own home, could be useful, interestin g and honourab le.' It is worth pointing out the theme of patriotism here, as well as the triple benefits, economic, intellectual and social, he sees in travelling in one's own country. The author emphasiz es that such advocacy in no way represent s the condemnatio n of travel to distant parts.

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I simply regret that nobody should yet have had the useful idea of assembling exclusively the products of our hills which offer very fine and varied examples of every sort, and of classifying them carefully and methodically in order to form a Gabinetto Nazionale. Several learned naturalists have, at various times, collected certain specific objects, but solei y because they were attracted by the distinctive features of a thing considered for its own sake or else because it matched a theory they adhered to; never in order to form rhe complete collection we need so much 1 9' This void was filled neither by rhe naturali:.,ts who studied the products of the Euganean Hills, nor even by John StraP,se, ro whom nonethele ss 'we owe a great deal, as all that he has succeeded in can be viewed by the public in our Museum of Natural Hisrory !that is, in the former Vallisnier i collection]; and it is the on! y collection Iof '"'bjects J from our mountain s which exists today.' Dondi Orologio therefore gave himself the task of 'forming a Gabinetto Naziona!e with a well-ord.::red collection of specimen s from them [the mountain s] and of devoting a work of natural history to them'. The outline of this book begins wid-; a descriptio n of the state of agricultur e in the Euganean Hills. Only then does the author turn to lithology , dwelling on certain features which could be ma1-: profitable , such as the basalt columns and thermal springs. 196 Here, tlk epistemic and utilitarian viewpoin ts are complete ly indissociable. Here we have an illustratio n of the change in attitude of the collectors of

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natural objects in the latter half of the eighteenth century, most of whom, as we shall see, were interested less by objects from faraway places than by those to be found in the immediate vicinity and who planned their collections accordingly. These therefore acquired a role of some importance, for providing they were exhaustive and methodical, they represented an inventory of the area's resources and made their use a practical proposition. Hence Dondi's call for a 'Gabinetto Nazionale' and his insistence on the need for including in it every single thing to be found in a particular region. Hence also the inclusion in a work on mineralogy of descriptions of the agriculture and of the thermal springs. Hence, lastly, the considerable degree of passion which animated arguments on topics at first glance as unexciting as the presence or absence in a particular area of substances likely to be of economic interest. Ten years after the publication of Dondi's book, and four years after his Saggio de littologia ettganect which contained a method of classifying minerals from the Euganean Hills placed in the 'Gabinetto Nazionale' the author was ro form, 197 a certain Paduan abbot, Basile Terzi, published a short work in which he claimed to have discovered various types of natural resources, in particular marble quarries and coal seams.L 98 A layman's study of geology, this work was immediately criticized in an anonymous work, (written in fact by Fortis), to which Terzi replied citing Buffon and Valmont de Bomare as his authorities 199 It was at this point that Dondi, whose works had not even been mentioned, descended into the arena in order to show that not even a single genuine marble quarry, let alone a coal seam, could possibly be found in the Euganean Hills, and that Terzi knew not the slightest thing about science, borrowed its terms without understanding them and indulged in speculation in matters where only experience could decide2° 0 We will leave out the eight [Jic!] letters in which Terzi rebutted these accusations, along with those of Fortis who, meanwhile, had launched three more scathing attacks on the poor abbot, characterizing him as a paladin of obscurantism 20 LHowever, we should underline the significance in cultural terms of such controversy, in that it proved that with this new interest in natural resources great attention was paid to the interpretation of these signs which were constituted by minerals found in a specific region and brought together in a collection. The debate concerned the legitimacy of coming to conclusions as to the geological structure of a particular region and the resources harboured in its subsoil simply by looking at the landscape and specimens collected from it- Terzi's method- rather than by calling on people with specific knowledge in the interpretation of natural objects and in the language needed to describe them. In other words, Dondi and Fortis defended a profession, that of the naturalist-geolog ist, which was gradually becoming established, and whose members alone were supposed

to possess the knowledge required to make pronouncement s as to what lay beneath the surface of the earth, including any eventual natural resources. True, these subjects concerned everyone, but it was for precisely this reason that they needed to be dealt with competently. Ir is because the natural sciences touched on matters concerning everybody that they formed pan of the general culture, and as such needed to be accessible to the public. The birth of the profession of naturalist therefore went hand in hand with efforts to publicize results obtained by science, along with its terminology and methodology. The propaganda effort undertaken by the men of the Enlightenment, for this is what it amounted to, made use nor only of books and journals, bur also of various forms of extra-curricular teaching, as we can judge from the prospectus of a course on natural history which Don Giovanni Serafino Volta (1754-1842), one of the most dominant figures on the naturalist scene in Verona, offered to the nobility and citizens of the town in 1790.2° 2 Divided into three pans, each corresponding to the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, the forty lessons making up this course were intended ro explain to the audience the methods and instruments used in chemistry. They also aimed ro provide a grounding in mineralogy, botany, and zoology, with a view to expounding the Linnaean sytem, Bergmann's theory of selective attraction and Scheele's discoveries, as well as making people aware of the new chemical terminology used by Moreau, Fourcroy, Berthollet and Lavoisier. In addition to all this, there were all the possible applications of science to be discussed, and Volta accordingly dealt with the methods of beer- and wine-making and with that of remedying the deficiences of the former; with spirits of wine and their uses 'nella chimica farmaceutica, ed economica; with vegetable matter and its 'preparazioni /armaceutiche per !a materia medica, ed economiche pe1· l'arte della Tintura'; with the 'fondamenti de!l'Ornitologia, e della cognizione pratica dei Volatili' and so on 203 Once again, the epistemic and utilitarian viewpoints are indissociable. Volta did not mention collections of natural objects in his course programme, yet as the author of a catalogue of a museum containing minerals, petrified objects, a herbarium with 1500 plants, 200 blocks of different woods, exotic fruit and a very complete series of shells, 204 he was already involved in the work which was to lead in 1796 to the publication of the Ittiolitologia veroneJe, which we will be discussing later on. It is thus apparent that not only did Dondi Orologio combine, in explicit fashion, the study of the natural sciences and the building of collections, but Volta did roo, together with all the other naturalists we will be dealing with in the following pages. It comes as no surprise that the new role accorded to the natural sciences in the Venetian Republic in the second half of the eighteenth century led to the purpose of collections being defined in a

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similar fashion. Their role henceforth was to promote knowledge of nature and contribute to a more efficient use of the republic's natural resources, though it remains to be seen to what extent these ideas were applied and what influence they had on both the actual contents of collections and the criteria employed in their classification.

garden was no longer in existence, but lists were published in 1794 and in 1802 of plants represented in a Vicenza botanical garden owned by Count Antonio Maria Thiene. 214 Small botanical gardens were also to be found in Chioggia in the final decades of the eighteenth century and opening years of the nineteenth, these being cared for by Bartolomeo Bottari ( 1732-89), Giuseppe Fabris (1735-94) and Giuseppe Vianelli ( 1720-1803 ),m all three doctors and at the same time naturalists. The same was true of Vegliano, in the province of Padua, where the parish priest, Girolamo Romano (17651841), was a namral history dilettante, 216 and of Padua itself, where Elisabetta Milesi Colombo cultivated rare exotic plants. 217 Lastly, the Iicea in Verona acquired a botanical garden in 1798, similar gardens also springing up in Brescia in 1808, and in Venice, Treviso, Vicenza and Bergamo in 1810.218 It was, however, the herbaria and the descriptions of flora which best illustrated the spread of interest in plants and the increased knowledge of them, not to mention the new independence of botany from pharmacy and medicine. This does not mean that there were but few doctors and pharmacisrs among the ranks of plant lovers, nor that the herbaria they composed, such as that of the Veronese doctor, Sebastiana Rotari ( 16671742), 219 and an anonymous Erbario Farmacetttico of 1730, 220 departed from the tradition of the medicinal herbarium. The majority of herbaria and descriptions of flora, however, were not so much intended as a guide to the makers of remedies, but rather as inventories of the plants growing in a given region, where their uses, including their therapeutic properties, would perhaps also be given a mention. Thus, a posthumous work by GianGirolamo Zannichelli described the plants growing on the beaches near Venice, 221 Seguier's books dealt with those found around Verona, and more particularly on the Monte Baldo and Lake Garda, 222 Francesco Roncalli (1692-1763), a doctor from Brescia, included an alphabetical list of plants found locally in one of his works 223 and Giuseppe Agosti (171 5-86), a Jesuit, listed those growing in Belluno. 224 Likewise, Bottari and Fabris devoted their herbaria ro plants from Chioggia, 225 while Turra gave over part of his to ones from Vicenza,220 so that although this series of names does not claim to be exhaustive, it does show that the Venetian botanists managed to cover every inch of the territory during the course of the eighteenth century, and demonstrates the size of the inventory of local flora drawn up as they worked.m Far more than simple inventory-taking was involved, however. As time went by, plants were placed in alphabetical order only when brief catalogues were drawn up, 228 more methodical systems of classification taking over otherwise. In this respect, Gian-Giacomo Zannichelli (1695-1759), who justified at some length his preference for the alphabetical order in the preface to his father's book, and with frequent references to Tournefort, still

Plants: a new approach The tradition of private botanical gardens, which began in the sixteenth century, if not at the end of the fifteenth, lasted throughout the whole of the eighteenth century. The most famous garden was most probably the one created by Filippo Farsetti around 1750 in his Santa Maria di Sala villa, which was maintained by his descendants until 1804 20 5 This 'co!lezione de Piame F.sotiche e Indigene' 206 owed its reputation both to its richness and to the fact that botany lovers were allowed access to it. Naming a new species after its founder, Antonio Turra wrote that the Farsetti garden was a 'garden whose perfection surpasses the means of a simple individual, adorned with countless plants, especially exotic ones, some even originating from South and North America, a garden always open to lovers of botany'. 207 ln Venice, around 1760, Giacomo Morosini, a patrician and wellknown collector of minerals and fossils, who was in contact with the best naturalists of the day, owned a botanical garden which he seems to have inherited from Giovanni Francesco Morosini (1658-1739). 208 A third botanical garden survived the whole of the eighteenth century in Venice despite several ups and downs. It belonged to Lorenzo Patarol ( 167 4-1727) who 'explored the Venetian lagoons studying all their plant species, bringing back examples from every corner and planting them in his garden, which he tended with his own hands'. Bequeathed to Count Sebastiano Rizzo, the garden subsequently passed into the hands of his son, Francesco, who entirely renovated it. 'He now acquires very numerous series of plants, almost all from foreign climes, sparing no thought for his purse; since the Tournefort method is no longer appropriate, he has abandoned it in favour of the more modern Linnaean one.' 20 9 During his travels in the Venetian Republic in 1736, Pier Antonio Micheli, a Florentine botanist, visited several small botanical gardens in Verona. 210 Nine years later, Seguier mentioned the garden owed by Maffei who, he said, wished to create another one, devoted to botany, in the courtyard of the Accademia Filarmonica, in close association with the Museo Lapidario. 211 Between 1767 and 1779, in nearby Vicenza, Bishop Marco Giuseppe Cornaro, already owner of a botanical garden in his Merlengo villa, possessed a second one, which Antonio Turra was charged to look after. 212 When Goethe stopped over in Vicenza in 1786,213 this

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belonged to the old school, someth ing to do, perhap s, with his profes sion as pharmacist.229 For his part, Seguier followed the metho d devised by Tourn efort- who was, in fact, well known in the region 23°with Antoin e Jussieu's correc tions,m - but by the last decades of the century , even if herbar ia in the style of Bauhin could still be found, m the Linnae an system was definit ely gainin g in popula rity. This seems due to Turra's efforts, more than anyone else's, for althou gh his herbar ium entitle d Vegetabilia Italiae indigena methodo Linnaeano disposta ... remain ed in manus cript form,2ll his Florae italicae prodromus, written toward s the mid-1760s, althou gh on! y publish ed in 1780,23 4 was widely read and establi shed its author 's reputa tion.m We know of one copy bearin g annota tions by someo ne who collected plants with him near Vicenza and wrote down the places where they grew, their similar ities and differences and changes in their appear ance according ro the rime of year. A second copy of the same work, a gift by the author to Anton Carlo Dondi Orologio, who added 5 30 names of plants ro the 1718 it already contain ed, later becam e the proper ty of the priest of Vegliano, Don Girola mo Roman o. 236 In Turra's book plants are classified according to the 'sexuale Linnaei systema', which was to be found at the end of the centur y not only in publications by natura lists but even in notes kept by diletta ntes, such as the Principii di storia naturale by a Verone se priest, Luigi Zoppi (1765-1811),237 and other similar manuscripts. The replac ement of alphabetical order, which was not really an order at all but merely a form of layout, by a methodical approa ch to plants and, within this, of one system by anothe r, was first and foremo st a change in approa ch. Whene ver one particu lar metho d domin ates plant study, certain organs are given more import ance, in this case, the visible ones, since both Tourne fort and Linnaeus deman ded that the microscope should not be used when identif ying the features which determ ined the positio n of each plant in the system. Tourn efort considered that it was the type of flower which determ ined which species a plant belong ed to, while for Linnae us it was the 'fructification parts', which require d a much closer examin ation of the plant. Both method s therefo re require d the natura list to learn to look at plants in such as way as to fasten upon the pertine nt characteristic s and ignore the rest. They also needed to learn the langua ge necessary to define the positio n of each plant in both a pertin ent and an unamb iguous way 238 The disciplined and selective way botani sts following in the footste ps of Tourn efort and Linnaeus looked at plants, as well as the language, both concise and precise, they employ ed, could equally be applied to animal s, minera ls and fossils. Accordingly, botany provid ed a thorou gh ground ing in the natura l sciences in the eighte enth century , a time when many natural ists who started out with an interes t in plants later turned to other branch es of science.

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Zoological collections were far rarer than botanical garden s and herbar ia because at that time techniq ues only existed for conser ving the hard parts of animals. This was such an import ant proble m for natural ists of the period that in the catalogue of animal s in his Zoologia Adriatica Abbot Giusep pe Olivi ( 1769-9 6) made a distinc tion betwee n the 'objects which natural ly remain in a good state of preser vation , that is, they posess solid integuments' and the 'transi ent and natura lly perisha ble objects 2 9 '. l As a consequence, zoological collections tended to concen trate on the insects of a particu lar region, as in the case of Turra's 240 or, going on to the ninete enth century, the one owned by one Bened etto da Campo in Verona , who 'forme d a rich and choice collection of almost all the insects of our provin ce and classified and arrang ed them so well that one could wish tO see them remain intact for many years'. 241 Some collectors, such as Abbot Dorign y in Verona 242 or, at the close of the centur y,]. Lambioi in Belluno 43 ,2 restric ted themse lves to butterf lies, and G. S. Volta's publica tion of a book devoted to these creatur es, with advice as to their captur e and preserv ation, 244 gives reason to think that these cases were by no means uncom mon. Two higher forms of animal life were also repres ented in collect ions: the one formed by Fra Angelo Ziliani in the Santo Conve nt in Padua, and which we have already mentio ned, contain ed quite a large numbe r of birds. Embal med by Fra Angelo, these birds mostly came from the local countryside. 245 The second higher life form consisted of marine specim ens, which could be studied and described immed iately after capture , althou gh collections only included the solid parts, such as the skeleto ns and shells. 246 Follow ing the pionee ring work by Vitalia no Donari , 247 several natural ists, all from Chioggia, carried out researc h into the vegeta ble and animal specim ens to be found in the lagoon and Adriatic. Hence the claim by Abbot Stefan o Chiere ghin (17 45-182 0) to have gather ed 1772 in the lagoon and the Gulf of Venice, and the nine volumes of drawin gs of aquatic animal s he left, along with three volumes of text 248 Hence also the career of Abbot Giusep pe Olivi who, after his appren ticeshi p with Chioggian natural ists of the old school, and in particu lar with Abbot Fabris, with whom he formed a marine natura l history collection, collaborated with Fortis, Nicolo de Rio and Dondi Orologio, publish ing four years before his prema ture death the Zoologia Adriatica, the fruit of seven years of toil. This work is a very good illustra tion of the twin epistem ic and utilitar ian approa ches which dominated natura l sciences at the time, for while it is an examp le of the most advanced researc h of the day, taking the Linnae an system as its basis in order to rectify its mistak es, fill in any gaps and accom modate the fauna of the Adriatic, it also includes passag es on the regional econom 24 y 9 Before turning our attenti on to inanim ate natura l objects , let us spare a few lines for the collections of scientific instrum ents, which both multip lied and diversified, reflect ing the growin g import ance of observ ation

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and experimentation, The largest of these collections was to be found at the University of Padua, where Giovanni Poleni ( 1683-1761 ), professor of experimental philosophy since 1739, as well as being an antiquary and architect, set up a display of machines for physics experiments/ 50 a display mentioned in the guides to the town, along with the astronomical observatory with its telescopes, spyglasses and clocks, 251 Private collections of scientific instruments could be found in Brescia, where one had been in the possession of the Martinengo de Barco family since the seventeenth century, 252 in Verona, where G, R Gazola owned a physics museum, which he later gave to the !iceo, 253 and lastly in Venice, where Abbot Antonio Traversi had amassed in his college a considerable number of machines to study mechanics, mathematics, aerometry, hydrostatics, magnetism and 'mechanical and artificial' electricity, as well as astronomical instruments 254

The marine bodies on the mountains Plants, animals and machines were however present only in a minority of collections of natural objects in the Venetian Republic of the eighteenth century, This particular brand of collector was actually chiefly interested in minerals and fossils, and those without any at all were extremely few and far between. It was not hard to come by them, as the region, especially the hills and mountains near Verona and Vicenza, was known for the variety of its rock types and for the presence of several deposits of fossils, the most famous of which was and still is that of Bolca, where fossilized fish in an often amazing state of preservation can be found 255 Here, more than elsewhere, nature itself presented the curious with the task, if one can put it that way, of accounting for the nature and origin of these foreign bodies, these being directly linked to the origin of the mountains. Nothing illustrates the change in attitude towards nature in the eighteenth-century Venetian Republic better than the history of the solutions put forward to this problem, part of the history of mineral and fossil collections, The first generation of Venetian collectors interested in a scientific way in minerals and fossils was made up of Scipione Maffei and Sebastiano Rotari from Verona, Antonio Vallisnieri from Padua and Lorenzo Patarol from Venice, all of whom we have already come across, as well as Giambattista della Valle, a pharmacist from Vicenza. In 1708 Maffei sent Vallisnieri a case of 'stones' containing fish from Bolca, and this consignment was not the only one, 256 Eight years later, and again for Vallisnieri, Rotari drew up a description of the site_ 257 The fossilized fish collections belonging ro these two Veronese certainly date from this period. 258 For his part Patarol, again a collector of minerals and fossils and a friend of Vallisnieri, wrote in a letter of 177.4 that his friend della Valle had gone to

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Bolca three times and that at that spot he 'had amassed a considerable number of fine objects, including around 150 fish, so beautiful, large and well preserved that they would never be outshone by a gallery belonging to a noble prince,' 25 9 This awakening of the interest in fossils followed a lengthy dispute between Europe's leading scholars concerning the 'theory of the Earth' and in particular the Flood, 260 and resulted in its being fought on less speculative ground, Vallisnieri's book, published in 1721, participated in this dispute and did indeed deal with the Flood, but its central problem concerned the presence of marine bodies in the mmmtains.26t This opened up a new debate on this subject in the Venetian Republic, and one which was to flourish there right up to the end of the century, Each of these five collections had a very different fate. In 1755, for instance, the della Valle one became part of the University of Padua's Natural History Museum 2(>2 itself built up around the Vallisnieri collection, The Patarol collection was purchased by Tomasso degli Obizzi, 261 while the one formed by Maffei ended up among Seguier's possessions after the death of its owner, bound for Nfmes_ Over the years it had been substantially added to, 264 and was just one of a whole group of Veronese collections, This group included one Rotari had built up and which had, at least until 1820, remained in the same family, 26 \ another formed by Andrea Gazola (16951776), one owned by Giulio Cesare Moreni since 1755 and the collection which had belonged to Giacomo Spada. 266 Spada, who contributed in 1737 to the debate on marine life forms, drawing on Vallisnieri's book in an attempt to quash the notion of fossils being merely 'nature's little games' and prove their antediluvian origin,Z 67 published a catalogue of his collection in 1739, At that time, this contained several hundred ammonites, nautili, belemnites, shells and complete fish fossils, as well as minerals, 268 It underwent rapid growth, as one can judge from the second edition of the catalogue, published five years later, 26 9 and after Spada's demise became part of the Maffei collection. Every gallery and museum, whether it belongs to a prince or to a personage renowned for his nobility, writings, feats of arms or wealth, is now required to contain a large showcase filled with fish, crustaceans and other petrified marine specimens found in the mountains. As the intrinsic value of most of them does not justify so honourable a position, it would seem that their owners consider them to be of a rare merit, encouraging those in search of the key to nature's secrets to determine the origins of these deposits of the sea, by what fortune they were carried from the sea to the mountains and what enchantments, if we may put it rhus, changed them into stone, making eternal the memory of the exile which forced them to die in lands so strange to them 27 D

