Today we’ll look at the role of collecting objects in the foundation of modern science and the origins of the museum in cabinets of curiosities.

Cantino planisphere, pub. 1502

There were occasional government sponsored scientific expeditions to Africa and the Americas, but those were very rare. Most of the voyages made to those places were involved in the "triangle trade," which sent manufactured goods to Africa, transported enslaved people from Africa to the Americas, and returned to Europe with dyes, tobacco, cotton, rice, sugar, and other raw materials. 

Collectors were often complicit in the slave trade as they depended upon slave trading ships for passage and for shipping their treasures home. They also relied on slavers in foreign lands for food, housing, and access to local sources of materials and knowledge. 

Collectors often gathered body parts for medical study or mere curiosity. Skulls and bones might come from burial grounds and taking parts from the living, like samples of skin diseases or worse, was not off limits.

Some advances in medicine perpetuated the slave trade. For example, medical research of plants from the tropics, like cinchona (aka quinine), allowed Europeans to survive in their colonies abroad. As the colonies grew safer and more profitable, their commercial activity expanded, which increased the demand for slavery. 

Many naturalists of this period gathered materials believed to have alchemical properties, though experiments in alchemy were considered heretical by the Catholic church and had to be done in secret.

Some naturalists believed that there were objects with magical properties and Imperato's original volumes included descriptions of some of them, like distorting mirrors, speaking tubes, and magic lanterns. However, his son edited these out, for fear of charges of heresy. 

He did, however, include some remedies taken from folklore, such as preventing drunkenness by placing an amethyst in the navel, "cleaning" ones eyes with sapphire to prevent lust, and wearing a jasper amulet to stop bleeding.

At the end of the 16th century, several European countries fought the Portuguese for dominance in the spice trade of the East Indies. The work of a cartographer and a spy made it possible for the Dutch to compete and led to the foundation of the Dutch East India Company, which led to an economic boom in the low countries (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg). 

Two individuals were especially crucial to the formation of the Dutch East India Company and the bounty that followed.

Cartographer Petrus Plancius fled religious persecution under the Spanish occupation of Belgium and went to Amsterdam, where he became interested in navigation and cartography. He gained covert access to navigational charts brought from Portugal and used these to create nautical maps of the Philippines and Spice Islands. Despite its errors and incomplete details, his map was very helpful to Dutch sailors and he went on to create dozens of maps for the Dutch East India Co.

The map was published to promote the commercial potential of Dutch voyages to the Spice Islands and was included in the book by Jan Huygen von Linschoten.

The founding of the Dutch East Company had an enormous impact on the economy and culture of the Netherlands. The wealth accumulated in the colonies is reflected in the architecture of Amsterdam and the bounty of luxury goods and naturalia are documented in the still life paintings of the era.

The Pieter Boel painting of the gold platter and globe contains a highly unusual element of the surreal. Note the small dog in the bottom left hand corner who is interacting with the bird. In an era that so highly favored naturalism, it's unusual to see a change of scale like this.

The largest collection of images was created by Roman brothers Cassiano and Carlo Anonio dal Pozzo. Their catalog, called the Museu Cartacao (Museum on Paper) aspired to compile all available human knowledge in visual form and  included between 7,000-10,000 watercolors, drawings, and prints. It documented specimens of botany, geology, ornithology, and zoology; images of costumes, religious ceremonies, architecture, antiquities, maps, portraits, and more.

The shackles pictured above were said to have belonged to an Early Christian martyr. We also see here a “fingered lemon” from Asia, and an apple with a human face, which most likely was an actual specimen with somewhat human-like features exaggerated by the artist.

The illustrations are arranged by subject. The Cassianos tried to identify each item, describe the circumstances surrounding the making of the drawing, and provide references to documentation. The brothers created some of the drawings and purchased prints, which were widely available. The catalog demonstrates the evolution of scientific inquiry in 17th century Europe.

Durer’s woodcut of a rhino is an emblem of the early 16th century, and a departure from his other depictions of nature, as he was usually committed to strict observation and accurate representation. 

He never saw the rhino himself. His engraving is a conflation of descriptions from multiple sources. 