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This is how Abbot Anton-Lazar Moro begins his book which, in 1740, rekindled the debate in the Venetian Republic over the presence of marine bodies on the mountains. It is not possible ro go into his arguments here, but suffice it to say that Moro used the emergence of islands from the sea bed to devise a Plutonist theory of the formation of mountains under the pressure of subterranean heat 271 The same process was used to explain rhe present location of fossilized marine bodies.

as well as naturally polished woods and other products of nature'. 276 In 1765, Rossetti mentioned only two collections in Padua containing minerals and fossils, those belonging to Francesco Leonessa, the town's most eminent doctor, and to the Lateran canons. Neither was alluded to in the 1776 edition. 277 Collections of this type became slightly more common tOwards the end of the century; we could cite those formed by Dondi Orologio and his adversary Abbot Terzi, both of which were essentially mineralogical, as well as the one possessed by Tomasso degli Obizzi in Catajo, the collection at Valdagno owned by Girolamo Festari (1738-1801), a doctor who was in charge of the springs at Recoaro and the friend of Fortis, Strange and Arduino, 278 and finally the collection in Padua itself which was created by Nicolo de Rio, described in the following fashion by Moschini in 1817:

Marine plants and animals, whose remains or relics are today to be found both on and below the surface of certain mountains, and which were born, found nourishment and reached maturity before these mountains were lifted up above the surface of the sea, were carried to the sites where they now lie in a petrified state when these mountains, leaving the bosom of the earth covered by water, were raised up to the heights at which we know them now272 Maffei warmly welcomed Moro's opinions. In the only book of his of an entirely scientific nature, he devoted one chapter to a resume of them, and used them to tackle the enigma of the formation of the Bolca deposits. According to Maffei, its origins lay in a catastrophe caused by subterranean heat, which suddenly left the fish on dry land.m Not content to quote global theories aimed at solving the general problem of the presence of marine bodies in the mountains, Maffei therefore put forward a solution to the specific question of the Bolca fossilized fish. These deposits were visited in September 1740 by Giovanni Arduino, who made a drawing in perspective of them, indicating the fossil-bearing strata, and this was published by Spada in the second edition of his catalogue.U 1 One of the most learned Italian scholars of his times, whose life, divided as it was between geological research and his activities as an engineer, is a perfect illustration of the twin orientations, epistemic and utilitarian, of eighteenth-century science, Arduino formed a link between the generation of the naturalist-collectors of the 1730s to 1750s and that which arrived in force around 1765. 275 In Venice itself, the members of this second generation included Arduino, John Strange, Giacomo Morosini, Father Guido Vio (d. 1782), a Romualdian monk from Murano, regarded by Fortis as one of his mentors, Father Placido Zurla from the same order, Girolamo Ascanio Molin ( 1735-1813 ), a Venetian patrician who also collected works of art and Abbot Antonio Traversi, whom we have already mentioned, and who was the owner of a collection 'of saline and alkaline substances, of sulphates, limestones and various different types of carbonate salts, marbles, spars and quartzes, barites, simple and composite siliceous stones, volcanic products, petrified plants and animals, bituminous and inflammable substances, metallic substances, marine products, semiprecious stones

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It is set out according to the method propounded by the famous Haiiy (Comparative table, etc.) ... We reserve our greatest admiration for a fine rounded beryl, the so-called 'sunsrone' and a large maxillary tooth from a masrodon. It also contains several types of marble, specimens of alabaster, quartz crystals, lead molybdate, sulphurated mercury, fine copper, carbonate crystals, recently discovered in France, etc. [as well as) several small ropographical collections intended to show the lithology of the Euganean Hills.279 Mineral and fossil collectors were undoubtedly active in most of the minor centres of the Venetian Republic in the closing decades of the century, though we know of but two: Antonio Gaidon ( 1738-1829), an architect from Bassano, 280 and a certain Lieutenant-Colonel Milanovitch from Rovigo. 2 8 1 In this same town, Canon Girolamo Silvestri (1728-68) took an interest in geology, which he discussed with Arduino, as well as in the practical problems of the economy of the Polesine, in livestock rearing, peat bogs, maize growing and so on, but we do not know whether his collections also contained natural objects. 282 It also seems reasonable to suppose that a certain Jacopo Odoardi had built up a fossil collection, as he would otherwise not have been able to write an essay on the marine bodies to be found in the Feltre district,283 and that similar collections existed in Treviso and Castelfranco, where the Scotti and Ricati families, together with their entourage, cultivated the natural sciences. 284

The naturalistic culture in Vicenza and Verona As far as collecting and studying minerals and fossils was concerned, none of the republic's towns, nor even Venice, was as important as Vicenza and

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Verona, where most of the collectors of such objects were to be found, along with the richest collections. In and around Vicenza, these numbered at least twelve, and were formed by monks or priests, such as Paolo Calvi ( 171681 ), a historian and antiquary better known as Angiolgabriello di Santa Maria, Gaetano Pedoni (1744-1809) and Giuliano Serpe (1731-1801), by doctors, such as Antonio Mastini (1717-1805), Antonio Turra and Francesco Orazio Scortegagna ( 1767-1851 ), by society figures like Fortis, nominally an abbot, Count Arnaldo I Tornieri ( 1739-1829) who purchased Calvi's collection after his death, Luigi Castellini ( 1770-1824) from Castelgomberto, Girolamo Barettoni (1730-1807) and a certain Maraschini (1774-1825), whose position in society is unknown to us285 In order to gain a clearer picture of these Vicenza collections, let us take the one belonging to Don Giuliano Serpe as an example, since Serpe was the only one to have taken the trouble to print a list of the categories he used to classify the objects he amassed. These categories were themselves grouped inro six different classes. To the first belonged the earths, coals, lava and other volcanic products, minerals, hard stones, concretions, crystals, amounting to a total of sixteen categories. The five remaining classes catered for fossils: 'calcined elephant bones', fossilized teeth, fish from Bolca and other sites, insects trapped in schist, vertebrae of different species, along with univalve, bivalve and multivalve shells belonging to seventeen, twelve and five different families respectively. The origins of the objects are consistently noted, these being the Vicenza and Verona regions, except in one or two cases, such as the geodes 'di carattere esotico', minerals and fossils from Germany and the 'elephant bones' from Cherso, Ossero and Dalmatia, very probably gifts from Fortis, Serpe's neighbour in Arzignano. This list of categories is followed by an appendix, of which one passage merits inclusion here.

relating to the natural sciences. 286 In this light, like Spada's catalogues forty years before, Serpe's modest text bears witness to the vigour of the veritable culture which grew up around the collection and study of natural specimens. In the Venetian Republic the true capital of this culture was Verona. This was due firstly to the presence of a relatively large public interested in the natural sciences - Volta's lectures are proof of this - of whom collectors represented only a small proportion. Secondly, at least fifteen of these collectors had a passion for fossils and sometimes also for other natural objects roo. Thirdly, this group included a large number of members of the local nobility: Count Alessandro Burri, who added Moreni's herbarium to his minerals and fossils; the Marquis Ottavio de Canossa who for his part purchased the fossil collection for which Moreni was also responsible; the Marquis Giacomo Dionisi, a canon as well as philologist and antiquary, and someone we will be discussing later; Count G. B. Gazola; Giovanni Girolamo Orti Manara, from very ancient noble stock; Count Girolamo Peverelli; the Rotari counts; and Count Ignazio Ronconi. Three abbots, G. S. Volta, Giuseppe Tommaselli (1733-1818), a chemist, meteorologist, agronomist and antiquary and Giuseppe Venturi (1766-1841), mainly an antiquary but whose collection included, among other things, 'divers objects of natural history and astronomy', also belonged to this circle of natural science lovers, as well as two laymen: Gaspare Bordoni, 'per.rona molto letterata e buon poeta' and Vincenzo Bozza, a pharmacist and chemist. 287 The composition of this group seeking to promote natural sciences in Verona illustrates the considerable prestige they enjoyed and also helped them to gain an important place not only in the rown's intellectual life but also in its social and fashionable one. With the death of Maffei and the departure of Seguier, only tile Bordonis, Morenis and the descendants of Sebastiana Rotari seem to have kept alive in Verona the tradition of collecting the Bolca minerals and fossils. Fresh interest came in the 1770s. It was at the beginning of this decade that Ottavio di Canossa bought Moreni's collection, so that one enjoying such repute should not become lost to Verona as Maffei's had been. 288 It was also at this time that Alessandro Burri began to form a collection, organizing excavations at Bolca in 1776, having obtained permission from the Maffei family, which owned the deposits. 289 Other collections of fossilized fish also appear to date from this period. In particular, 1770 appears to be the approximate date at which Vincenzo Bozza began to build his own. Containing roughly 700 specimens of fossilized fish, the fruits of twenty years of searches, Bozza's collection also included every type of petrified object to be found in the Verona region, as well as a series of European and exotic shells, with specimens of 150 different species and a series of minerals. 290 For around fifteen years, this was Verona's most important collection,

I also possess a series of natural sea shells which corresponds to the above-mentioned petrified sea creatures; note should be taken of several precious specimens of foreign sea urchins, as well as of the large, rare pearl snail from the Jamaica seas, which Rumpius calls Cochlea olea. There is also a large, rare winged murex from the seas off the coast of the African Congo, as well as various other types of polyps which can be compared with the collection's petrified specimens. At first glance just another inventory, this passage actually refers to the much debated problem, of which more later, of the presence in tropical waters of living species which could be found in fossilized form in the mountains around Vicenza and Verona. Serpe was obviously abreast of all the brest scientific questions, as the list of authors he drew on to classify objects in his collection shows he knew of relatively recent publications

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and as such was described by several foreign visitors. Its catalogue was drawn up by Fortis, whose article, published in 1786, rekindled the discussion over Bolca, calling attention to the resemblance of three fossilized fish to living species found in Tahitian waters and even going so far as to assert - in the final passage, whose authorship he later denied that most of the fish found at Bolca were similar to certain current inhabitants of the tropical seas. This assertion was, moreover, not without global implications, as in the same article, Fortis drew attention to the important role the Bolca deposits could play in the solving of major geological puzzles. 'We have never', he wrote, 'examined this curious site in any detail; we never imagined that the fish found there beneath the ground could serve as a focal point for all those endeavouring to make sense of the chaos of the ancient revolutions which shook the whole of our globe.'29t Around 1784 it was the turn of one of Fortis' friends, Giovanni Battista Gazola, to begin a collection. Four years later it already contained approximate! y 400 fossilized fish, and with the purchases of the collections belonging toJacopo Dionisii and Bozza in 1789 and 1791 respectively, this figure reached 1200 in 1792. Five years later, the French rook Verona and as a reprisal confiscated and sent back to France the most precious pieces of the town's collections. Gazola was forced to cede his own in its entirety to the natural history museum in Paris, whence it never returned. He formed another one in a relatively short space of time, however, mainly through the purchase of the Ronconi collection and as a result of excavations carried out at Bolca. In his Ittiolitologia veronese Volta gives a description of this reconstituted collection accompanied by several engravings,292 and this allows us to ricture a major private natural history museum at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The objects were set out in five rooms, plus a library and a display of machines. The first one 'displays on the walls, complete with Greek-style embellishments, all the marbles from the region of Verona - around 600 rectangular pieces - without counting the larger stone slabs arranged opposite the mirrors whose frames were formed by the aforesaid embellishments.' Along the walls of the same room there were also glass-fronted cabinets, each divided into two distinct levels

On display in the second, smaller room, behind glass was 'a substantial collection of European insects set out according to nature's own system and described with care, attractively mingled with a collection of birds, some embalmed and under belljars, others painted on the walls'. Next came the two rooms housing the 'display of fossilized fish'. Placed in glass cases, perfectly visible, these were divided up into classes based on the Linnaean system, and given the description and engravings it would appear that each case corresponded with a particular class and was divided into two compartments, so that each type could be placed opposite its counterpart. At the very bottom of the cases in the first of the rooms of the fossilized fish display, were 'bulky pieces of fossilized ivory from the Romagnano excavations'; while in the second each case containing fish was flanked by two smaller ones, 'where the series of natural marine plants and zoophytes is matched with the series of impressions of the same plants dug up in the Vertena quarry, as well as zoophytoliths from the neighbouring mountains'. The fifth room contained a collection of minerals 'divided into four classes derived from our theory of mineralogy and placed in a corresponding number of cases'. Each specimen was given a systematic description attached to its support.

the upper one allowing the eye to take in at one glance a copious series of natural shells, nor only from the sea bur also from land and from rivers, and from every corner of the world, set our in accordance with the linnaean method, their labels giving their technical names and origins. The lower one contains rhe genera and different species of fossilized shells placed directly below their natural counterparts, which is why this precious collection is not only visually surprising but also very useful and instructive.

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Every gemstone, from the diamond to the aquamarine, is present; among the semiprecious stones one can see the large pieces of opal from Hungary, adularia from the St Gotthard, carnelian from rhe orient, as well as jasper from Egypt, hydroliths from Piedmont and even the rarest of agates from Germany. In the class of metals, are robe found the n~ttive gold of Transylvania, granulated platinum from the Pinto, native silver and copper from Hungary, yellow lead from Carinthia and red from Siberia, opalescent iron from the Elbe and the Dauphine province, tungsric pewter from England, coloured native arsenic from Bohemia, bismuth and peacock ore from Saxony, crystallized cobalt from Germany, France's native antimony and coloured antimony from Hungary, mineralized and calciferous zinc from Carinthia, native and oxydized manganese from divers places and nickel in irs metallic form from the TyroJ.2 9 l

From the extraordinary to the normal An exception in terms of size and the costly way the objects were displayed, the Gazola Museum was in other ways perfectly comparable with the other collections of natural productions around at that time. Like them, it reflected the desire to make nature's great diversity and wealth visible by putting all the objects which had resulted from it on display, on condition that their conservation was feasible. There was also a wish to render nature intelligible, to show how its simple and universal principles operated.

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Providing one had sufficient means, the first of these wishes resulted in the accumulation of objects, as if the collector lived in hope of possessing specimens of every living species one day, while the second gave rise to the practice of classifying objects and to procedm:es aimed at bridling the apparent diversity and revealing an order, if not that of nature itself, at least that of the human spirit - in other words, a methodical order. It was an order of this kind that the layout of the exhibition was intended to reflect, as well as it could, through the arrangement of the objects, whose proximity or distance was by no means to be arbitrary, and also through their descriptions, which were meant to define the place of each one in the general order of things. Nature, as portrayed by a well-ordered collection, was no longer exuberant and incoherent. Instead, it was disciplined and orderly. A little more than a century before the formation of the Gazola Museum, Moscardo published the description of his own one. 294 A simple comparison of one with the other enables one to gauge the changes in attitude towards nature and more particular! y towards the criteria governing the choice of objects deemed worthy of inclusion in collections, as far as these can be identified from the contents and organization of these collections. First of all, it is clear that there was a shift in emphasis from the extraordinary to the normal, and away from the object which owed its importance to its unique properties, to the one which reflected the normal mechanisms of nature. In scholar! y culture, the quest for miracles therefore became the search for laws. There next came a shift in attention away from the exceptional to the commonplace. Although people continued to be struck by the eccentricity of certain objects, they now focused their attention on easily found objects, whose essential characteristic was that they were neither rare nor strange, but rather commonplace and banal. This was the case of stones, insects, birds, plants and sea plants and animals, of which specimens abounded in their thousands. last of all, there was the move in emphasis away from the exotic to the native, from the distant to the close at hand. This does not mean that the distant and the exotic had lost their attraction, but rather that all that was to be found nearby was even more interesting. Every natural history collection discussed here was made up in the main of objects originally from the same region, if nor from the immediate environs. Accordingly, the inhabitants of Chioggia specialized in marine fauna and flora and the Paduans in objects from the Euganean Hills, while the nearby mountains kept the collections of Verona and Vicenza well stocked. Thus, the activities of both botanists and natural history lovers also involved the selection of different areas to be covered and the assessment of their resources, in a twofold approach which was both epistemic and utilitarian. In the context of this triple transfer of attention from the extraordinary to the regular, from the exceptional to the commonplace and from the exotic to the native, fossils posed a problem. The very terminology

employed by Volta and Serpe is proof of this, as they only qualified as 'natural' those species actually living, not because they regarded fossils as the result of some artifice, of course, but because they saw in them the effects of a distant, exceptional and extraordinary event. It cannot be denied that the way the shells, crabs and molluscs from the Adriatic, as well as the plants, were laid out in the Gazola Museum forced visitOrs tO compare current! y living creatures with fossilized species and see that they were identical, and Serpe did much the same thing, though on much more modest a scale. However, specifically on the subject of the Adriatic, this identicalness was questioned by Olivi.

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If one compares these fossils [from the Vicenza hills and Bassano and Friuli localities] with the specimens in the present catalogue, one finds: (1) that the majority of the former did not live in the Adriatic; (2) that the majority of the latter are not found in the mountains; (3) and that, accordingly, either the Adriatic never covered the foothills of the Alps, or else it covered them at a time when they were already flooded by another sea, or again when the Adriatic was in flood, it was not in the same state as it is today, in terms of both climate and size and, accordingly in terms too of the nature of its inhabitantsZ9> Collections and texts alike, therefore, raised the question of the continuity between the present and past of both the Earth and its living creatures or that of the revolutions at the surface of the globe, which in fact amounted to the same thing. This very same question applied, in an even more acute form, to the fossilized fish from Bolca. The article published in 1786, bearing the signature of Fortis, attested to the presence among them of species still extant in tropical seas. Two years later, Bozza found that such species were indeed to be found at Bolca alongside European species and, in order to explain such a strange coexistence, claimed that the great Flood had mixed together the waters of all the oceans and the fish of every species. 296 Bozza's article drew a reply from Volta, who in fact repeated the same arguments, intending to base them strictly on simple facts and reasonings. The facts were provided by the collections in Verona, where Volta claimed to have identified 100 species which, after comparison with actual living species described in works on ichthyology, turned out to correspond to fish found in the seas of Europe, Asia, Africa and of the two Americas, as well as m European and exotic freshwaters. His reasoning ran as follows. If, therefore, fish from every part of the globe, both sea- and freshwater are buried on Mount Bolca, as recorded in the adjoining catalogue, is it not natural to imagine that, as we read in the Holy Scriptures, a general

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flooding of our planet formed, from the waters of the seas and rivers, a single, swirling ocean, a destroyer of all life, in which the force of the currents and the inner movement of the floods mixed together earth and every creature which lived, then as now, in the seas and waters which do not communicate with one another and in different climates?

in his eyes, the 'rapidita volcanica' provided a far better explanation of the formation of the Bolca deposit than the 'lentezza marina'. 303 It was simply too bad for those mineralogists who persisted in drawing attention tO the sedimentary nature of the Bolca rocks.l 04 Practically octogenarian by this time, Giovanni Arduino did not intervene in the triangular argument between Testa, Fortis and the Veronese naturalists. In actual fact, he had voiced his opinions concerning Bolca some considerable time earlier.

Volta found this argument all the more convincing in that the Plutonist hypothesis was able to explain neither the presence of so great a variety of fish in a single place nor the fact that they were deposited in limestone. 297 Volta was therefore 'continuist' as far as living creatures were concerned. For him, the only difference between past and present was in the geographical distribution of species which had coexisted in times past, and he saw behind this a global cause, namely the Flood. Every one of these points was contested, firstly by Abbot Domenico Testa, whose interest in fossilized fish had been stimulated by a visit to the Gazola Museum, and secondly by Fortis. Both cast doubts on the validity of identifying fossil fish with living species, and especially with exotic species. Both agreed that even if fish from warm climates could be found at Bolca, then rather than having recourse ro a cataclysm on a global scale, their presence should be explained by local causes, such as a change in temperature of the waters at Bolca. For Testa, this could well have been rhe result of volcanic activity, and he attributed the formation of the fishes' graveyard to the eruption of a volcano. Fortis, on the other hand, who had carried out studies in the field, unlike Testa, emphasized the sedimentary nature of the rock at Bolca, which invalidated the volcano hypothesis. 298

The Bolca fish and the changes in the Earth's surface In the face of Bozza, Volta and indeed all the 'Naturalisti veroneJi', whose common stance was expressed by these two authors,2 9 9 Testa and Fortis attempted to explain the Bolca deposits not by a distant, exceptional and extraordinary happening, such as the Flood, but by the normal and regular activity of nature, which was still taking place. Their disagreement over the role of volcanoes in the formation of these deposits in actual fact concerned the length of time it lasted. From the very outset, Testa asked himself in his letters just when such a happening could have taken place, to which Fortis replied that it probably took place 4000 years ago.l 00 Later on, in his third letter which included an attack on Volta, Testa conjectured 'that the burial of the Bolca fish could have taken place sometime between 2207 and 1500 BC, a period of slightly more than seven centuries.' 10 l However, as Cuvier's example makes clear,l 02 a brief time-scale in geology requires the invocation of catastrophic changes. This is why Testa turned to the volcano theory, for,

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Among these [the hills around Verona], Mount Bolca is extreme! y well known because of the fossilized marine fish and exotic plants to be found there in the fossil strata of a fine, sandy, limestone rock, and entirely surrounded by substances of volcanic origin. It is obviously a fragment of seabed which has been thrust up during the violent upward movement of these substances caused by an underwater volcanic force, and it has been left at a steep angle, as we can tell from its many stratifications which are far from horizontapos It is, however, clear that these opinions were those of a geologist who was not going to give a verdict as to either the identity of the fossil fish or the presence in their midst of species now living in warm seas, the very subjects which were at the heart of the debate. Even so, Arduino did not lack ideas on the order in which living creatures had succeeded one another. In 1760 he wrote to Vallisnieri the Younger: For the more enlightened observers, however, I also have in my collection no less marvellous things, namely examples of the different degrees of perfection of these very same species of petrified aquatic animals. The cruder and less perfect ones come from the lowest strata of the mountains, which I refer to as secondary strata in my letters ... but become increasingly perfect as we move up to the higher strata, reflecting the order in which they were formed, so that in the final strata, the ones, that is, that form the tertiary hills and mountains, we see the most perfect species, which resemble all those we find in the seas today.3° 6 Had it been applied to the problems surrounding Bolca, this approach could have given the debate a different emphasis, as implicit in this passage was the idea that certain species disappeared over time and were replaced by new ones bearing an increasing resemblance to those of today. This idea did not rely on a single and, therefore, extraordinary flood, but rather on a series of cataclysms of this type, each one explaining a particular change in the fauna and flora, and each seemingly part of the normal mechanisms of nature.