A contemporary of Durer's saw a living rhino in Lisbon that was given to King Emanuel and sent a rough sketch and a description to the artist. Durer also referred to an excerpt written by Pliny the Elder that described a mammal with the “feet of an elephant and tail of a boar,” and a description of a different species from Africa written by the ancient Roman writer Martial, that included a second horn.

Durer’s print confirmed what Europeans had read in ancient descriptions, and so accepted his image as realistic, even though it conflicted with some contemporary accounts from first hand observation. The print also fed the European appetite for images of exotic animals, and he sold around 5,000 prints. It served as the model for rhino illustrations in natural history encyclopedias for another 200 years. It inspired imitations in relief sculptures, tapestries, and paintings, and became a popular symbol for strength and fortitude.

Natural philosophers of the era rarely considered the humanity of people with unusual physical conditions. They were sometimes included in natural history books, grouped with mythological beings or under the heading of “monsters,” a word derived from the Latin monstrum, meaning divine omen. This category also included (at times) pregnant women.

The image above and to the left are portraits of Pedro Gonzalez. He was assigned the Latinized of Petrus Gonsalvus because he was treated as a specimen rather than a human. Gonzalez had a condition called hypertrichosis, which causes excessive hair growth all over the body. He was kidnapped at the age of 10 from his home in Tenerife and sent as a gift from Margaret of Parma (a regent of the Netherlands) to Henry II, the King of France. (in 1547). He was assumed to have some qualities of a wild animal and was watched over by the court doctors, who waited for his "savage" behavior to emerge. However, he was intelligent and learned to read and write fluently in three languages. Unfortunately, he was never treated as an equal because of his appearance.

His children also had the condition and suffered the same treatment. They were sent to various courts in the Netherlands and Italy. Though they lived as nobility, they were  viewed by their contemporaries as objects of curiosity and not fully human.

Frederic Ruysch (1638-1731) 

Ruysch was a Dutch anatomist, botanist, and obstetrician of the surgeon’s guild for 60 years and father of the famous flower painter, Rachel Ruysch. He introduced new embalming and preservation techniques and wrote extensively on pathology and surgery.

His identified several diseases and disorders; demonstrated the role of placenta in childbirthand; discovered the function of valves in the lymphatic system and the central artery of the eye; and described the circulatory system of the cortex.

Ruysch collected specimens, often arranging them in dioramas that reflected the contemporary interest in a genre of still-life painting called vanitas. His arrangements included human bones and hardened arteries and items called natura artificiosa, nature that had been altered for aesthetic purposes, like corals made from wax-filled arteries or polished gallstones. While these were considered macabre by some of his contemporaries, Ruysch believed the presenting the material this way would help the viewer overcome distaste for the subject matter. He also believed that they highlighted the complexity and delicacy of the organisms.

Ruysch wrote, in Latin and Dutch, a description of his collection, which was illustrated by Cornelius Huyberts and published in 1710 with the title Thesaurus animalium .

Peter the Great purchased the collection shortly before Ruysch’s death

Seba joined forces with two publishers to share the expense of such an enormous project. His book, “Accurate description of the very rich thesaurus of the principal and rarest natural objects”  is a four volume series that includes close to 450 engravings.

He claimed in the intro to his “thesaurus” that the illustrations were based on his collection, but includes imaginary beings such as a 7 headed creature. He also included specimens copied from other resources, which was common practice in natural history compendiums.

He wrote the descriptions for the first two volumes, but had help from other naturalists in identifying and describing species in the last two volumes. Frederik Ruysch identified the snakes, and Peter Artedi described the fish. The focus is on external appearance with very little information on internal anatomy.

Following the lead of Maria Merian, the animals in the first volume are often composed into scenes, decorative motifs, or vignettes, rather than against a plain background. There were common discrepancies in the scale of the objects to each other, for which he was criticized.

The catalog was not completed until after his death and his family had to sell of his collection to cover the printing expenses.

In the last three volumes, the specimens are depicted in a more conventional manner, with no interaction between them. However, they are often arranged symmetrically or in a decorative pattern.

As is the case with most natural history books of this kind, many artists and illustrators created the templates for the printers or engravers, but did not receive credit, and so remain anonymous.

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