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Arduino developed all these ideas in a document, unfortunately left unfinished and without a date, entitled Risposta allegorico-rornanzesca di Voniangi Riduano, Osservatore Longobardo, al Celebre 01·ittologo Viaggiatore Sigr Giovanni Giacomo Ferber del Collegia Metallico di Svezia sopra Ia genesi della presente faccia della Terra. The title is a significant one, because of its insistence on the literary character of the exercise, the ironical self-presentation of the author as 'LongobaTdo' (allusion to a certain vogue for the Middle Ages which reigned at the time?) and above all because of the explanation of the genetic nature of the approach he adopted. The opening lines of the work are equally significant.

or stony strata which compose the mountains and all other parts of the Earth. 107

... Illustrious Ferber, quit those Greek and Roman medals, monuments to transient episodes in history, and leave their study to the indolent antiquary who spends his entire life in his rooms, slouched over wormeaten books. Observe and enrich your already abundant collection with those which Vulcan and Neptune, those two eternal and powerful rulers, have liberally dispersed throughout the Earth's stratified entrails. It is these which will allow observers to learn of their occupations and invasions, as well as all that they have been capable of accomplishing, with the succour of old Father Time, sometimes separately, sometimes locked in furious combat. It is throughout this interminable conflict that certain species disappeared and others came into existence. Species which had already disappeared were replaced by new ones, whose development and survival benefited from favourable physical conditions of which their precursors had been deprived. Their remains, buried and borne along amid the strata, are the monuments to these successive changes in the species. The sight of so many of them among the early and marbled strata of each part of the Earth, and the absence of any equivalent of them in the seas today, confirms the belief of the naturalists that they are utterly extinct. This very same conflict also produced minerals, both volcanic and sedimentary, which in their turn constitute signs or medals left by the great events of the past. He who wishes to learn the true version of the great history of our planet, as well as the many periods of tremendous catastrophes and changes it has undergone, has no choice but to study these signs and medals attentively. And also the diversity, number, development, substances, correspondences and all the other characteristics of the ferruginous, sandy

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As well as being additional proofs of the importance of collections, especially collections of minerals and fossils, to the pursuit of the natural sciences in the eighteenth century, the above-quoted texts also highlight something the Bolca controversy only intimated. This is the inclusion of the time factor into the thinking of geologists, or rather the advent of a new temporalness in their thinking and very perception which, as Arduino wrote, 'distinguishes at a single glance these later works of Neptune from those I have situated in the first period .... ' A fresh approach to geological events, whereby they were placed in chronological order, was required if scholars were to tackle the problems of continuity and discuss the revolutions on the surface of the globe, local and global causes and the role of the waters and volcanoes. However, when the question of time was raised, it was inevitable that the question of absolute dating would be also, and at that time, it could only be given a completely fanciful reply. Unlike Fortis and Testa, who displayed a certain naivety, Arduino was fully aware of this, and divided the history of nature into four periods 'whose length we cannot know, given the absence of dates in the Book of Nature'. 308 Fortunately, the question of time could be restricted to that of relative chronology, and this was now solvable, since a tutored eye could now tell from a certain succession of strata or corresponding series of minerals or fossils which events had preceded others. Thanks to this new approach, a well-organized collection became a visible history of the Earth, just as a similar collection of paintings now became a visible history of painting.

7.3 HISTORICAL MONUMENTS

It was around 1720 that collections of historical monuments in the Venetian Republic began to diverge from the model to which they had conformed until that time. The main features of this model, which had appeared as early as the sixteenth century, were an almost exclusive interest in antiquity, the preference shown by antiquaries for inscriptions and medals, rather than for figured monuments and, among these monuments, for small objects rather than for large statuary. An additional feature of this model was the attraction exerted by curious, rare and enigmatic things, although this did gradually wane in the last decades of the seventeenth century, and the de facto linking of numismatics with universal history, while epigraphy formed the link between the latter and local history, and as a result was invested with political meaning.3°9 Obviously, a number of collections based on this model survived throughout the whole of the century, while more or

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less everywhere the collection of inscriptions and the compilation of anthologies of inscriptions, often left in manuscript form,lto continued. We will cite as examples of the latter just two works which were published: an anthology by G. D. Bertoli devoted to antiquities from Aquileia,l 11 and the list of inscriptions from Vicenza and its environs compiled by J T. Faccioli. 312 On the other hand, it was only in the fourth, if not the fifth decade that catalogues were published for a number of important medal collections, whose origins were far more ancient, such as those which belonged to Tiepolo,lll Onorio Arrigonil 14 and the Pisanis, the latter having previously been the property of the Corrers.l 15 Continuity therefore did prevail, but a continuity accompanied by changes in emphasis, which eventually led to ruptures.

Accademia's courtyard and gave them greater protection.l 19 Many long years of work were therefore to go by before he finally saw his ideas bear fruit. Moreover, he actually modified these ideas to a considerable degree during his lifetime. To start with, beginning with the period when he was busy preparing the publication of his Verona illustrata, with requests that Tiepolo draw the antiquities of the Bevilacqua collection, Maffei manifested a growing interest in figured monuments, both bas-reliefs 320 and cameos,m and he henceforth expected his museum not only to contribute to the study of history, but also to encourage contemporary artists to imitate their ancient precursors once more.m In addition to this, it was only in the 1730s that he settled on the definitive architectural design of his museum and found in the shape of Alessandro Pompei (1705-72) an architect willing and able to realize it. 123 In its second version, first open to visitors in 1745, Verona's lapidary museum was more than just a collection of inscriptions supposed to have some sort of connection with town history, since it contained many which had none whatsoever, having been brought straight from foreign pans for display purposes. This desire to transcend the local and reach for the universal is even more apparent in the MuseJtm veronense, the book where Maffei listed not only the monuments he had amassed in Verona but also those he had studied elsewhere, especially in Turin and Vienna.l 24 The term veronense in the title of this work therefore has quite a different meaning to the similar determiners in the Memorie bre.rciane, the Marmora berica or the Momtmenta patavina. Moreover, and not entirely unconnected with Maffei's universalist ambitions, was the fact that the museum also contained a number of figured monuments. In terms of both its contents and architecture, it therefore provided a contrast to the baroque tradition and heralded a return to classicism.m Known even to those who never visited Verona, thanks to Maffei's book, his museum was a considerable influence in the Venetian Republic, numerous rowns in Italy, as well as abroad.l26 This was, however, only one of a number of those projects which were embarked on around 1720, bur only came to maturity twenty or twenty-five years later. They included the book by the two Anton Maria Zanettis, entitled Delle antiche statue greche et romane, published in 1740 and 1743, as well as Dactyliotheca Zanettiana by Anton Maria Zanetti the Elder, which appeared in 1751. 327 Preparations for this work did, it is true, only begin in 1743, once the previously mentioned work had been completed. However, Zanetti's collection of engraved stones itself dated from the early 1720s.l 2 S Not unlike Maffei's initiatives and propositions in this respect, Zanetti's editorial activities had a manifestly anti-baroque message, and greatly contributed to the return to classicism. We have already touched on this topic with regard to the work devoted to ancient statues, but it is nonetheless worthwhile emphasizing here the role of collections of

From the baroque tradition to classicism Foremost among the innovators, whose initiatives, the seeds of which were sown around 1720 but only came to fruition a quarter of a century later, had a fairly rapid effect on every aspect of antiquarian studies and opened up paths down which others were to venture, was undoubtedly the medievalist and museologist, Scipione Maffei. Medievalist, in that he helped not only to change opinions on the past history of art, but also - and the first deed rendered the second feasible - to arouse interest in the Middle Ages in general as a period occupying a place of cardinal importance in the history of the Venetian Republic Published in 1732, Verona illustrata underlined the continuity of history, especially in irs linguistic and artistic dimensions, 316 by showing that the roots of the present were firmly anchored in the Middle Ages. Maffei's brand of history, reliant on epigraphic documents and on the study of monuments, therefore contrasted with that of the seventeenth-century numismatists, who viewed the Middle Ages as a black hole but, as we shall see further on, completely revised this opinion in the 1740s. Wearing his museologist's hat, Maffei initially intended his lapidary museum to be a simple variation on the theme of the collection of inscriptions of local interest. From 1716 onwards, however, the project began to take on added breadth; Maffei began to talk in 1719 of a 'Museo universale e publico' ,m the programme of this type of institution being the one he set out in his famous Notizia di nuovo museo d'iscrizioni a Ver01za. 318 The initial building work was completed in 1724, with the erection in the courtyard of Verona's Accademia Filarmonica of a wall in which were embedded approximately 230 inscriptions. Maffei was not entirely satisfied with the results which, instead of realizing his ambitious programme, merely increased the number of stones amassed in the

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engraved stones which were not only symptomatic of this change in taste but were also instrumental in it, on condition that they included pieces which were interesting not because of their mysterious inscriptions but because of the quality of their drawings. It is precisely this shift in attention away from 'erudite stones' and towards small, figured monuments, which is illustrated by the Zanetti collection, all the more so when it is compared with that of Antonio Capello, the contents o~ which were published in 1702, and which uniquely compnsed amulets, talismans and abraxas. ' 29 This was a collection which am~ssed enigmas in order to provide scholarly exegetes with an opportunity to put their great wisdom to the test. The Zanetti collection however, amassed works of art with a view ro providing pleasure, via thei: publication, to those unable to see the gemstones for themselves. It was also i~te~~ed to offer artists models to imitate, and in this respect it is sig~lflCant that another promoter of early Venetian neo-classicism, Joseph Smtth, also formed a collection of engraved stones. 13° The parallel between Zan~tti and ~affei is also striking, as each helped in his own particular way to direct the Interest shown in ancient objects towards works of art and thereby modify the very principles governing antiquarian culture. Maffei and Zanetti were both part of the movement which led to the inversion of the practice of scholars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who used images or objects to increase their understanding of texts, so tl~at by the second half of the eighteenrh century, it was the texts which contributed to the understanding of objecrs and images. An antiquarian culture with strong philological overtones was therefore transformed into an antiquarian culture with archaeological and artistic overtones, before the return in strength of philology at the beginning of the nineteenth century. While it is true that this change in course was chiefly steered by Caylus in Paris and by Winckelmann in Rome, the fact remains that Maffei and Zanetti were foremost among those who initiated it.

number of others, of antiquarian curiosity placed in the service of contemporary art. Not only was his visiting card designed by Canova but he also commissioned Gianantonio Selva (1751-1819), a friend of the sculptor and a representative of neo-classical architecture, to decorate one of the rooms in his apartment in the Procuratie Nove 'with the !Canova] plaster casts he owned, especially the bas-reliefs where he depicts the early events of the Trojan War and the most memorable of Socrates' deeds; and in order to make a greater contribution to his country's heritage he provided the young students of the art of drawing with examples to imitate, leaving each the opportunity of benefiting from them as best they could.' 1 l 2 With the exception of the Canova plaster casts, objects of the very same type formed the contents of the collection created by the Senator Bernardo Nani (1712-61) and considerably added to by his brother Jacopo ( 1725-97). With its several hundred antiquities - most notably 180 inscriptions collected between 1700 and 1761, mostly in Dalmatia and the Peloponnese -alongside which were 'inscriptions and the monuments of the late Empire and the Christian era· and the orientalia, it constituted without doubt the largest Venetian collection of its type in the second half of the eighteenth century.lll It was also the best known, thanks to around thirty publications devoted to the monuments it contained: to a particular marble or votive basrelief, to a particular papyrus, ivory or to coins, or even to a whole class of objecrs linked by their common origin. 114 This abundant literature devoted to the Nani collection shows that unlike the one belonging to Antonio Capello, this one reflected preoccupations which were archaeological and learned rather than artistic. Even so, it did include a number of works of art and, among these, large Greek and Roman statues, one of which was 'a Greek statue of a young girl in Paros marble', which 'had lain forgotten for many a long year until the Illustrious Cavalier Giacopo Nani saw it and placed it in his famous museum, submitting it to the judgement of Canova, who lavishly praised this new acquisition'.m This is an illustration both of the collector in his role of saviour of works of art and of the weight attached to Canova's powers of judgement, he being the ultimate authority in questions of ancient sculpture. ln the Venetian Republic of the eighteenth century, there is no lack of proof of the interest in the Orient, particularly in China, in the shape of carnival costumes, theatre pia ys, operas and furniture, examples of which could be seen at the Ca' Rezzonico, as well as sundry lacquered objects or their less costly imitations.ll 6 Towards the middle of the century villas began to be decorated with chinoiseries, while a few decades later, the inclusion of a 'Chinese room' became practically de rigueur. 337 Giandomenico Tiepolo's frescoes, painted in 1757 in the fore.rteria of the Villa Valmarana in Vicenza, constitute the best-known example of these images of China which, placed near scenes of rustic life and carnival times, seemed

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Oriental curiosities, finds and excavations During the period under scrutiny here, many Venetian towns boasted at least one archaeological collection where, alongside the inscriptions and medals, statues or fragments of statues, busts, heads, statuettes, funeral u.rns, amulets, glass vases, fragments of glass, amphorae, lamps, fibulae, rm~s, keys, arms and divers utensils were placed. Such were the objects which were to be found in substantial quantities in the Capello collection in Venice, 331 pan of which was bought from the Duke of Mantua, and which was preserved throughout the entire century. Its last owner, Antonio Capello ( 1736-after 1806), was an example, like Girolamo Zulian and a

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to belong to a world of play and disguise, intended to amuse: rather than to 38 instruct. ' It is perhaps this link between the idea of a pleasant and frivolous pastime and these ima~es and objects of oriental origin which explains why apparently nobody decided to form an entire collection of them, and why so the~11 ~vere_ tO be found in collections. There were, in fact, just two few Arab mscnptions m the Maffei museum in Verona,m while in the same city towards 1730 a certain Domenico Vallarsi, ·among the divers scholar! y curios possessed a large Chinese printed Mappamundi'. 140 It is also possible that the La_teran. Canons in Padua owned oriental objects amongst their 'fdo!J cmd Dtvmtttes of several ancient and modern nations'.34t Two collections, however, did reflect an interest in exotic objects on the pan of their founders, and these were one belonging ro Antonio Vallisnieri, subsequently the property of the University of Padua, and another owned ~y the Nanis, and which we only mention here because of this specific Interest. The Vallisnieri collection conrained curios and artefacts of Persian Iml~an, Chinese and American origin, in particular objects made by th~ Indians of South America and a Sogdian calendar dating from the fifteenth 3 2 century. " The Nani collection, for its part, contained eight statues supposedly from India, Tibet and China, as well as a Christian codex written on palm leaves. 343 It also comprised around a hundred 'Kufic' coins struck by t~1ecaliphs and sundry Arab, Turk and Tartar dynasties as well a; by the Chnstwn kings, such as Roger II of Sicily and Alfonso of Castile not co mention twenty odd 'vetri cttfici', glasses bearing inscriptions, mos;ly with the names of the Fatimid caliphs. 144 Last of all, this collection contained orienral manuscripts, another forty of which were placed in the Pinelli library. 14 \ After this digression into exotic objects, let us look now at the collections of antiquities scattered around the mainland towns, from Treviso, home of the Scott is and Crespanis, with their Roman stones and coins, w. to Brescia where Quirini lived, 147 and then on to Bergamo, where moves were made t~ found a museum of ancient monuments around I 743. 148 Similar collections existed in Adria, in the homes of Ottavio (1697 -1749) and Francesco Girolamo Bacchi (1748-1810) and of Luigi Andrea Grotto (1708-73).349 One was also to be found in Rovigo, in rhe possession of Canon Girolamo Silvestri, whose contacts with Arduino have already been mentioned and who_, a.long _with his b~other Rinaldo, a lover of painting, belonged to the famrly s tlurd generation of archaeologists, historians and collectors. A series of drawings which were made ar his request between 1750 and 1775 enable us to visualize his collection, and though part of ir came from his gran~father, Camillo (1694-1719), and from his father, Carlo (1694-1754), he himself made considerable additions to it. no Even though it does not come up to today's standards, the description he gives of a find made near Rovigo shows that his was definitely the eye of an archaeologist interested

not only by objects suitable for collection but also by the structures and remains revealed during excavations and which enabled the original state of the site to be reconstructed.35t We have already discussed Tomasso degli Obizzi's collection, so let us move on to rwo Paduan ones which, towards 1765, belonged to Francesco Leonessa, the town's foremost doctor and to the Lateran canons. 352 In Vicenza Count Arnaldi Arnalda I Tornieri (1739-1829) had amassed a substantial collection of antiquities which also included 6000 medals and a large number of inscriptions.m In VeronaJacopo Muselli (1697-1768) built up a genuine museum of antiquities of every sort, just as Count Jacopo Verita (1744-1827) was to do some rime later, as well as Giovanni Fontana and Abbot Giuseppe Venturi, though on a far more modest scale." 4 Several objects which once belonged tO these three men are today in the possession of the Museo Archeologico di Teatro Romano in Verona. Those owned by Muselli, some of which are also now in this museum, also figure among the prints of a book he published in 1756; 'we can be sure,' he asserts, 'that we will not find anything among these which has been drawn a capriccio or else whose true form has been changed in any way whatsoever.' 355 This is a concern for accuracy which yet again reveals an archaeologist interested first and foremost by the way the object itself was rendered. J acopo Muselli had inherited part of his collection from his uncle, Gian Francesco (1677-1757), archpriest of Verona cathedral, and in whose home had finished up several antiquities which had previously belonged ro Francesco Bianchini ( 1662-1729), a native of Verona who had spent his life in Rome, where his archaeological discoveries had won him celebrity. 356 Another parr of Jacopo Muselli's collection was, however, made up of objects found during excavations he had carried out on the site of an ancient necropolis near Verona. Muselli has left behind him an account of these excavations in which he gives the location of the site in relation to the town, describes the different types of tombs and the way the objects found in them are laid our, suggests a dating system based on coins unearthed there, and even goes as far as to indicate that the people buried in the cemetery were paupers as no gold coins and only one silver one were found there.l 57 In the second half of the century other Venetian antiquaries embarked on excavations, either in order to find out more about a monument or else to search for objects. In Verona, for instance, following a discovery made during a dig, Giovanni Fontana organized excavations in the Roman theatre between 1757 and 1760. 358 The Roman theatre in Vicenza, the layout of which had already been traced in 1720 by Count Octavio Zago (1654-1737), was excavated in 1773 by Ottavio Bertotti Scamozzi (1719-90),359 while in 1778-89, Tornieri organized digs in various different parts of the town in search of antiquiries.l 60 All this was part of a cultural movement which embraced rhe whole of Italy. The high points of this movement included the

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discoveries of Herculaneum (1711) and Pompeii (1748), but it was also given momentum by the excavations in Rome and by the fascination for the Etruscans which was aroused by the publication of Dempster's De Etruria rega!is in 1723. 361 This movement was also represented in the Venetian Republic by one book, published by Maffei in 1728, on amphitheatres, especially the one in Verona, 362 and another written by Ottavio Bocchi on the Roman theatre in Adria, 363 as well as by the posthumous publication in Verona of the work Francesco Bianchini had devoted to the excavations he arranged on the Palatine, 364 by Giovanni Poleni's supplement to the collections of antiquities compiled by Graevius and Gronovius and by commentaries on Vitruvius also by this author. 365 The antiquaries of the first half of the century were prolific authors, those of the latter half seem to have published fewer weighty tomes. They did, of course, continue excavating and collecting, conscientiously protecting all the objects brought to light, as if they had taken to heart this dictum of Tornieri's: 'Each ancient piece, however small, deserves to be preserved.'3 66 However, antiquity was not the only period to attract their attention, as they had now discovered the Middle Ages, and this discovery took effect in the field of numismatics, which accordingly acquired fresh meanings.

cal order, as well as according to their office, nationality and so on. There is every indication that universal history amounted to a succession of great men, completed by a succession of major happenings as far as he was concerned.m In this sense, he, along with all the other collectors who set out their collections in the same way, at least on paper, exemplified the way in which the notion of history as a discontinuous phenomenon, punctuated by exceptional, rare and extraordinary events and individuals persisted over a very long period. No purpose is served in dwelling on the contrast between those who exclusively used series of medals to illustrate history and those who, while not ignoring them, considered that only a highly varied series of monuments could enable one to comprehend the essential nature of history, namely its ceaseless variations. Towards 1700, Apostolo Zeno (1668-1750) began to amass medals portraying poets, in order to illustrate a work of literary history he was working on, but this highly specific collection was abandoned quite rapidly in favour of a large one of ancient coins.J7 4 later on, Count Gian Maria Mazzuchelli ( 1707-65 ), from Brescia, formed a collection of medals devoted to men celebrated in scientific and literary circles. He subsequently published it in two folio volumes, in which the frontispiece clearly echoes the vision of society and hisrory underpinning this project. At the foot of the page on the right, an old man with wings bearing a scythe, a clepsydra in his right hand, has been knocked to the ground. A winged figure with an aegis on his breast and a helmet topped with a bird, has placed his foot on him, and is about to strike him with his lance. Further up the page, a winged female is blowing a trumpet, while a pyramid and a temple uniting the sphere and the triangle rise up from the bottom of the page. In short, Minerva overcomes Saturn, wisdom triumphing over time and death and bestowing the glory which is the key to long, if not eternal life. In the left half of the engraving instruments are figured which enable one to conquer glory, with a pair of compasses, a set square, a telescope and a model of the universe at the bottom, and at the top, pyramids whose sides are decorated with medals, the putti actually in the middle of attaching these to the one on the left. Glory belongs to men of letters and learning. The book itself consists of a series of plates each featuring several medals; the accompanying notes give a description of the figures they celebrate. Among the several hundreds of famous men and women, from Moses to authors still alive at the time of publication, are representatives of every tendency, denomination and party, all united thus in glory. Present are both the heretics and the reformers: Calvin, Fare!, Knox, Luther and Zwingli, but present too are the inquisitors and the champions of the battle against Protestantism. Nobody therefore is absent from the roll-call, providing he or she has been honoured through a medal. The problem is that in this exercise in glorification an entire period of history is made ro seem utterly

History and numismatics Out of the fifty or so collectors of antiquities we know of in the Venetian Republic of the eighteenth century, more than thirty were either partially or exclusively interested in coins and medals. Sometimes they owned collections of ancient coins which were not noticeably different from those a century or more earlier, even if they had actually only been formed a short time ago; this, however, was not always the case as a fairly large number had been handed down from one generation to the next. Here, as elsewhere, however, a certain continuity was accompanied by shifts in interests, if not complete breaks with tradition. One of the changes with the least impact included an increase in the number of collectors attracted in particular to medals bearing effigies of illustrious figures, such as the holders of high office and the heroes of memorable exploits, as well as writers, artists and scholars. These collectors included Nicolo Balbi, whose collection subsequently fell into the hands of the Pisanis,l67 Tomasso Giuseppe Farsetti (1720-92), who bequeathed his to the Biblioteca Marciana,lGs Benedetto Valmarana,3 69 Pinelli,3 70 degli Obizzi,m Tornierim and Jacopo Muse IIi. Although Muselli apparently never really grouped his medals into one or several series organized according to this principle, he did class the illustrious men represented in his collection in alphabetical and chronologi-

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bereft of famous people. Wrote Mazzuchelli, 'We make a huge leap from the first to the thirteenth century. The first medal we display after this very long period was struck in honour of Giovanni da Scio, a member of rhe Dominican Order who lived around 1230.' Other representatives of the late Middle Ages include Jacques de Vitry, St Thomas Aquinas, Ottaviano Ubaldini, Dante, Cecco d'Ascoli, Andrea Dandolo, Wyclif, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Salutati. There nevertheless remains the gulf of some twelve centuries which, like the list of prominent figures from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, reveals the necessarily discontinuous nature of numismatic history in a particularly flagrant fashion. This can be seen with regard not only ro ancient times but to the recent period too. Mazzuchelli cites as modern celebrities, Bacon, Bayle, Clarke, Descartes, Galileo, Linnaeus, Locke, Maffei, Malebranche, Malpighi, Maupertuis, Montesquieu, Muratori, Newton, Pascal and Voltaire. Remarkable by their absence, however, are Leibnitz, his absence being particularly inexplicable, and Rousseau and Spinoza, their absence being more comprehensible. The book ends with several indexes compiled according to nationality, rank, sciences and the arts, one even dealing with 'sectarians'Y 5 Although he remained within the framework of the traditional numismatic representation of history, Mazzuchelli concentrated his medalcollecting activities on the heroes of the republic of letters and accordingly only applied the principles which governed the approach of his predecessors and some of his contemporaries to universal history to 'literary history'. Although the idea of viewing history through its heroes and major events had become somewhat anachronistic in this domain by the middle of the eighteenth century, it remained entirely valid when applied to science, art and literature. The ideas expressed in the collection and in the book were therefore not obsolete, even if his interests in medals devoted to men of letters and scholarship did prevent him from taking into account the most important change which took place in numismatics in his time, a change which was eventually ro alter the very framework of its representation of history. This was the advent of the Middle Ages into the field of interest of the collectors of medals and coins and into that of antiquaries interested in their country's past. The first signs of this change appeared as early as the last decades of the seventeenth century. The papers of Giovanni de Lazara the Elder (1621-90) included a work entirely devoted to the Paduan and Venetian seals he had amassed, and to Paduan coins of the Middle Ages. Engravings had been made of several pieces from this collection, and de Lazara hoped to have others engraved too, as we can see from the lists of the Sigilli spettanti a Padova da far intagliare and Sigilli da far intagliareY 6 It is therefore reasonable to suppose that he envisaged the publication of his seals and coins, though even if such a project was devised, it was certainly never

carried out. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, medieval Venetian coins and seals were to be found in several other collections in Padua, Venice and perhaps elsewhere too. In 1662, for instance, Giovanni de Lazara purchased a medieval seal from Sertorio Orsato, which can be seen today in the museum in Padua, 377 yet never published a single word on this subject, even though he did write a work on ancient coins. Accordingly, for a long time, there was a discrepancy between the practice of certain collectors and the image they gave to the public of their collections, since they spoke only about ancient objects and kept quiet about all those that dated from the Middle Ages. In 1728 a Venetian senator, Domenico di Vincenzo Pasqualigo (d. ?1746) finished compiling an anthology of learned essays on the coins in his collection, 178 a collection which - and herein lies its originality - was composed of Venetian coins, from the most ancient to the most recent, as well as lead bullae and tesserae, also Venetian, medals from various different countries, Italian coins and a number of antiques. 379 The immediately striking feature of this list is the fact that none of the coins was ancient, and that the focal points of the collection were Venice and Ita! y. The Pasqualigo collection, formed in the 1720s, if not earlier, was, in fact, one of the first Venetian numismatic collections to have such emphasis, just as the essays its founder wrote were among the first Venetian publications to be devoted to the coins of the Middle Ages, even though they only appeared in print between 1737 and 1743. These discussed three of the oldest Venetian currencies, as well as the coins issued under Doge Domenico Michie! (twelfth century), as well as Visigoth and Lombard coins 380 - themes which would soon be taken up by a whole new body of literature.

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Numismatics and the discovery of the Middle Ages The 1730s saw a rapid growth in the number of signs indicating the numismatists' shift in attention towards the Middle Ages. At the beginning of this decade, Apostolo Zeno began tO put together a series of Venetian grossi rnatapani and build up a collection of oselle, buying 500 medieval seals in 173 3 for fifty Roman crowns, and selling them four years later. 381 In 1738 Muratori embarked on the publication of the Antiquitates italicae Medii Aevi, the second volume of which contained essays on coins 382 and found attentive readers in the Venetian Republic. Six years later, Giovanni Brunacci (1711-72), a Paduan abbot, published a history of the minting of coins in his town during the Middle Ages 383 based on the collection he had formed, but also drawing on the collections of de Lazara and of the Papafavas, who also seem to have been interested for a long time in medieval Paduan coins. For his part, Brunacci was in contact with Onorio

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Arrigoni and Aposrolo Zeno,l 84 as well as with Marco Foscarini, a historian of Venetian literature and future doge, to whom his book was dedicated.JSs The Brunacci collection did not solely comprise coins.

ers. 395 Of all the major Venetian collectors interested in numismatics, only Pietro Persico (1745-1802) seems to have confined his interest to ancient coins.l9 6 A closer look at the collection formed by Matteo Pinelli, of which there exists a reliable catalogue, will provide us with a more accurate picture of a typical Venetian numismatic collection. It consisted of a series of Venetian coins from the period stretching from the eleventh to the eighteenth century, in all, some 1669 pieces, including 221 gold coins and 1161 silver ones, the rest being copper. In addition, there were forty-five silver coins and seven copper ones struck in towns later subjugated by Venice and by the Aquileian patriarchs. 'An additional and quite remarkable ornament to this collection is a complete series of portraits of doges and their wives, numbering 168 . . . bearing their names and dates. They have been executed with great artistry and with the finest of taste by Sig. Francesco Maggiotto, a Venetian painter.' Seventy-one lead bullae, dating from 1192 to the eighteenth century, and which were normally attached to letters sent by the doges, matched the set of coins, along with a 'Series of medals of illustrious Venetian figures and other medals of the Republic of Venice', comprising 356 pieces in all. 'Enhancing this series of medals are ten portraits by Francesco Maggiotto, already mentioned, which are not unlike those of the doges described earlier, and which represent the five Venetian popes, as well as the five patriarchs of Venice who were cardinals.' This was the real heart of Pinelli's numismatic collection, for although his 'series of medals of illustrious men and others struck to commemorate special occasions' contained far more pieces than the coin series, it seems only to have had a secondary role, the genuinely important items being those which were connected with Venice.397 We can quite easily skip over several collections of the second half of the eighteenth century in the mainland towns which contained in varying proportions specimens of medieval numismatics; suffice it to mention the series of seals, 'liturgical instruments and objects' and Byzantine and Venetian coins in the possession of Tomasso degli Obizzi, who amassed considerable quantities of them. 398 However, we must not ignore the case of Verona where, as in Venice and Padua, the interest in the Middle Ages was expressed not only in the collections of objects from this period but also in the burgeoning of research, which depended at least in part on these collections. In 1756, for instance, Jacopo Muselli wrote a work, left in manuscript form despite being obviously intended for publication, which contained a description of the medieval and modern sections of his numismatic collection. This included a list of all the coins it comprised, from the medieval to the contemporary ones - the most recent English coins dated from 1733- drawn up in alphabetical order according to the names of their places of origin. This part of the book was completed by two indexes -

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Abbot Giovanni Brunacci, a scholar and learned historian and antiquary, has in his possession an extensive collection of medals from the Middle Ages, from the Byzantine Empire, as well as from divers foreign and Italian princes, and several seals belonging to our bishops and other important objects. He has assembled all these things in order to illustrate the secular and ecclesiastical history of this town and diocese, long awaited by scholars. I could also mention other monuments and countless parchments, both originals and copies taken from archive material which are to be found under his roof, but they are not my concern. Lovers of painting will, however, have the pleasure of seeing several examples of very old paintings which appear to date from the thirteenth century or thereabouts; despite their recent date, we already find them strange and executed in that clumsy manner which some claim was usual at that time. He also possesses a small work by our Andrea Mantegna .... \86 This description given by Rossetti in the 1765 edition of his guide is a good illustration of the link between the awakening in interest in medieval numismatics and in the Middle Ages in general on the one hand and, on the other, a certain new esteem for the paintings of the 'primitives'. The de Lazaras, who collected medieval coins throughout the eighteenth century,387 belonged, like Brunacci, to the same world as Facciolati and Lodoli. Five years after Brunacci's book, Giangiuseppe Liruti (1689-1780), from Villafredda in Friuli, the author of several works on local history,lss published an essay on the currency which was in use in the Duchy of Friuli between the decline of the Roman Empire and the fifteenth century. It contained a historical commentary on his collection of medieval coins, where we learn in passing that a similar collection had been formed by one 'Signor Agricola, Gentiluomo udinese'. 389 This work was followed by others on the very first Venetian coins. Their author, Girolamo Zanetti, concentrated his studies on the pieces in the collection belonging to Antonio de Savorgnan,l 90 though he did cite at least once the one owned by Giovanni Soranza. 391 The latter half of the century saw an increase in the number of collections in Venice entirely or partly comprising coins of local denominations. A series held to be one of the most complete was to be found in the home of the Pisanis, 392 two further ones of equal renown being the work of Lauro de Giovanni Dandolo (1746-1805)393 and Girolamo Ascanio Molin.' 94 We should also mention the Tiepolo collection, to which Venetian coins were added during the final decades of the century, as well as the ones owned by Gasparo Moro, the Gradenigo family and the Mocenigo broth-

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provinces, towns and localities whence they originated, and names of princes figuring on them - and was followed by the list of the lead bullae used by the popes, by Charlemagne and by various doges from Venice, along with their seals, the stampmarks of sixty-five of these seals being reproduced alongside this list. l9 9 A member of a later generation, Gian Giacomo Dionisi (1724-1809), a canon, antiquary and coin collector, who was incomparably more important to the culture of his rime than Muselli had been, published a number of works, the ones most worthy of note being his histories of miming in Verona, and prepared an edition of La Divina Commedia. 400 Around him revolved figures of lesser calibre, such as antiquaries, local history specialists and connoisseurs of Dante, whose work enjoyed a new wave of interest at the end of the century.40J In the context of seventeenth-century antiquarian culture coins, which we~e connected with universal history, were contrasted with inscriptions, whJCh were responsible for the integration of universal hisrory into local history: both were held to be by far the best sources for students of antiquity. The changes which began in the 1720s, however, not only caused both to cede this role to figured monuments but also took coins as the link between local and universal hisrory, altering the definition of each in the process. This is because numismatics could not assume its new role unless the Middle Ages were taken into account, and this meant that history, as represented through coins, was no longer interrupted by a void of several centuries but was characterized instead by a new continuity. Nor did this continuity exactly match that illustrated by the inscriptions, as it was now based on the length of the regimes in whose name the coins were struck, and on the techniques required for their production: numismatic history was essentially an institutional history. Moreover, by minting a coin a town showed that it was now a place history should take note of, and that it had attained a certain rank, which explains the imponance now given to the question of whether a particular town possessed a mint and in what radius its coins circulated. This importance was reflected in the essays contained in the Raccoita delle rnonete e zecche d'Italia 402 and in many large and small volumes, such as one by Francesco Girolamo Bocchi who, with regard to a silver coin unearthed in Adria in the sixteenth century, attempted, 'with the aid of clear and irrefragable documents, to make known the fact that Adria could rival several other famous towns in Italy even after Constantine and in the Middle Ages (though not in every period, and despite inrerruptions)'.403 Numismatic history became a vehicle for local patriotism. Even though medieval coins were accorded a new status as historical sources, which went hand in hand with their metamorphosis into collection pieces, this by no means implied a willingness to consider them on the same footing as ancient coins: 'The crudeness and barbarism of ours', wrote Liruti, while commenting on a piece from his collection, 'are ample proof to

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anyone who has handled many things of this type that it was struck during the long-distant centuries of barbarism of the most obscure and uncouth nature ever to have oppressed our Italy and which, brought by the Goths and other peoples, reach its height during the time of the Lombards ... .' 404 In other words, Liruti refused to attribute any artistic worth whatsoever to this coin, thereby apparently dissociating this worth entirely from documentary worth. This dissociation did not only occur when coins from 'barbaric' periods were involved, but rather was a constant feature of medieval numismatics. 'Although it comes from a miserable period, although it is of a base metal and of crude and pitiful execution, as was normal for those times, the medal of Michael and Basil, Emperors of Constantinople ... seems to me to warrant particular study .. .',405 wrote Zanetti on the subject of a Byzantine coin, while Moschini said of Pasqualigo that he left 'quite a rare collection of coins, even though they were only Venetian ones'. 40 6 The essential difference between antiquity and the Middle Ages, and between these and the period which began with the Renaissance, is precise! y this absence of artistic worth peculiar to medieval objects, except for a few rare examples so highly charged with patriotism, that this even coloured the way in which they were judged. Medieval objects were instructive bur could not arouse any admiration; they were to be studied but not emulated, and fell not within the ambit of artists but within that of historians.

The twin poles of antiquarian culture Having completed this analysis, it would appear that Venetian antiquarian culture was influenced by two different, if not conflicting tendencies. The first of these was centred on an antiquity seen from an increasingly ethical and aesthetic perspective, which gave figured monuments not only a documentary but also an artistic and a moral value, seeing them as the most reliable sources for students of ancient history and the best examples to follow. The second tendency looked towards the Middle Ages from an increasingly hisrorical perspective. In other words, it no longer condemned the medieval period out of hand as a rebarbative one. The advocates of the first tendency placed medieval objects, unless they were relics of the country's glorious past, on the level of distractions, erecting Gothic pavilions alongside their Chinese display rooms. The advocates of the second continued to hold ancient works of art as models and standards of good taste, so that relations between the two groups were not symmetrical, given that those who were interested in the Middle Ages also recognized the aesthetic superiority of ancient art, officially consecrated moreover by the public institutions - in particular by the academies and museums -

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while the collection of medieval objects was left to private individuals. Lastly,. the first tendency continually sought out the universal, only accordmg exemplary status to that which sprang directly from nature itself. The medievalists, on the other hand, attributed a certain value to the particular, to local specificities resulting from long traditions. The first was cosmopolitan, the second patriotic. Even though they are contrasted in a schematic and systematic fashion here, these two different movements, which underwent many changes between the 1720s and the 1830s, and which took several different forms are none the less real and can even be personified. In the cultural world of Venice and Venetia in the second half of the eighteenth century, the first tendency was represented by Angelo Querini ( 1721-96) and the second by Teodoro Currer (1_750-.1830). Sharing same social background and having both.' :1p t? a certam pomt, followed the cursus honorum of every Venetian ~atnuan, It nevertheless seems at first sight impossible to compare the two tn any way, because of the three decades separating their births. This interval is in fact less important than might first appear, since no real break occurred in the history of the Venetian Republic between the times when Querini and Correr reached adulthood, and both abandoned public activities at almost .the sam~ date, in 1775 and 1780 respectively. In 1777 Querini, a~companred by Grrolamo Festari, travelled to Switzerland, where he paid VISits to a famous geologist, Horace de Saussure, an equally famous botanist by the name of Albert Haller, the founder of physiognomy, Johann Kaspar Lavater and, most imporrant of all, to Voltaire. Correr seems never to have ~eft Venice, and this constitutes the first significant difference. However, it 1s on.l Y. when one compares their historical and artistic preferences that Qu~nn1 .and Correr turn out to represent the two opposing poles of the antrquanan culture of their time.107 'Mr Querini is furiously for the ancients' wrote Giustiniana Wynne, Count~ss ?f Rosenberg (173 7-91) in a description of the villa he possessed at Alticchtero on the banks of the River Brenta,4°8 and both the interior of the house and the surrounding grounds were indeed filled with remains from antiquity. Inside could be seen a collection of antique curios, 'more remarkable because of their choice and rarity than because of their number'· comprising lamps, rings, fibulae, cinerary urns, a 'series of Etruscan vases of eve:y shape and sort' and another made up of 'the strangest and most anctent of Etruscan, Egyptian and Indian vases' as well as several small 409 busts. Outside, in the garden, were statues including, one of Marins, large busts of the Caesars, of Plato, Scylla, Demosthenes and Scipio (whose ashes were supposed to be contained in one of the urns), allegorical bas-reliefs and sarcophagi. All these objects were present not only because of their beauty but also because they bore a message: 'I confess to you, Sir, that this antiquity's language of predilection, seemed to me at the outset obscure and

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tiresome: have become accustomed to it, and each mythological sign I glimpse in an ancient or modern work elevates my mind to the most sublime moral philosophy.'4 10 Engravings depicting an ornithological collection, cards, plans, town views, portraits of philosophers and sages (not to mention the busts of Voltaire, Rousseau and Catherine II), a screen covered in topographical maps of the Republic of Venice and statistics concerning its population and economy: the decor of the Querini residence was not intended solely to please: 'there is no ornament in this house which is not also useful,' 411 which was not subordinated to didactic ends, which was not supposed to teach moral philosophy or knowledge likely to increase the well-being of man. The same principle governed most of the monuments set out in the garden: the altar of Friendship, the statue of Ceres erected to commemorate the Venetian Senate's creation of a magistrate responsible for agriculture; the temple of Apollo where 'the elogy of rural life and scorn for the false gaiety of splendour and of show are gaily expressed' 412 It also governed the botanical garden which was not an 'immense collection of plants in the manner of Tournefort and Linnaeus' but merely a 'precious selection of plants useful in pharmacy and medicine which poor peasants and all who ask can use for no charge. As they are divided into twenty-two classes according ro the best-known properties and marked with both their botanical and common names, the gardener can recognize and use them more easily.' 413 Given the impossibility of studying one by one all the elements of the garden planned by Querini, each of which had in all probability a complex symbolism of masonic inspiration,' 14 let us confine ourselves to finding examples to illustrate the bipolarity behind the way the grounds of Alticchiero were organized. The civic virtues and 'sublime moral philosophy' represented by several ancient monuments were set opposite the Chinese pavilion, 'truly baroque and grotesque but ... nonetheless quite drole and pleasam'.m In a similar fashion, though in a different style, the statue of Saturn devouring a child faced a statue of Rhea clutching a child in her arms: 'nothing as explicit or interesting as this symbol of Time, the destroyer of all things, and Nature which continually reproduces everything through love, bringing together the elements of matter its enemy disperses'.416 This explains why a labyrinth, the image of life, decorated with busts supposed to depict both the four seasons and the four ages of man, leads onto 'Young's wood' the wood of death, with its portals adorned with the portraits of Heraclitus and Democritus. 417 It is in 'Young's wood' that the sarcophagi were situated, including one restored by Canova and a Christian one dating from the fourteenth century. Here roo were a botanical clock and the statue of Time. Near this statue could be seen two monuments which 'in truth are merely Venetian' but

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which 'because of their antiquity and links with famous events ... could be of interest to scholars who like the middle ages, or to those seeking to increase their knowled ge of the history of this Republic.' 418 These comprised a 'base and most badly sculpted column', a monume nt to the 'revoluti on' in ideas about the fourteen th century led by the Tiepolos and Querinis, along with another erected to commem orate an event later acknowledged to be fictitious and for this reason 'worthy of inclusion in the ruins of time, which destroys both truth and falsehood'. 41 9 Querini therefor e did not place monume nts from the Venetia n Middle Ages on the side of nature, the side of antiquity, but on the side of time, but transien t and not lasting time; not in the labyrint h of life but in the wood of death. Everyth ing leads us to believe that Teodoro Correr was diametri cally opposed to Querini in this respect, neither making professi ons of faith nor organizi ng gardens where each object had a message. He simply left behind him a collection of manuscr ipts, books, painting s, engravin gs, objects made from wood, bronze, ivory and various other material s, seals, coins, weapons and narural specime ns which filled three state rooms and around twenty other rooms in his residence, although we do not know the exact layout. 420 This extreme ly rich collection was characte rized by its homoge neity, Correr being intereste d solely by monume nts and docume nts linked in some way with Venetian history. Even the antiquiti es he acquired seem to have been importa nt in his eyes because they had formerly belonged to eminent fellow countrym en, one example being the gemston es from Zanetti's set of engrave d stones.m This preferen ce for the historica l or docume ntary value of objects was translate d into the care lavished over the numism atic section of his collection, particula rly over his set of Venetian coins, 422 and in the number of works by Pietro Longhi, the eighteen th-centu ry painter who was best represen ted in Correr's gallery, the obvious explana tion being that he depicted scenes of Venetia n life.42J Correr's activities were not met by universa l acclaim, many apparen tly accusing him of accumulating any manner of objects without exercising the least discernm ent, and without any real aims or criteria. These detracto rs were still vocal thirty years after his death, 424 and one can understa nd their reaction s, for anyone who had grown up with the notion that, except in a few rare cases, an object only deserved inclusion in a collection if it had some aesthetic value and was pleasing to the eye, must have felt disconcerted by a collector who was motivate d by the desire to rescue relics of the nation's past quite simply because they were relics. So ecumenical an attitude towards objects, one which Tomass o degli Obizzi, Correr's chief rival at the turn of the century, seems to have shared, was acceptable in scholars and in antiquar ies intereste d in monume nts of local history and consequ ently in the relics of the Middle Ages long before its importa nce was realized by a public of any real size. This same public, however ,

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accustomed to the cult of antiquity alone, could only accept this ~ttit~~e as a private aberrati on betrayin g an absence ?f taste. and an. mabtlny to distingu ish good from bad. It is these reacoon s whtch consmu te the best evidence of the original ity of the Correr collectton and of. the way tt overturn ed eighteen th-centu ry antiquar ian culture by. choosmg. a lo~al, tradition al and medieval emphasi s, and thereby heraldm g a turnmg- pomt in the history of society and taste.

Private Collections, Public Museums

8 Private Collections, Public Museums

One only needs to draw up a list of the major museums in Venice, together with the dates when they were founded, to realize that they all began life at different periods in history. The core collection of the treasure-house of St Mark's basilica, for example, was established at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the origins of the Sale d'Armi dei Consiglio di Dieci go back to the fourteenth century, the Archaeological Museum dates back ro the sixteenth century, while the Academy's galleries, founded on 12 February 1807, are therefore the fruits of the eighteenth century, like the Pinacoteca Manfrediniana and Correr Museum. This particular museum was moreover founded slightly later than the galleries, and the nature of its very contents was determined to a large degree by the fall of the republic: in 1866 the Risorgimento Museum was added to it. 1868 saw rhe opening of the Pinacoteca Querini-Stampalia, and 1897 that of the Gallery of Modern Art. The 1920s brought the Oriental Museum ( 1923) and the Franchetti Gallery at the Ca' d'Oro (1927), as well as the Natural Science Museum, which was given autonomy from the Correr Museum in 1924, just like the Museum of Glass and Glass-making and rhe Museum of Eighteenth-century Venice at theCa' Rezzonico in 1932 and 1935 respectively. 1951 was the year in which the Peggy Guggenheim Collection was given a permanent home in the Venier dei Leoni Palace.

Distinguishing features of a collection All these facts and dates, except for the last one, have been taken from the Lorenzetti Guide; in other words, they are familiar to any tourist who takes the trouble ro visit Venice properly. The history of Venice's collections, which these facts and dates encapsulate, has by no means been neglected,

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especially within the walls of the Ateneo Veneto. On 30 January 1879 one of the Ateneo's members, Francesco Fappani, gave a talk on the history of collections in Venice, the text of which can be found in his Elenco dei Musei, delle Pinacoteche e delle varie co!fezioni pubb!iche e private, che un tempo esistettero, e che e.riJtono oggidi' in Venezia e nella .rua Provincia, on which he worked for twelve years and left in manuscript form. In doing this he was, in actual fact, following in the wake of Marco Foscarini, Giannantonio Moschini and Emmanuele Cicogna, all of whom had rightly considered this history to be an important component of the history of the arts and letters in Venice, and of Venetian life in general. Our interest in it, therefore, merely represents the continuation of a long tradition, and our aim is not so much to bring forgotten or unknown facts tO light bur to arrive at some general conclusions regarding collections taken as political, or even anthropological phenomena. For this reason, we will be basing most of our arguments on well-known facts, and will constantly refer back to the list of Venetian museums arranged in chronological order, since this enables us to take in at a glance the entire history of public collections as it unfolded in Venice from the very earliest times right up to the present day, leaving at each of its major turning-points a new type of museum, and thus becoming woven into the very fabric of the city. As to whether a history of this kind can, despite its obvious specificity and the narrow confines within which it moves, provide a satisfactory basis for significant conclusions with a sufficiently wide application, this will become clear from the results obtained. For the time being, we will merely say that it is so rich that the risk of being bogged down in local anecdote is not great enough to outweigh the advantages of adopting a rigorous approach intended to do away with the factual bric-a-brac engendered by a disregard for chronology and the unity of place, and replace it with a homogeneous body of knowledge. For all that, we are quite at liberty to make comparisons and indeed will not hesitate to do so. Before rounding off this introductory section, a few more remarks still need to be made regarding the criteria which enable the historian, during the course of his work, to distinguish a collection from a mere heap of objects. This work consists, of course, of the study of source material, such as inventories, catalogues, descriptions left by visitors, travel accounts and guides, correspondence, memoirs, accountancy documents and so on. The characteristics of the objects cannot be used as criteria in quite the same manner, as one only needs to make a tour of the museums and private collections in any given city to realize that they can contain virtually every known sort of natural and artificial object. This was just as much the case in the past, although rhe number of types known to collectors and the methods of classifying them were different then.

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The chief distinguishing feature of a collection is the fact that the objects of which it is comprised are kept either temporarily or permanently out of the circuit of utilitarian activities. A set of objects assembled in a shop or boutique in order to be sold does not, therefore, constitute a collection, and the same applies to sets of instruments intended for the production of materials or finished products. We have here a criterion which is both easy to apply and unambiguous, but it is not the sole condition which has to be mer if we are to begin to talk about a collection. We must therefore add that, in order to constitute a collection, a set of objects must also be afforded special protection. This requirement is easy to understand, as objects one does not protect from physical wear and tear or from theft are effectively treated as if they were worthless, nothing more than scrap. To all intents and purposes, scrap is indeed excluded from the circuit of utilitarian activities and therefore satisfies the first criterion we laid down, yet we cannot place scrap in the category of colleCtions. The formation of a collection thus requires solutions to be found to the problems of preservation and possibly of the restoration of the pieces composing it. Even with this second criterion, however, we do not arrive at an adequate definition, for all the above conditions can be met by a hoard of coins shut away in the basement in a sealed clay pot, given that it has been removed from the circuit of utilitarian activities and afforded special protection. The same can be said of a set of paintings guarded in a bank strongroom. The main difference between treasures of this kind and a collection is that the latter is placed on display in an enclosed space specially designed for the purpose. Placed on display, it is introduced into a circuit of non-utilitarian exchanges where the value attributed to it by irs owner is confirmed or invalidated by people other than him. This depends on a public (which can be defined in a multitude of ways) being given access to the collection, and on the existence of suitable premises along with a successfulla your scheme enabling the pieces to be seen properly. The formation of a collection intended for mortal beings (some are occasionally intended for the gods, but this does not fall within our ambit) therefore means finding away of displaying the pieces it comprises, in terms of presentation, lighting, the passage of visitors from one piece to another and so on. In every single case, thought must also be given to the type of premises used, since they not only provide protection against theft and damage from the environment, but also bestow unity on a multiplicity of objects, a unity which allows them all to be perceived as constituent elements of the same whole. Hence the importance of the architecture and furniture which determine the nature of these premises and perform the same role for a collection as a frame does for a painting. The discovery that a set of objects mentioned in source material satisfies the above conditions, amounts to the recognition of this set as a collection. It is particularly important to proceed in this manner when sets of objects

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amassed in the homes of private individuals are involved, as their functions are easily misinterpreted if they are not properly identified. It will not be necessary to adopt this procedure here, however, as this essay simply requires us to show that with sufficient documentation it is possible to distinguish a collection from a mass of objects with a different finality.

The formation of public museums: four distinct patterns Now that these preliminaries have been settled, let us return to the list given at the beginning of this chapter and use examples from it in order to illustrate four different patterns of public museum formation. The first pattern, which we shall call the 'traditional' one, is represented by every institution which gives rise, in the course of its normal activities, to the birth of a collection accessible either to all the public or to certain specified categories, in accordance with a timetable settled in advance, or else on particularly solemn occasions. This is exactly the case of the treasure of St Mark's, from its creation in the thirteenth century to the fall of the Venetian Republic. Placed on display five times a year on the main altar of the basilica, it was also opened very exceptionally to foreign personalities: John Evelyn, for instance, was able to visit it in 1645, being part of the retinue of the French ambassador, while Montfaucon was similar! y favoured in 1698. The treasurehouse of St Mark's therefore functioned as a museum for a very long period before being officially recognized as such in 1832. However, it did so only intermittent! y, being closed to the public most of the time. Its role as museum was a secondary one, and dependent on its primary one of sanctuary and treasure-house. It was first and foremost a storeroom for objects which, either relics or emblems of power, had to be displayed above all within the context of ecclesiastical and political ceremonies befitting their dignity, which celebrated both St Mark and the nation. In a similar fashion, and provided no dreadful catastrophe occurred, every church where paintings, monuments and objets d'art had accumulated throughout the centuries became the home of a collection to which the public had access. It is precisely this historico-artisric facet of places of worship which is stressed in so many of the guides, descriptions of towns and travellers' accounts, such as Martinelli's brief work, written in 1705 and entitled Il ritratto ovvero le case piit notabili di Venezia diviso in due parti. Nella prima si descrivono brievemente tutte le Chiese della Citta, con le Memorie piit illustri, Depositi, Epitaffi, Iscrizioni, Sculture, e Pitture piit cospicue, con le dichiarazioni, e Autori de esse .... Some churches were actually even classed as museums, and A. M. Zanetti the Younger, for instance, wrote in 1771 that Santa Maria Maggiore 'puo chiamar.ri ... una compiuta galleria di pitture veneziane'.

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The collections open to the public did not only accumulate spontaneously in churches. They were also quite frequently to be found in the palaces of princes and kings dutybound to surround themselves with rare and beautiful things, amass them in large quantities and show them off. Since it was dictated by the rank they occupied in society and the role they had to assume, this obligation led to the formation or conservation of collections even when the individuals concerned had no personal interest in them. This type of collection, the emanation of power, was represented in Venice by the one housed in the Sale d'Armi dei Consiglio di Dieci in the Doges' Palace. Originally intended as an armoury, but subsequently used as a place where trophies, works of art and gifts made to the republic by princes and foreign dignitaries were guarded, these state rooms were the ones chosen to house the collection of ancient coins donated to the state by Pietro Morosini in 1683. Under strict guard, the Sale d' Armi were opened from time to time to famous visitors who had been given special permission. Thus, like the treasure-house of St Mark's, they served for part of the time as a museum. Last of all, there were those collections which were open to the public and grew up in teaching establishments, including the Academy of Fine Arts (from 1750 onwards) and, most importantly, the University of Padua where a botanical garden was set up in 1546. This garden, which was enlarged in the eighteenth century by the addition of ornithological and mineralogical collections, was visited and described by many naturalists and the guidebooks of the day recommended visiting it. The foundation of the University's natural history museum, based on the collections of Antonio Vallisnieri which his son had donated in 1733, and comprising in particular a substantial amount of archaeological equipment, followed a different pattern of public museum formation, which will be discussed later on. The transformation into a museum of a treasure-house which, even if it retains its former name, still changes in status, or else of a collection amassed in a palace or castle, always involves the loss of the liturgical, ceremonial, decorative or utilitarian role which had originally been pia yed by their contents. In some cases, this happens quite imperceptibly and progressively. Objects cease to fulfil their initial functions because they are no longer fashionable or have suffered damage, or else because the development of new techniques has rendered them obsolete. Yet they are conserved because of their historical or artistic value, until the day when it is decided to display them to the public. For instance, the weapons and suits of armour kept in the Doges' Palace since the fourteenth century had lost all semblance of usefulness several centuries later, but then became a collection put on show to the public- initially a hand-picked public- well before they were placed in the Arsenal Museum, whence they returned in 1917 to their original home. The history of the St Mark's treasure-house was even more

eventful, as it suffered tremendous destruction after the fall of the republic, and was only reopened after complete restructuring. Outside Venice, the traditional pattern was followed by a number of institutions, including the Uffizi in Florence, the Ambrosiana in Milan, the Munich Art Gallery, the Vatican Museums, the Crown collections in Great Britain (Hampton Court, Windsor Castle, etc.), the Hermitage in Leningrad, as well as the treasures housed in countless churches in a number of differem European coumries. All these institutions have a long history, some dating back as far as the Middle Ages, in the case of church treasures, others, in the case of the museums, as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; even the Hermitage, the most recent among them, was already in existence in the first half of the eighteenth century. All were emanations of temporal or spiritual power, and all were opened early on to the public- the last to be so was the Hermirage in 1852- even if the notion of public was considerably more restrictive than it is today, and the conditions of access very different. Often tumultuous, the history of these institutions is reflected both in their contents, frequently made up of different strata laid down in successive periods which have undergone a process of sedimentation lasting several centuries, and in their buildings, several of which are histOrical monuments intended from the very ourset to house the works on show there today. 'Traditional' museums therefore differ in several respects from those formed according to a different, 'revolutionary', pattern. The latter, which were founded by decree, absorbed works from extremely diverse origins seized by the state from the homes of their former owners, and were housed in buildings completely unconnected with these works, generally disused places of worship converted for the purpose. In Venice, this pattern is represented by the Academy's galleries, which were solemnly inaugurated on 10 August 1817, after ten years of preparations and the reconstruction, overseen by Giannantonio Selva, of the former Church and School of the Charity and the Convent of the Lateran Canons. The majority of the paintings on display came from churches and convents. The galleries were, of course, formed around a core, in this case composed of the collections belonging to the Academy of Fine Arts, which included paintings and plaster casts of anciem sculptures. These casts had belonged to Abbot Filippo Farsetti and had been purchased by the Austrian government in 1805. Apart from these, and the acquisition in 1816 of the Girolamo Molin legacy, the galleries received several donations from collectOrs - in particular, 188 pictures from Girolamo Contarini in 1838 - and also enriched their stocks by purchasing certain works, which brings us back to the two patterns of public museum formation we will be dealing with later. Having said this, one must nevertheless recognize that behind the foundation of the galleries was a centralizing and modernizing system of

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state control. The decree of 12 February 1807, by which the new Academy of Fine Arts was set up together with an art gallery, implemented in Venice the statutes granted to the academies of Bologna and Milan in 1803, and in this domain the Austrians appear to have pursued the policy embarked on by the Kingdom of Italy. Under this system, works had been distributed according to political objectives, these consisting in the main of favouring the capital to the detriment of the provincial towns. This meant that Venetian paintings were sent to the Brera gallery in Milan, the aim apparently being to bring rogether the finest works by the most eminent representatives of the local 'schools'. Examples of these schools were, however, to be displayed in greater number in their places of origin, which explains the initial homogeneity of the Academy's collections, composed solely of works by Venetian painters, in spite of attempts to exchange some of these for different ones. It is useless to dwell on the fact that this pattern of public museum formation was a direct result of the practices and ideology of the French Revolution, which the Napoleonic state inherited and which was profoundly influenced by Enlightenment thought, with its anticlerical, if not antireligious slant, and its belief in the benefits of a strong, philosophybased power. This is why the family of museums to which the Academy galleries belong is only represented in those countries which have undergone revolutionary upheaval, even when this has been the result of foreign conquest, either at the turn of the nineteenth century or else in the wake of the Bolshevist and Maoist revolutions. The chief precursor is obviously the Louvre, opened in 1793 and subsequently emulated by other French museums in the provinces together with others founded under Napoleon in various European countries. The most notable example of the latter, the Prado, was the result, at least on paper, of a decree signed by Joseph Bonaparte in 1809. At the beginning, these museums housed almost exclusively ancient sculpture and examples of post-Renaissance painting and sculpture. Later on, they broadened their scope to include other periods and other domains. In the twentieth century, the revolutionary pattern governed the creation of the majority of museums in the Soviet Union, in certain of its satellite states and also in China. The Anglo-Saxon world, however, contains no example whatsoever of this type. Neither the traditional- nor the revolutionary-type museums exist in any great number in either Venice, Europe as a whole or the United States. Rather, in Venice, if not everywhere, one finds museums based on a third pattern one could term 'evergetic', to make an adjective out of the name given to city benefactors in ancient times. These are, in fact, private collections left to their founders' home towns, to the state or else to an educational or religious institution, so that the public may have access to them. The oldest example of this in Venice, if not in modern Europe, is the

Archaeological Museum, which grew, thanks to the 'statuario publico', from the donations of Giovanni and Domenico Grimani in 1523 and 1587 and was enriched between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries by the legacies of several Venetian collectors. If we compare it with the St Mark's treasurehouse and the Sale d'Armi dei Consiglio di Dieci, the public museum created in the sixteenth century in the antechamber of St Mark's library obviously constitutes a new type, being once again the gift of a generous benefactor. New in terms not only of its origins but also of irs contents, since these no longer comprise curiosities, relics or objects whose value comes from the material they are made from, but works of art brought together simply because they date from antiquity. Other museums of the same type, though with differing contents, were to make an appearance later on, including the Correr Museum in Venice itself, the Querini-Stampalia Art Gallery, the Franchetti Gallery at the ca d'Oro and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Padua boasted the Natural History Museum, which has already been mentioned, Verona the Lapidary Museum created by the Accademia Filarmonica at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and which was greatly enlarged and completely reorganized by Maffei in the first half of the eighteenth century. At the same time, the museums founded according to the traditional and revolutionary patterns saw their initial stocks increase in size thanks to donations from collectors: we have already noted the numismatic collection Pierro Morosini bequeathed ro the Sale d'Armi in the Doges' Palace, as well as the Molin and Conrarini legacies received by the Academy's galleries, and these were certainly nor isolated cases. There were a great many museums based on the evergetic model outside the Venetian Republic, so many in fact that any attempt to list them results in a volume of a size approaching that of a telephone directory. It is possible, however, to detect a number of common features. Some, like the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, founded in the second half of the seventeenth century, belong to the same generation as traditional-type museums, but the majority were founded much more recently; their 'dates of birth' span the whole of the nineteenth century, though they are particularly concentrated at the turn of the twentieth century. In the majority of cases they were the creations of industrialists, tradesmen and financiers who owed their prosperity to the current economic expansion, and who used part of their time and money to set up collections and arrange for these to be taken care of after their deaths. In Europe, however, evergetic museums have only ever played second fiddle to the large national museums based on the traditional or revolutionary patterns. In the United States, where they have no such rivals, it is a different story, and as a result, they can be found at every level, from the tiny museum of only local importance ro those that are known the world over, such the Smithsonian

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Institution and National Gallery in Washington, the Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as the ones to be found in all the major American cities, a number of universities and so on. For want of a better term, we shall baptize the fourth pattern of public museum formation the 'commercial' model. This applies to every museum formed when an institution either buys separately all the pieces intended to fill it or else purchases entire collections. The first of these eventualities is illustrated in Venice by the Modern Art Gallery, which owes its existence to the acquisition of works displayed during the international biennial art events. As for the second one, a good example would be the Oriental Museum, which grew out of the collections formed at the end of the nineteenth century by Henri de Bourbon-Parme, Count of Bardi, sold after his demise to a Viennese antiquary and returned to Italy as part of the reparations paid by Austria after World War I. The best-known museum of this type is undoubtedly the British Museum, which was founded around the collection purchased in 1753 from the executOrs of the will of Sir Hans Sloane for £20,000, after a ruling by the British parliament. It would be quite superfluous to add that museums, whatever their origins, enlarge their initial stocks not only through gifts bur also through purchases. These latter can sometimes be made indirectly, as in the case of a museum organizing or financing archaeological digs the results of which are then added to its collections. These, then, are the four patterns of public museum formation, and it seems highly improbable that museums have been established other than through the effects of tradition, the decrees of a revolutionary power, the action of a generous group or individual or through purchases. Nevertheless, although the origins of a museum are important, they do not completely determine its fate, unless, of course, it remains completely frozen in time. Every museum, regardless of the way it started life, develops by receiving gifts and making purchases, either with money from benefactors or else with central, regional or local government funds set aside for that purpose. In this sense, the activities of every museum follow the evergetic or commercial patterns, with the exception of countries under complete state control, whose inhabitants, citizens in name only, cannot exercise any possible influence over the institutions. The division of public museums into four different formation patterns does not therefore enable us to evolve any proper museum typology. Its interest lies, in fact, elsewhere, since it allows us to relate museum hisrory to general history, or more accurately, to political, cultural, social and economic history. This is particularly obvious as regards the history of museums in Venice, since this highlights, as we have just seen, the links of these museums with those in power and underlines the role of benefactors in their creation and development. We should perhaps note that benefaction

in the Venetian Republic, the motives of which the various wills, from that of Giacomo Contarini (1596) to that of Teodoro Correr (1830), clearly explain, was essentially a political phenomenon, a demonstration of attachment to the nation to which one sought to express gratitude and praise through the bequest of one's collection to the public. During the period of the republic, the benefactors mostly consisted of the patricians, who held the reins of power and possessed full citizenship, while in the nineteenth century, this role was mainly played by the descendants of ancient patrician families. This link between citizenship and benefaction is not peculiar to Venice. In general, the greater the degree of participation by individuals in the affairs of the state, the more they show a propensity to place their possessions at the disposal of the community. The fact that evergetic-type museums were absent, except in very rare cases, from absolute monarchies and under the ancien regime, and do not exist in any of roday's totalitarian states is proof of this. Not only do they not form in political environments of this kind but existing museums, created following different patterns or, quite simply, bequests made in the past, only receive gifts from private individuals in quite exceptional circumstances. Museums of the evergetic pattern, on the other hand, do exist in oligarchies and are quite numerous in democracies. As both the examples from the ancient Venetian Republic and those from the United States show, they benefit above all from increases in personal freedom in the particular regions in which they are to be found. This all helps to show the importance of private collections not only to the formation of public museums but also to their running, as well as illustrating the links between the two. While private collections sometimes help to enrich museums which come into existence following the traditional pattern or else as the result of a decision by the powers that be, they are also, on occasion, turned into new museums thanks to donations or foundations, and the time has now come to take a closer look at the dividing line between public and private and at the relationship between them.

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The boundary between public and private The exact position of the dividing line between public and private has shifted with the centuries. Nowadays, there is a tendency to identify public property with state property, but this is only acceptable if one considers the state not only to be one representative of the general interest but also its sole representative, two presuppositions which are questionable to say the least. Whatever the case, the most widely accepted meaning of the term public applies solely to that which has a link with society as a whole and with every member of the people, though the definition of a people has also

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varied considerably down the centuries. One has only to take this particular definition of the word public to see that in the Middle Ages, and for a long time afterwards, the collections which accumulated in ecclesiastical buildings, especially in places of worship, were public, in that they belonged to the Christian people represented by an institution which, in the West, embraced all the members of each society and indeed sought to embrace the whole of humanity. Moreover, and this is particularly important, they were, though with certain restrictions it is true, on view to everyone. Royal or princely collections were private, on the other hand, as their owners, as individuals, could dispose of them as they wished, which meant that they only showed them to those they wished. It was to take the work of many centuries, in the legal and political fields, to determine and incorporate into the very fabric of the institutions the difference between the king's status as an individual and the monarchy as a legal entity and the corresponding distinction between the king's private property and that of the public, which belonged to the Crown, and of which he was merely the caretaker, dutybound to pass it on in good condition to his heirs. This process, which even changed the status of the royal collections, reached completion sometime between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, depending on the particular European country concerned. At the same time the definition of the people, which had previously been very narrow, was extended to include all those who spoke the same language, inhabited the same territory and owed allegiance to the same state, regardless of whether or not they enjoyed political rights. This meant that the srate could pose as a coextension of the people and claim to be the sole legitimate representative of the general interest. It is in this way that the situation which prevailed in the Middle Ages was completely overturned. From the point of view of the state-oriented ideologies, the churches were henceforth synonymous with private institutions, dividing up the subjects or citizens according to religious criteria. The collections belonging to the Catholic Church followed exactly the opposite course to that of the royal collections, for while they had previously been recognized as public, they were now seen as private ones, or even as public property illegitimately requisitioned by a private institution. Seen from this angle, as it was during the French Revolution and its sequel, nothing prevented the state from returning to the public that to which it had a right, expropriating the church and housing the 'nationalized' objects in disused places of worship or else in buildings built specifically as museums. This is rhe bare outline of the history which, in Venice, led to the setting up of the Academy galleries, filled when a disused church, together with several new buildings, was stocked with paintings taken from the churches. However, the new definition of the term public, which this operation presupposes, and which did not include ecclesiastical property, was

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introduced to the city by a foreign army exporting revolutionary principles. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, the siruation had been somewhat different, for it had been the Venetian collections which were housed in the churches and palaces of the republic which had been regarded as public. This can be clearly seen in old descriptions of the 'pubb!iche pitture' beginning with Sansovino ( 1581) and the successive editors of his book (Stringa, 1604; Martinoni, 1663 ). Descriptions continued to be written by Boschini (1674) whose work was revised sixty years later in 1733 by A.M. Zanetti the Elder, and even by A. M. Zanetti the Younger ( 1771), to mention but the most important aurhors. It was with this traditional type of public collection that private collections were contrasted, and these private collections appeared in the Venetian Republic earlier than elsewhere, the two oldest ones dating from the latter half of the fourteenth century. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, there were at least six Venetian collectors, two of whom lived in Crete. At this time Florence was apparently the only town in Europe to boast a greater number of collectors; we know of eleven today. A century later, there were already several dozen in Venice, and in the second half of the sixteenth century, Hubert Goltzius, a Flemish numismatist and engraver, produced a list bearing the names of twenty-five ancient coin collectors in Venice which, according to him, placed that city in third place in Italy, after Rome (seventy-one) and Naples (forty-seven), but ahead of Genoa (seventeen), Milan (sixteen), Florence, Bologna and Padua (eleven). At the end of the seventeenth century, Martinoni mentioned thirty-one collectors, but as in the case of Goltzius, this only accounted for the visible part of a group which was undoubtedly much larger, even though it is impossible to make an accurate assessment. Indeed, the latter will only ever be achieved by dint of a vast amount of research concentrated on the thousands of inventories stored in Venice's archives. It would be extremely useful on various counts to know the exact number of active collectors in Venice decade by decade, from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth. It would allow one to measure the extent of this phenomenon and to see how it evolved as the years went by. It would be possible to make a sociological analysis, albeit a rather rough and ready one, of the changes in taste and in scientific and historical interests. Nevertheless, the results of any research of this kind would by no means undermine the assertion that collectors, whatever their number, never constituted, in Venice as elsewhere, any more than a small minority of the population. The advent and growth of this minority nonetheless had a considerable influence on the evolution of European culture. The very first collectors in Venice, Florence and elsewhere, grounded in the humanists' texts and inspired by Petrarch, were fascinated by antiquity.

Private Collections, Public Museums

Private Collections, Public Museums

Their fervent wish was to have, touch, study and examine at their leisure ancient objects, such as inscriptions, engraved stones, statues and coins. These objects which, except for a few particularly spectacular examples, had lain buried beneath the ground, and which accordingly were classed as rubbish, now acquired a historical, artistic and market value, since people could be found who were willing to pay, and pay dearly, to obtain them. This prompted people to start looking for such objects in Italy itself, on the islands, in Dalmatia and in Greece, on behalf of the waiting collectors in Venice. It was the beginning of a movement which was to last several centuries. With the discovery of new, unexpected and often inexplicable artefacts during the search for ancient objects, fresh explanations had to be found; this led to the publication of new scholarly works, which in their turn stimulated new research and so on. The result of this constant oscillation between text and object was the gradual accumulation of a new body of knowledge dealing with even the most diverse aspects of the life and times of the ancients. Its choice of documents and methods of interpretation changed with time, but its dominant position in artistic and literary culture was nor challenged until the nineteenth century. The constitution of this body of knowledge went hand in hand with the changes in taste which now advocated that the medieval model should be shunned and the antique model emulated, even if it was impossible to agree what form this emulation should take (this became the source of interminable arguments). It also went hand in hand with the inauguration of a new presentation of history which differed on several important points from those of the Middle Ages, and finally with the advent of a new rhetoric and new moral philosophy, which constituted the synthesis of the Christian requirement for charity towards one's neighbour in exchange for the salvation of one's soul, and the requirement for generosity towards one's fellow citizens and native town, in exchange for glory, the earthly substitute for immortality. In Venice at the end of the sixteenth century, the entry on stage of the modern private collector - the individual who collects even though he is neither king nor prince, and therefore not forced to do so because of rank accompanied by the advent of benefaction, the product of this same civic moral philosophy, resulted in the creation of the 'antiquario publico' an innovation of great importance following a series of gifts to the republic. The public collections which were already in existence contained relics, precious objects, paintings and curiosities, but lacked antiques capable of fulfilling the role of exemplary works of art, the ancient vases in Sr Mark's treasure-house serving as reliquaries. In other words, at the end of the sixteenth century the public collections in Venice continued to reflect a taste and interests which were no longer the concern of cultured men, who now focused their attention on antiquities. Therefore, when they donated the

ancient statues destined for the anteroom of the library of St Mark's, the collectors were making up for ground lost by official institutions in keeping up with changing public tastes, and in doing so thrust Venice into Europe's cultural avant-garde. The attribution of value to things previously held to be valueless, if indeed any attention was paid to them at all, took place on several occasions in the history of modern Europe, though obviously its protagonists were not always humanist collectors and the objects concerned were not always antiquities. Moreover, even antiquities underwent promotions and revisions; whereas Federigo Contarini donated statues to the republic at the end of the sixteenth century, roughly one hundred years later, Pietro Morosini made a donation of coins, the typical constituents of a scholarly collection. Although antiquity never lost its exemplary status, by the second half of the seventeenth century it was no longer seen primarily as a period to be imitated in every aspect of secular life. The principal aim was now to gain knowledge of it through the remains it had left behind, though in an encyclopaedic way and without any order of importance being imposed on its various different aspects. Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea that it was art which gave expression to the 'spirit' of antiquity and which therefore explained its privileged position in history, gained momentum. Accordingly, the large statues which, since the fifteenth century, had never ceased to win admiration and serve as a source of inspiration, now won the favour of the scholars, while the smaller objects which had formerly sent scholars into raptures, slipped into obscurity. In Venice, this resulted in the creation of the Academy of Fine Arts and in the formation of a large collection of plaster casts intended to enable young artists to familiarize themselves with ancient sculpture. This, of course, was the Farsetti collection, which rose to fame in the final decades of the eighteenth century, and which we have already had cause to mention. The same process affecred other classes of objects, such as those produced by nature. Apart from ones which were regarded as useful, such as medicinal plants, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were primarily interested in rare, exceptional, extraordinary, exotic and monstrous things. Nature attracted those who sought meanings rather than laws, messages rather than consistency, small matter whether these came from God or from demons. The collections of this period faithfully reflect this unbounded curiosity, which was only brought to heel by the new brand of post-Galilean science. In Venetia, this turning-point came about at the beginning of the eighteenth century, with Patarol and Zannichelli in Venice itself and, most importantly, with Vallisnieri in Padua. Henceforth, interest began to be shown in the banal, the repetitive and the easily accessible, and in everything which had previously been ignored, such as the insects to be found in the countryside, the plants growing in the neighbourhood, stones

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Private Collections, Public Museums

from nearby mountains and the shells and algae deposited on the beaches by the Adriatic. They now no longer attracted attention solely because of potential therapeutic properties, as had been the case with the seventeenthcentury naturalist-pharmacists, bur also because they represented a source of the objective knowledge needed for the compilation of an exhaustive inventory of nature. The number of collectors of natural history specimens steadily increased from the beginning of the seventeenth century onwards, while the works devoted to the subject also grew in quantity, not to mention the public lectures on it and the controversies it gave rise to. The Museo Civico di Scienze Naturali in Venice was a late offspring of this promotion of natural history, which had already spawned several public museums, such as that of the University of Padua, in the eighteenth century. Our third example of previously worthless objects attributed worth, or rather of devalued objects having their value restored, concerns the rediscovery of the artistic value of medieval monuments which, for many centuries, had interested only historians spurred on by local patriotism to study the period of 'Gothic barbarism'. This purely historical interest in things medieval, illustrated by the collection of Venetian coins donated to the republic at the beginning of the eighteenth century by Domenico Pasqualigo, had already caused Maffei to discover the genuine aesthetic value of certain medieval monuments in Verona (the Scaliger tombs). Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, we find paintings by the primitives in the Paduan collection belonging to Abbot Facciolatti, as well as in one belonging to someone of the utmost importance in the cultural life of Venice at this time, Fra Carlo Lodoli. A little later, A.M. Zanetti extolled the virtues of Carpaccio, while towards the end of the century, Milizia insisted on the superiority of Gothic as opposed to baroque architecture. Venice and Venetia therefore took part in the European movement to upgrade medieval art, a movement which can be traced in England, Germany and France, and which has left in every Western country paintings inspired by the miniatures, neo-Gothic buildings and monuments restored in accordance with the principles of Viollet-le-Duc. Spread over some 150 years, this movement, like humanism, underwent several internal transformations, which we cannot dwell on here. Suffice it to say, as a conclusion, that by altering the perception of Gothic architecture, it affected the very image of Venice, as Ruskin's The Stones of Venice illustrates. The final example of this series, although we could have cited still more, is the attribution of value to non-European art, beginning with Chinese art in the eighteenth century, although this was given only minor importance, and continuing with Japanese art in the latter half of the nineteenth century, followed by African, Oceanic and American Indian art and so on. This phenomenon, which had a profound influence on the evolution of European art and decorative arts as a whole, led to the creation of several

collections, some of which, like the one owned by the Count of Bardi in Venice, were later turned into museums. Every one of these changes in taste, or more accurate! y these shifts in artistic and historical preoccupations, altered not only the corpus of objects endowed with meaning and therefore with value, but also the framework within which they were displayed and the principles governing their layout. The emergence of the private collector as a cultural type was accompanied by a change in the layout of interiors, since a place was now set aside for a scrittoio, studio/a or Jtudio: the place where the collection pieces were assembled. As early as the sixteenth century, this role had also been given to the garden, where statues were placed, and to the inner walls of the courtyard, sometimes also the fa~;ades, where busts, bas-reliefs and inscriptions were inserted. The gallery was the next innovation, though judging from Scamozzi's remarks, it only became popular in Venetia in the course of the seventeenth century. From this time onwards, therefore, all the main components of collection architecture had become established: a gallery for arranging paintings or statues, along with an extra room reserved for masterpieces, the descendant of the studio/a. These were the elements which were to be used to organize the space not only of newly built public museums, following the example of the Uffizi in Florence, with its differentiation between gallery and tribune, but also of ecclesiastical buildings converted into museums. Several examples of these conversions exist in both Venice itself and in Venetia, the most striking one being the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona, converted by Carlo Scarpa.

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Private collections and cultural innovation The history of artistic and historical preoccupations in Venice, Venetia and modern Europe as a whole, of which several notable episodes have just been mentioned, can be likened to a wave train, each wave leaving a well-defined centre constituted by a group of collectors, and spreading to different countries, at times affecting domains at a considerable remove from the original one. Though they may only be transient in themselves, these waves leave permanent marks on the cultural landscape, carving out lasting s1gnarures here and there, in the shape of public museums, mostly the evergetic type, as one can see from the list of Venetian museums extending from the Archaeological Museum and the Correr Museum ro the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. These waves do more than simply leaving behind them museums containing objects to which they have given or restored value, and thereby caused to rise or return to the surface for, with a backlash effect, their passage alters the meaning of objects which already enjoy high esteem.

Private Collections, Public MttJeums

Private Collectiom, Public Mttsettms

No further elaboration is necessary to prove the truth of this statement: one has only to acknowledge that when it was recognized that art, in the true sense of the word, and not only 'bizarre productions' had existed in the Middle Ages, the significance of ancient art had to be redefined, since this no longer constituted the norm and sole manifestation of beauty. This change in significance broadened the very definition of ancient art to include both more primitive works and ones from the late Empire, thus endowing them with a value they had not previously had. Similar shifts took place in the definition of modern an which were especially advantageous to the baroque style and to mannerism. Art historians and the readers of scholar! y works were not the only ones involved; the mass of people who simply went to look at the works were also affected, as the new ideas also filtered down into the guides and catalogues. They were the inspiration behind temporary exhibitions and led curators to bring out certain pieces from their storerooms and have others restored. They even had an indirect effect on the appearance of these pieces, as the meaning invested in them had some influence on the type of restoration carried out on them. This meant that rather than their original and elusive appearance, they were given the one they were imagined to have had. Not only did the way in which they were looked at change, bur also, to a certain extent, an itself, a fact which the whole of hisrory should have tried to take into account, as far as documentary evidence allowed. We are, it should be stressed, talking about art from the past, of which neither the physical aspect nor the semiotic dimension is static, contrary to firmly established preconceptions. Although the four patterns of public museum formation encompass the legal, political and socio-economic aspects of the relationship between public museums and private collections, they take no account of the objects which move from the latter to the former. In the light of the history we have just outlined, we can see that the relationship between these twin public and private poles, which have coexisted throughout modern times, seems to consist of a permanent tension between a certain conservatism on one side and attempts at innovation on the other. The case of Venice is quite typical in this respect, and shows how, over a very long period, public collections greatly lagged behind the artistic, historical and scientific interests of groups of collectors, groups which were initially very small, but became progressively larger. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, donations from private individuals were the only means by which public collections were able to make up a little of the ground they had lost, even if they did not bring them entirely into line with current tastes. Purchases, the first of which seems to have been that of the Farsetti collection, were not used as a means until the nineteenth century. At length, therefore, innovatory waves, originating from groups of collectors, altered the

contents of public museums, bringing them in succession statues and ancient coins, natural objects, relics of the nation's past, chinoiseries and so on. Elsewhere, it was a different story, although there is nothing which really invalidates the general conclusion that private collections were among the most important sources of cultural innovation from the fifteenth century onwards. Indeed it is highly likely that they have remained so in the majority of countries, if not all, to this very day. Throughout the whole of this account, we have seen that any discussion of collections must touch on political, economic and social problems. Moreover, one of the examples quoted earlier shows that collections are also linked with the natural sciences just as they are with history and art. If, instead of studying one collection in particular, one examines the phenomenon of collecting in a specific country during a well-defined period, one is forced to admit that this activity is not restricted to any one domain in particular. Rather, it is characterized by its position at the intersection of various different domains, by its multi-disciplinary nature. In other words, the collections of a given country at a given time are, taken as a whole, the coextension of that country's culture at that particular time. They incarnate this culture and make it visible to us.

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Notes to pp. 17-33

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CHAPTER I THE COLLECTION: BETWEEN THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISfBLE

First published in Enciclopedia Einaudi, vol. III, Turin, 1978, pp. 330-64. Reproduced in Libre, 3 (1978), pp. 3-56.

2 .'>

4

5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13

Souren Melikian, 'The discreet art of selling a Rembrandt', Intem,1tional Herald Tribune, 1 Dec. 1974. Le Monde, 3 Feb. 1976. Henri Mercillon and Pierre Gregory, Tart et l'imp6t', Le Monde, 11 Nov. 1975. A. Buchalski, K. Konarski, A. Wolff, Pol.rki Slownik A1·chiwalny (Polish dictionary of archives), Warsaw, 1952. James Mellaarr, (atal Hiiyiik, 1me des premieres cite.r du monde, s.l., 1971, pp. 207-9 Tresor.r d'art chinois, nicente.r decouve1tes archeologiques de Ia Republique populaire de Chine, exhibition catalogue, Petit Palais, Paris, May-Sept. 1973. Th. Homolle, Donarium, in Ch. Daremberg ;md Edm. Salio, Dictiomzaire des antiquites grecques et romaines, vol. II, pan I, Paris, 1892, pp. 363-82. Cf. also H. Thedenat, Favissae, ibid., vol. II, part II, Paris, 1896, pp. 1024-5. E. Cavaignac, Etudes· mr l'histoire fincmcihe d'Athime.r all Ve Jiec!e. Le trhor d'Athimes de 480 a 404, Paris, 1908. Pliny the Elder, NatMal HiJtory, XXXVII, 12-14; translated by W. H. S. Jones, Loeb, 1963. Ibid, XXXVII, 18-20. Cf. foreword by James G. Frazer to his translation of Pausanias, Description of He/las, London, 1898, vol. I, pp. XXXVI-XXXVII. Pliny the Elder, Natural Hi.rtory, XXXVII, 3-4. Ann,des Sa11cti Disiboldi, 1125, MGH, SS, val. XVII, p. 23, quoted in K.

21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38

277

Leyser, 'Frederic Barbarossa, Henry II and the hand of St James', English Historical Review, no. CCCLVI, July 1975, p. 491, n. 3. [Translator's note: The kingdom of the Franks was often referred to by its Latin name in this period.] P. Heliot and M.-L Chastang, 'Quetes et voyages de reliques au profit des eglises frans;aises du Moyen Age', Revue d'histoire ecclesiastique, vol. LIX (1964), no. 4 and LX (1965), no. 1. Hubert Silvestre, 'Commerce et val de reliques au Moyen Age', Revue beige de philologie et d'histoire, vol. XXX (1952), pp. 721-39. Jean Guiraud, Questions d'histoire et d'archeologie chnitienne, Paris, 1906, pp. 235-61. lnventaire du mobifier de Charles V, roi de France, published by Jules Labarre, Paris, 1879. Choix de pieces inedites relatives au regne de Charles VI, published by L. Douet D'Arcq, Paris, 1864, val. II, p. 350. Ernest Babelon, Catalogue des camees antiques et modernes d
278 39 40

41 42 43

44

45 46

47

Notes to pp. 34-47 Louis Reau, Les Monume nts ddtmits de !'art franrai.r, Paris, 1959, vol. I, pp. 65ff. L D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars. A Gttide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, Oxford, 1974, R. Weiss, The Renai.rsance Discovery of Classical Antiquity , Oxford, 1969. Claude Faucher, Recueil de l'origine de Ia !ang11e et de fa pohie fram;oise (1581), published by]. G. Espiner-Scott, Paris, 1938, pp. 21-2. Hubert Goltz, C. ]uliiJJ Caesar sive Historiae Imperato rum Caesarttmque Romanor um ex Antiquis Numisma tibus Restitutae, Bruges, 1563, f0 aaaii-cc. Linda Van Norden, 'Sir Henry Spelman and the Chronology of the Elisabeth an College of Antiquaries' The Hu11tington LibrarJ' Qttm·terly, 13, 1950, pp. 131-60. Joan Evans, A History of the Society of A miquaries, Oxford, 1956, p. 16. E.-T. Hamy, Les Origines dzt mMee d'Ethnographie, Histoire et Documen ts, Paris, 1890. Julius Von Schlosser, Die Kunst- und Wttnderk ammem der Spiitrenaissance, Leipzig, 1908. Krzyszto f Pomian, 'Medals/S hells = 'Eruditio n/Philoso phy', see above, pp. 121-38. Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painten A Stud;' in the Relations between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque, London, 1963 (new edition: New Haven-L ondon, 1980). This calculation is based on Fritz Lugt, Repe1'toire des catalogttes de ventes publiques interessant l'a1·t ou fa curio.rite. Premiere periode: vers 1600-182 5, The Hague, 1938.

Notes to pp. 48-51

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9 CHAPTER 2 THE AGE Of CURIOSITY

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First published m Scienze, ctedenze occulte, livelli di cu!titl'a, Olschki, Florence, 1982, pp. 535-57. Reproduced in Le Temps de Ia Reflexion , III (1982), pp. 337-59. Les A ntiquitez, Raretez, Plantes, Mineraux et atttres chases considerables de !a ville et du comte de Castres . .. Avec !e roolle des principaux cabinets et a1ttres raretez de !'Europe, comrne aussi fe catalogue des chases rares de maistre Pierre Borel, . .. autheur de ce livre, Castres, by A. Colomiez, 1649; The Roo!le des principattx cabinets curieux, pp. 124-31. The Catalogue (of which it is the second, longer edition), pp. 132-49. For further informat ion on Borel, read the Dictiomzaire de biographie franraise, vol. VI, col. 1096. 2 Quoted in J. Ceard, La Nature et les prodiges. L'in.rolite au XVIe si?x!e, en F1·ance, Geneva, 1977, p. 297. 3 Among Borel's writings, let us noce Bibliotheca chimica, seu Catalogtts libmrum pbilosophico1·um hermetic omm . .. , Paris 1654; De Vero Tefescop ii inventore, cum brevi onmittm conspicil!iorum historia ... AcceSJ'it etiam centuria observationum micmcos picantm [sic!], The Hague, 1655; Vitae Renati Cartesii, summi philosophi, compend ium, Paris, 1656; Discottrs 110tn'eatt pro1tvant Ia plura!ite des mondes, q11e les a.rtres sont des terres

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habitees et fa terre zme estoile, qu'elle est hors du centre du monde dam le troisieJme ciel et se tourne devant !e solei! qtti est fixe, et atttres chases treswriettses, Geneva, 1657. Cf. the remarkab le and little-kno wn books by H. Daudin: De Linne a]ussiett. iVUthode de classification et idee de serie en botanique et en zoologie (174090), Paris, 1926, and Cuvier et Lamarck. Les classes zoo!ogiques et !'idee de serie animate (1790-1830), Paris, 1926, 2 vols. Cf.]. Von Schlosser, Die Kttmt- und Wunderk ammem der Spiitrenaissance, Leipzig, 1908; B. J. Balsiger, The Kunst- ttnd Wttnderkammer: A Catalogue rais01me of Collecting in Germany, France and England, 1565-1750 (Univ. of Pittsburg h, Ph.D., 1970), Universit y Microfilms, Anne Arbor, Mich., 1971, 2 vols. For all of the following, cf. S. Sperh-Ho lrerhoff, Les Peintres flamands de cabinets d'amateurs, Brussels, 1957, which contains reproductions and detailed analyses of several paintings to be discussed later. I shall only cite the most recent publications concerning these works. Cf., for example, Frans Francken II, View of an Enthusiast's Galfery at the beginning of the Seventee nth Century (The Duke of Northum berland, Syon House, Brentford, Middlesex) or Johannes Georg Hainz, Gallery of Curiositie s (Gotha, Schlossmuseum, Schloss Friedenst ein). Reproduced and comment ed on in Albert Dzire1· aux PaJ's-Bas. Son voyage (1520-1), son influence , exhibition catalogue, Brussels, 1977, nos 426 and 181. Cf. Rubens et la pittura fiamming a del Seicento nelfe collezioni pubbliche fiorentine, exhibitio n catalogue, Florence, 1977, no. 1. Cf. Le Siecle de Rubem dans !es collectiom publiqttes franraises, exhibitio n catalogue, Paris, 1977, no. 63. Cf. L'Arnerique vue par !'Europe, exhibitio n catalogue, Paris, 1976, no. 109. Cf. Pedro Pablo Rubens (1577-1640). Exposici6n homenaje, Madrid, 1977, nos 108-12. Cf. MIISeo del Prado, catalogue of paintings , Madrid, 1972, nos 1403 and 1404. Le Siec!e de Rubens ... , no. 14. Natures mortes. Catalogue du Ia collection dtt musee des Beaux-Ar ts de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, 1964, no. 16. Cf. Albert Dztrer aux Pays-Bas, no. 181 and Natures mortes ... du musee des Beattx-Arts de St1·asbourg, no. 28. Cf., for example, Lubin Baugin, Nature morte a f'echiquie1· (Musee du Louvre, Paris); Philippe de Champai gne, Vanite (Musee de Tesse, Le Mans); Simon Renard de Saint-An dre, Vanite (France, private collection) in Peintres de f!eMs en France du XVIIe au XIXe siec!e, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1979, nos 5, 11, 24. Note that Baugin's painting was regarded as an allegory of the five senses, and that Les Cinq Sens by Jacques Linard (Musee des Beaux-Ar ts, Strasbourg; ibid., no. 15) could have passed as a still life. Cf. also Pieter Boel, Alfegorie de.r vanitds du monde (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lille) and the importan t comment ary in Le Siecle de Rubens . .. , no. 8. Lastly, S. Renard de Saint-Andre, Vanite (Musee des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg). Natures mortes du musee des Beaux-Ar ts de Stra.rboMg, no. 58.

280 17 18 19

20 21

22

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29 30 31 32 33 34

Notes to pp. 52-64 Cf. L. Berti, Il Principe della Studio/a. Francesco I dei Medici e Ia fine del Rinascimento fiorentino, Florence, 1967, in particular pp. 61ff. Letter from G. B. Adriani to Giorgio Vasari (1567) in G. Vasari, Opere, ed. G. Milanesi, Florence, 1906 (re-edit. 1973) vol. I, p. 35. Antoine Furetiere, Dictionnaire Universe!, Contenant generalement taus les Mots Fran(ois tant vieux que modemes, et les Termes de toutes les Sciences et des Arts ... , The Hague and Rotterdam, 1690. Dictionnaire de l'Acadhnie Ft-an(oise, Paris, 1694. Cf. K. Pomian, 'Utopia i poznanie historyczne. !dear republique des lettres i narodziny postulatu obiektywno5ci historyka', Studia Filozoficzne, 1 (40), 1965, pp. 21-75. St Augustine, De vera religione, 7 and 52; P. L., vol. XXXIV, cols 126 and 146. Cf. also Confess., X, XXXIV and XXXV (on curiositas.). Also P. Courcelle, Les Confessions de saint Augustin dam fa tradition litteraire, Etudes augustiniennes, Paris, 1963, pp. 101-9. Isidore of Seville, Synonyma de !amentatione animae peccatricis, ll, 71; P. L., vol. XXCIII, col. 861. StThomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2a 2ae 166, 2 ad 3, translated by Th. Gilby, Eyre and Spottiswoode, London Blackfriars, 1972. Ibid., 2a 2ae 167, 1c and cf. also 162, 4 ad 4. Ibid., 2a 2ae 167, 2 ad 3. Ibid., 2a 2ae 167, 1 ad 1. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, I, XI, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliotheque de Ia Pleiade, 1953, p. 61. Cf. also I, XXXII; II, XII; III, V. Ibid., pp. 214, 254, 538, 610, 972. Blaise Pascal, PenSties, no. 152; ed. L. Brunschvicg, in CEuvreJ, Paris, G. E. F., 1925, vol. XIII, p. 76. Jean De La Bruyere, Les Caracteres, chapter. De la mode, in CEuvre.r, Paris, G. E. F., 1865, vol. II, pp. 135-42. Cf. Rene Descartes, Regulae ad directionem ingenii, IV; A. T. X 371. Idem., La Recherche de la verite par fa lumiere naturelle; A. T. X 449-504. Nicolas Malebranche, De fa recherche de la verite, IV, III and IV; ed. G. Lewis, Paris, 1945, vol. II, pp. 14-22. Bernard Lamy, Entretiens sur les sciences . .. , Paris, 1684, pp. 34-5. I am very grateful to Mr Fernando Gil, who brought my attention to this text.

CHAPTER 3 COLLECTIONS IN VENETIA IN THE HEYDAY OF CURIOSITY

First published in G. Arnaldi and M. Pastori Stocchi, eds, Storia della cultura veneta, Vicenza, Neri Pozza, 1983, vol. 4jl, pp. 493-547. I should like to express my gratitude to Mme Andrea Ballarin and MM. Lanfranco Franzoni and Licisco Magagnato for the suggestions and advice which were so helpful to me when carrying out this research.

Notes to pp. 65-8

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16 17

281

Cf. J. Shlosser Magnino, La letteratura artistica, 3rd Italian ed. revised by Otto Kurz, Florence, 1977, pp. 555££. Breve Istruzione per intendere in qualche modo !e maniere de gli Auttori Veneziani in Le ricche miniere della pittura veneziana. Compendiosa informazione di Marco Boschini. Non .rolo delle Pittt~re pubbliche di Venezia ma de!l'lso!e ancora circonvicine, Venice, 1674 (unnumbered pages). S. Maffei, Verona itlustrata. Parte terza contiene le notizie delle cose in questa citta piu osservabili, Verona, 1732, pp. 175-6. With regard to this definition cf. K. Pomian, 'The Collection: between the Visible and the Invisible', see above, pp. 7-44. Cf. F. Sansovino, Venetia citta nobilissima et singolare, Venice, 1581, and the 1604 and 1663 editions with the additions by G. Stringa and G. Martinoni, I. VIII, Delle fabriche publiche. M. Boschini, I gioie!li pittoreschi. VirtttoJo omamento della Citta di Vicema; cioe l'Endice di tutte le Pitture pttb!iche della stessa Citta, Venice, 1677, 'Al Lettore' (unnumbered pages). Cf. Le Vite de'Pittori, de G!i Scttltori et A1·chitetti Veronesi Raccolte da 1/a?j Autori stampati, e manuscritti, e de altri partico!ari mernorie. Con fa narratiua delle Pitture, e Scu!ture, che s'atf1·o1/ano nelle Chiese, case et a!tri !uoghi publici e prittati di Verona e JUO Teritorio. Dal Signor Fr. Bartolomeo Co: Dal Pozzo . .. , Verona, 1718; l G. B. Lanceni], Ricreazione pittorica asia Notizia Uni1/ersale delle Pitture nefle Chiese, e Luoghi Pubblici di Verona, Verona, 1720. R. Gallo, 'Le donazioni alia Serenissima di Domenico e Giovanni Grimani', Archivio 1/eneto, series 5, vol. L-LI ( 1952), p. 52. Ibid., pp. 57ff. The term 'antiquario publico' is used in Mocenigo's will cited ibid., p. 58. On Federigo Contarini cf. also G. Cozzi, 'Federico Contarini: un antiquario veneziano tra Rinascimento e Conrroriforma', Boll. del!'Ist. di Storia della Societa e della Stato veneziano, III (1961), pp. 190-220 and especially pp. 211££. Cf. also for all this M. Perry, 'The Statuario Publico of the Venetian Republic', Saggi e memorie di Storia defl'arte, 8 (1972), pp. 78ff. Cf. G. Valentinelli, Manni scolpiti del Mttseo ttrcheo!ogico della Marciana, Praro, 1865, p. XVII. [Ch. Patin], Themu1ws N11mismatum AntiqttorttJn et Recentiomm ex Aura, Argento etA ere, Ab lllu.rt1·i.rs. et Eccelentiss, D. D. Petro Mauroceno. Senat01'e Veneto; Sereni.rsimae Reipublicae LegatuJ, Venice, 1683, foreword (unnumbered pages). Cf. E. Cicogna, Saggio di bibfiografica veneziana, Venice, 1847, no. 5147. Cf. G. Moschini, Della letteratttra veneziana del secolo XVIII fino a nostri giomi, vol. II, Venice, 1806, p. 77. Cf. U niversitit degli Studi di Padova, Guida del!'orto botanico, Padua, 1977. Cf. under the direction of H. R. Hahnloser, ll te.roro di San .Ma1'Co, vol. II, If tesoro e il museo, Florence, 1971, nos 111-14. The horn purchased by Alessandro Contarini is numbered 113. S. Maffei, Vemua, p. 175. J. Spun and G. Wheler, Voyage d'Jtalie, de Dafmatie, de Grece et dtt L:Jvcmt, Fait attx annee.r 1675 et 1676, The Hague, 1724, vol. I, p. 1 1L

282 18

19 20 21 22

23

24 25

26 27

28 29

30 31 32 :13

Notes to pp. 68-70 'Decirne [May 1700] Vicentiam petimus, ubi nil mst tritum et vulgatum observatur', B. de Montfaucon, Dia1·ium italicum sive monumentorum vetentm, bibliothecarum, musaeorum, etc. N otitiae singulares in itinerario italico collectae, Paris, 1702, p. 437. This is the voice of a Frenchman; the English made their pilgrimages to Vicenza in order to admire Palladia's works. M. Misson, No;weau vo;•age d'Italie, The Hague, 1702, vol. I, p. 188. Cf. above, pp. 45-64. Cf.]. Von Schlosser, Raccolte d'arte e di rneravigfie del tardo Rina.rcimento (1908), Florence, 1974, pp. lOlff. Cf. E. Jacobs, 'Das Museo Vendramin und die Sammlung Reynst', Repertorillm fur Ktmstwissemchaft, 46 (1925 ), pp. 15-39; T. Boren ius, 'More about the Vendramin collection', The Burlington Magazine, LX (1932), pp. 140-5. 'Un quadro d'un coruo d'India che me fu dona to uiuo'- 'Quadri con l'Aquarelle de Animali cauatti dal naturale quadrupedi et volatili'. T. Borenius, The Pictttre Gallery of Andrea Vendramin, London, 1923, pp. 20-1. Ibid, pp. 3-4. I Ieroglifici, overo Commentarii delle occulte significationi degli Egitij, et cdtre Nationi, compo.rte daf!'Eccefente Signor Giovanni Pierio Valeriano da Balzano di Befluno. et da lui in cinquantaotto libri divisi, nei qua!i con l'occasione di leroglifici si tratta della natura di molti Animali Terrertri, Maritimi e Volatili; delle Piante, dell'Herbe. de'Fiori e de 'Frutti; delle Pietre, delle Gioie e lvletalli; de 'Font . de'Fiumi, de'Mari, e dell'Acque tutte, de'Cie!i, delle Stelle, e de Pianeti; delle iHonete e Medaglie, de Vestimenti et Arme; degl'lnstrumellti Musicali, Bellici, et IISatili: de'Nmneri, de'Segni, de'Cerri, de'Sogni, e delle Favale, et altre case c11riose e degne . ... Fabrica non Jo!o utile e Difette·vole peri Studiosi ma necessat·ia ancora a Pittori, Scttftori, eta quelli che di Statue. di lviedaglie, et altre Antichita .ri dilettano ... , Venice, 1625. Quoted from A. Buzzati, Bibliografia bellunese, Venice, 1890, no. 22. Cf. Marc'Antonio Michie!, Notizia d'opere di disegno, ed.]. Morelli, Bassano, 1800; ed. G. Frizzoni, Bologna, 1884. For the Grimanis, cf. R. Gallo, Le donazioni. For Gabrielle Vendramin, cf. A. Rava, 'II "Camerino delle Amicaglie" di Gabrielle Vendramin', Nuo1'0 Archivio Veneto, vol. XXXIX (1920), pp. 155-81. The text of the will is quoted in G. V
119 120 121 122

123

124 125 126 127

128 129

130 131 132 133 134 135

136 137 138 139 140 111

1-12

143 144

319

owned by Alessandro Pompei and three out of the 247 in the Giulio Pompei collection. Cf. A. A[ vena? J, 'La Galleria Canossa', and idem, L'lstituzione, appendices III and IV. S. dalla Rosa, Catastico, ffO 344, 356, 362, 364-5. F. M. Tassi, Vite de Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti Bergamaschi, F. Mazzini, ed., Milan, 1970, vol. II, pp. 136ff., 364, 374, 379. P. Baldarini eta!., Desct·izione ... di Vicenza, pp. 51, 114. 0. Bertotti-Scamozzi, II Forestiere istmito nelle case piu rare di a·rchitettura. E di alcune Pitture della citta di Vicenza, Vicenza, 1761, pp. 26, 39, 102; we should add Balestra and S. Ricci (p. 102) and Cignaroli (p. 117). L. Puppi, 'I Tie polo a Vicenza e le statue dei "Nani" di villa Valmarana aS. Bastiano', Atti dell'Istituto veneto di Scienze. Lettere ed Arti, CXXVI (1967-8), pp. 227-8. Catalog a dei doni fatti al Civico .Mus eo di Vicenza . .. , Vicenza, 1866, p. 3 and F. Barbieri, If Museo Civico di Vicenza. Dipinti e Sculture dal XVI al XVIII secolo, Venice, 1962, pp. 184, 186, 217,219. Cf. A. Sartori, Documenti per !a storia dell'arte a Padova, Vicenza, 1976, passim. F. Vivian, I! console Smith, pp. 95ff. V. Giormani, 'Fra'Angelo Ziliani', appendix I, p. 94. A. Memmo, Elementi di a1·chitettu·ra Lodoliana o sia l'arte del fabbricare con solidita scientifica e con eleganza non capricciosa, Rome, 1786, p. 56 and cf. E. Kaufmann, jun., 'Memmo's Lodoli', Art Bulletin, XLVI (1964), pp. 169-75. A. Memmo, JJ!ementi, p. 59. Ibid., pp 56-8. Ibid., pp. 59-60. G. Previtali, La fortuna dei primitiz;i. Dal Vasm·i ai neoclassici, Turin, 196-1, pp. 79ff. and 220-1. A. Memmo, Elementi, p. 56. F. Vivian, Il console Smith, pp. 76, 99, 105. P. J. Grosley, Observations on Italy and on the Italians. London, 177-1, vol. II, p. 164; cf. G. Previtali, La fortuna dei primitivi, pp. 218-20. Cf. L. Vemuri, II g;1sto dei primitivi (1926), Turin, 1972, pp. 102ff. . . A. M. Zanetti, Della Pittura Veneziana e delle Opere Pubbliche de'Veneztam .Maestri libri V, Venice, 1771, p. VIII. Ibid., pp. 89ff Ibid., pp. 299ff., 323. . Ibid., pp. 19, 35 and cf. G. Previtali, La fortuna dei primitivt, p. 93. Cf. N. Ivanoff, 'Anton Maria Zanetti, critico d'arte', Atti de/l'Istztuto t·eneto dt Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, CXI (1952-3), pp. 29-48. Cf. A. M. Zanetti, Delle antiche statue gt·eche e romane che nell'antisa!a della !ibreria di San Marco e in altri luogbi pubblici di Venezia si trovano, Venice, 1740-3 G. Lorenzetti, Un dilettante, pp. 66ff., and on the inventory of the Marciana statues by A. M. Zanetti the Younger: M. Perry, 'The Statuario Publico', pp. 90ff. A. M. Zanetti, Della PittMa, p. XII. Fr. Haskell, Patrons a11d Painters, pp. 362ff.

320 145 146 147 148 149

150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162

163

164 165

166 167 168

169 170

Notes to pp. 212-15

Notes to pp. 215-18

Cf. 'Collections in Venetia in the Heyday of Curiosity', above, pp. 81-112.

A. M. Zanetti, Della Pittura, p. 487. Ibid., p. 488. Cf.]. W. Goethe, Viaggio in ltalia, Florence, 1955, p. 123. Cf. N. Lastesio, De Musaeo Philippi FMsetti Patricii Veneti Epistola ad c!ariJSirnam Co1'tonensem Academiam, Venice, 1764. P. A. Paravia, Def!e lodi de!FA.b. Filippo Fa1'Setti Patrizio Veneziano Orazione, Venice, 1829. Museo della casa eccelentissima Farsetti in Venezia, s.l., n.d. Statues mentioned by P. A. Paravia, Delle lodi .. . , pp. 15-17. 'Catalogo de'quadri esistenti nella Galleria della casa eccelentissima Farsetti in Venezia', in ivluseo della casa . .. Farsetti, pp. 31ff. Cf. G. Dandolo, La caduta della Repubb!ica di Venezia, Venice, 1855, pp. 11516 (Daniele Farsetti), 119 (Anton Francesco Farsetti). E. Bassi, ed., Venezia nell'eta di Canova 1780-1830, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 1978, no. 8, pp. 16-17. Ibid., no. 9, p. 17 and nos 73-4, p. 58. P. A. Paravia, Delle lodi . .. , p. 18. Cf. 'Maffei and Caylus', above, pp. 169-84. G. della Lena, Esposizione, para. VIII, p. J 75. Ibid., para. XII, Joe. cit. C. A. Moschini, Della letteratura ·venezimza, vol. II, p. 107. G. Previrali, La fortuna dei primitivi, pp. 153ff. Ibid., pp. 156ff. and 243. G. B. Rossetti, Descrizione ... di Padova, 1765 edn, p. 318; 1776 edn, p. 320. F. Barbieri, I! Museo Civico di Vicenza. Dipinti e .rcu!ture da! XIV a! XV seco!o, Vicenza, 1962, pp. 161, 196-7, 21.'>, 218 (Paolina Porto Godi) and pp. 22, 140, 151, 180, 184, 195,222, 227 (Carlo Vicentini dal Giglio). F. Bartoli, Le pitture di Rovigo, pp. 181-3. A. Romagnolo, ed., La pinacoteca . . . dei Concordi, p. 24. Al vena 1 ], 'La galleria Canossa', and G. B. da Persico, Descrizione di Verona e della .rua provincia, Verona, 1820, vol. I, pp. 79, 130-l. G. A. Moschini, Della !etteratttra veneziana, vol. II., p. 95ff. I. Favaretto, 'G. Zulian e Ia sua collezione de vasi italioti ed etruschi nel Museo Archeologico di Venezia', Atti dell'lstituto veneto di Scienze, Lett ere ed Arti, CXXIII ( 1964-5 ), pp. 26ff. R. Bratti, 'Antonio Canova nella sua vita arristica privata (da un carteggio inedito)', Nuovo A·rcbivio Veneto, 33 (1917), pp. 281-90. Cf. The Age of Neoclassicism, exhibition catalogue, London, 1972, nos 307 (pp. 199-200) and 314 (pp. 202-3). L. Rizzoli, 'II castello di Catajo nel Padovano e il testamento del Marchese Tommaso degli Obizzi (3 giugno 1803)', Archit;io Veneto-Tridentino, IV (1923), pp. 127-46. By, for instance, G. Fiocco, 'Le pitture venete del Castello di Konopiste', Arte veneta, II (1918), pp. 7-29. Cf. L. Olivato Puppi, 'Alle origini del museo moderno. Museo privato come funzione pubblica nella corrispondenza inedita di collezionisti veneti fra'700 e'SOO' in Fr. Haskell, ed., Sa!oni, Gal!erie, Musei e Ia foro infbrenza ml!o

171 172 173 174 175 176

177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185

186

187 188 189

190 191

321

svi!uppo deli'arte dei seco!i XIX e XX (= Atti del XXIV Congresso Internazionale di Scoria dell'Arte), Bologna, 1979, pp. 29-36. P. Paulino a San Bartholomaeo, Mt<miograpbia MttJei Obiciani, Padua, 1789, p. 14. C. Cavedoni, Indicazione dei principali monttmenti antichi del rea/e museo estense del Catajo, Modena, 1842, p. 8. Cf. L. Olivato, 'Gli affari sono affari', p. 300. C. Cavedoni, Indicazione, pp. 6-7. Cf. the inventory drawn up of the collection of Tomasso degli Obizzi on 28 June 1803 after his death; Biblioteca Civica di Padova, MS B.P. 1386 IV. On this point, I agree with L. Oliva to Puppi, 'Aile origini del museo moderno', p. 33. For the distinctive features of the Kunst- und Wunderkammem, cf. 'The Age of Curiosity', above, pp. 45-64. MS B.P. 1386 IV, fED 3-52 (description of numismatic collection). Cf. M. Meiss, 'Italian Primitives at Konopisre', The Art Bulletin, March 1946, pp. 1-16. G. Previtali, La fortuna dei primitivi, p. 244. Cf. F. A. Visconti, 'Catalogo', in Documenti inediti per servire alia .rtoria dei Musei d'Italia, vol. II, Rome, 1879, pp. 235-65; vol. III, Rome, 1880, pp. 28-80. L. Rizzoli, 'II castello del Catajo', document IV, pp. 145-6. L. Olivato, 'Gli affari sono affari', document III, p. 304. Cf. C. A. Levi, Le Col!ezioni veneziane d'a1·te e d'antichita del seco!o XVI ai nost1·i giorni, Venice, 1900, vol. I, p. XCIII. L. Rizzoli, 'Alcune lettere di Canova', p. 403 and letters I and II, p. 408. J.-Fr. Seguier, Plantae Veronenses seu Stirpium quae in agro veronense reperiuntur Methodica synopsis . .. , Verona, 1745, vol. I, pp. XXIIIff. Cited in T. Metterle, 'II ventennio arzignanese de Alberto Fortis ( 1778-1798) e Ia comunita di Arzignano alia caduta della Repubblica di Venezia', in collective work, Valle del Chiampo, Antologia 1975, p. 124. J.-Fr. Seguier, Plantae Veronenses, vol. I, p. XXXV. Idem, Plantarum quae in Agro veronense reperiuntur supplementum seu vo!umen tertium, Verona, 1745, pp. X and XIV. A. de Tuoni, 'Volfango Goethe a Vicenza e !a sua visita a! dottor Antonio Turra', Ateneo Veneto, 128 (1941), p. 247. A. Fortis, Delle oJJa d'e!efanti e d'altre cMiosita naturali de'monti di Romagnano nel Veronese, Vicenza, 1786, pp. 6-7. B. Brunelli Bonetti, 'Padova, Vicenza e Verona nelle note di viaggio di un francese del Settecento', Attie Memorie della R. Accademia di Scienze, Lettere ed A 1·ti in Padova, LVII (1940-1), p. 110. Cf. C. Goldoni, La villegiatura. John Strange rhus formed a mineral collection during a stay at the Abbano spa in the summer of 1771. Cf. 'Lettera geologica di Sua Eccelenza il Sig. Gio. Strange Residente per S. M. Brittanica presso Ia Sereniss. Repubblica di Venezia scritta al Dot tor Gio. Targioni Tozzetti', in collective work, Dei Volcani o monti ignivomi piit noti, e distintamente del Vesuvio osservazioni fisiche e Notizie lstoriche de Uomini Insigni di varj tempi, raccolte con diligenza, Leghorn, 1779, vol. II, p. 38. Cf. also A. Fortis, Delle ossa d'elefanti, pp. 5-6.

322 192 193

194 195 196

197

198 199 200

201

202

203 204 205 206

207

N oteJ to pp. 218-22 A lerrer from G. Arduino to Girolamo Silvestri dared November 1758 refers to these discussions: B. C. Ver., Fondo Arduino, file 757. A. C. Dondi Orologio, P1·odromo in /orrna di lettera del!'lstoria Naturale de'Monti Euganei, Padua, 1780, and dated: 'Dalla mia viltegiatura della Giara, it 12 Maggio 1780'. Cf. F. Venturi, Venezia ne! .recondo Settece11to, Turin, 1980, pp. 49ff., 109ff. and passim. A. C. Dondi Orologio, Prodromo, pp. 7 and I 0. Ibid., pp. 11-12, 19-21, 28-9, 32-44. For Strange's collection, donated to the Natural History Museum at the University of Padua in 1772-cf. V. Giormani, 'Fra'Angelo Ziliani', appendix I, p. 94 - there is a catalogue: 'Catalogo Ragionato di varie Produzioni Naturali del Regno Lapideo, reccolte in un viaggio peri Colli Euganei nel Mese di Luglio 1771 da Sua Eccellenza il Sig. Giovanni Strange', in collective work, Dei Volcani, vol. II, pp. 59-98. Cf. A C. Dondi Orologio, 'Saggio di littologia euganea osia distribuzione metodica, e ragionata delle produzioni fossili di Monti Euganei', Saggi scientifici e letterarii dell'Accademia di Padova, vol. II, Padua, 1789, pp. 16484. B. Terzi, hiemoria intomo alle prodm:ioni forsili di Monti Euganei, Padua, 1791. B. Terzi, Rirpo.rta di ... al!'articolo inserito ne! foglio di Cesena contm la Memoria intomo aile produzioni natm'clii dei Monti Euganei, Padua, 1791. Lett era del nu1rchese Antonio Carlo Dondi Orologio diretta a! Reuerendis.rimo Padre Abbate D. BaJile Terzi ... sopra !a di lui Memoria intomo alle produzioni fos.ri!i de'Monti Euganei, Padua, 1791. Cf. Prima risposta di RJSi!e Terzi ... alia lettera del Signor Marche.re Antonio Dondi Omlogio ... wpra !a Memoria intomo all produzi011i fossi!i de '1\Ionti Euga;zei. Padua, 1791. The eight letters begun with this one extended from 24 July to 20 Nov. 1791. In September of the same year, the work written by A. Fortis appeared, Tre !ettere al Signo1· Conte Nicolo da Rio sopra le sei !ettn·e sinora Mcite del P. D. BaJ·ilio Terzi . .. a! Marchese Antonio Dondi Orologio intomo aile produzioni fo.rsili de'Monti Eugcmei, Cesena, 1791. Cono di Storia naturale, e chimica proposto a fetterario trattenimento di 40 Nobili, e Cittadini di Veronct dal Sig. Professore Canonico Don Giovanni Serafino Voitel. Per l'anno 1790, s.l., n.d., B. C. Ver. 153.4. Ibid., nos I, VII, XIV, XVIII, XXIV, XXXIII. Cf. G. S. Volta, Prospetto del Museo Belfisoniano. C!assificato e compendiosamente descritto, Pavia, 1787. Cf. E. Vio, La villa Far.retti a Santa Ma1·ia di Sa/a, Venice, 1967. Expression used by A. F. Farsetti, Elenco botanico del giardino di Sa/,, j>er /'Amzo AIDCCXVI, s.I., n.d., in the dedication. It was the second catalogue. The first was: Catalogo delle piante che eshtono nef gim·dino del nobil ttomo A 11fo1zio Francesco Far.retti nella me< villa di Sa/a, Venice, 1793. A. Turra, Fcw ldest propria forma praeditztm qui apud loannem Iacoburn Spadanz Gretianae Archipresbyterum AsservantM, Verona, 1739. Co1pormn Lapidefactorum agri veronensis CatalogttS quae c1pud Joan. ]acobum Spadam C,:retianae Archipresb)'terum asservantltf. Editio altera multo a11ctio1·, Clli accedunt A Jlnotatione.r. et i\1armortnn quae in eadem agro reperiuntm· Elencbm, Verona, 17 44. A.-L. Moro, De Cro.rtacei e degli altri marini carpi che si trovano su'mo11ti libri due, Venice, 1740, pp. 1-2. Cf. P. Rossi, I .reg ni del tempo, pp. l 04ff. A.-L. Moro, De Crostt1cei, p. 231. Della fonnazione de'fu!rnini trattclto del Sig. !Vfarchese Scipione Maffei raccolto de varie .rue Lettere. In a!cune delle quali .ri tratta anche deg!'Imetti

ne

268

269

270

271 272 273

326

274

275 276

277 278 279 280 281 282

283

284 285

286

287

Notes to pp. 231-40

Notes to pp. 228-31 rigenerantisi e de'Pesci di ma1·e su i manti, e piit a fungo de!l'Elettricitta, Verona, 1747, pp. 118ff., 124-5. G. G. Spada, Corporttm !apidefactorum ... Catalogm. G. Arduino's original draft, which lies in the Biblioteca Civica in Verona, was published by G. Stegagno, II veronese Giovanni Arduino e if suo contributo a! progre.r.ro della scienza geologica, Verona, 1929, table V. Cf. also l. Sorbini, I fossili di Bolca, figs. 10 and 11, pp. 29-30. Cf. M. Gliozzi, 'Arduino', in Dizionario Biografico degli ltaliani, vol. III, pp. 64-6. G. A. Moschini, Della lette1'atura veneziana, vol, II, pp. 80, 108-9. On G. Morosini, cf. G. Arduino, Afemoria epistolare sopra varie produzioni tJttlcaniche. minerali e fos.rili. Tratta del Nuovo Giomale d'lta!ia, Venice, 1782, p. 6. On the relationship between Fortis, Guido Vio and]. Strange, cf. T. Metterle, Dal conte Azzolino ad Alberto Fortis: cinque .recoli di storia a! monastero di San Pietro a! C01·to. Precisazioni biog1'afiche sulfa giovinezza del Fortis dal 1741 a! 1778, in collective work, Valle del Chiampo. Amologia 1974, p. 234. T. Metterle, If ventennio arzignanese di . .. Fo1·tis, p. 145, n. 37. G. Strange 'Lettera geologica', p. 39. G. B. Rossetti, Dese1·izione . .. di Padova, pp. 185-7, 333. G. Arduino, Memoria epi.rtolare, pp. 9 and 15. G. Strange, 'Lettera geologica', p. 39. T. Metterle, If ventemzio arzignanese, pp. 127 and 145, n. 38. G. A. Moschini, Guida per fa citta di Padova, p. 187. Fortis sent him minerals. Cf. T. Metterle, Dal conte Azzolino ad Alberto Fortis, p. 231. F. Bartoli, Le pitture ... di Rovigo, p. 215. Cf. E. Zerbinatti, 'Interessi per l'epigrafia amica e testimonianze archeologiche in due inediti di Girolamo Silvestri', Padusa. Bolletino di Centro Polesano di Studi Storici Archeologici ed Etnografici, XIV (1978), pp. 67ff. and 69, n. 27 in particular. Cf.]. Odoardi, De'corpi marini che nel Fe/trese distretto si t1·ovano, Venice, 1767 (= NtiOtJa Raccolta Calogeriana, vol. VIII, pp. 103-96). Quoted from Buzzatti, Bibliografia belftmese, no. 367. Cf. M. Brusatin, Venezia nel Settecento: stato, architettura, territorio, Turin, 1980, pp. 140ff., 314ff. Cf. M. Mamese, Memorie storiche della chiesa vicelltina, vol. V (1700-1866) Da! prima Settecento a! amzessio11e del Veneto al Regno d'ltalia, Vicenza, 1982, pp. 815, 832-3, 837-9. R. Fabiani, 'La Sezione di Scoria Naturale del Museo Civico di Vicenza', Bo!letino del MMeo Civiw di Vicenza, fasc. III and IV (1910), pp. 3-5. lndice delle Prod11zioni naturali alia Terra, non cbe Orgcmico-Marine petrefatte e concbig!ie, le q11ali si ritrovano l'aCcolte e metodicamente disposte appresso don Giuliano Serpe in Arzignano, Vicentino Distretto, Vicenza, 1788. All these people feature in G. S. Volta, lttio!itologia ·t;erone.re, with the exception of Tommaselli and Venturi. For these two, cf. G. P. Marchini. Antiquari e collezionisti dell'Ottocento veronese, Verona, 1972, p. 67, n. 25 and document 3A, p. 20 l.

288 289 290 291

292 293 294 295 296 297

298

299 300 301 302

303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310

311 312 313

327

G. S. Volta, Ittiolitologia veroneJe, part 2, pp. III-IV. Ibid., p. CCLXXVIII. Ibid, pp. VIII-IX. 'Extrait d\me lettre de M. !'Abbe Fortis dan~e de Veronne Lsic] 24 septembre 1785 aM. le Comte de Cassini ... sur les differentes petrifications', journal de Ph)'Sique, 28 (1786), p. 162. Reproduced by L. Sorbini, I foSJili di Bolca, pp. 34-5, figs. 12 and 13. Idem, La collezione Baja, pp. 12-13, figs 3 and 4. G. S. Volta, lttiolitologia veronese, pp. LVIII-LXI. Cf. 'Collections in Venetia in the Heyday of Curiosity', above, pp. 74-8. G. Olivi, Zoologia Adriatica, p. 134. Cf. V. Bozza, De!l'universale rivoluzione sofferta dal globo terracqueo. Lettera a! D. Orazio Rota, Verona, 1788. Degl'impietrimenti del territ01'io veronese ed in particolare dei pesci foSJ·ili del celebre monte Bolca per servire di continuazione all'argomento delle rivoluzioni ten·acquee. Lettera del signor canonico Don Gio. Serafino Volta a! Signor Vince1no Bozza, s.l., n.d., but dated Mantua, 27 Oct. 1789, pp. 18 (quotation), 20-4 (reply to Plutonists). Cf. the first letter from D. Testa in G. B. Gazola, Lette1·e recentemente pubblicate .rui pe.rci foJsili veronesi con annotazioni inedite agli estratti delle medesime, Verona, 1794, pp. 5, 33ff., 45ff., and [A. Fortis J, Tre lettere Jli i pe.rci fos.rili di Bolca, Venice, 1793, especially pp. 16ff., 29, 34ff. Cf. L. Sorbini, l fos sili di Bolca, p. 31. Letter from Testa, in G. B. Gazo1a, Lettere, p. Slff.[A. Fortis), Tre lettere, pp. 83-4. D. Testa, Terza lett era .rtt i pesci foSJi!i del .Monte Bolca, s.l., n.d., but dated 25 Nov. 1793, p. XLIV. Cf. G. Cuvier, Discours sur les r