“A Goodly, Huge Cabinet”: Books About Cabinets of Curiosities and Early Museums. Title List
Francis Bacon’s plan for the increase of human knowledge encompassed artifact and book, museum and library, and called for “a goodly, huge cabinet” filled with treasures real and artificial. Indeed, the texts and images included constitute all we know of some early museums and cabinets of curiosities, since the contents of many such collections have long since been dispersed. The following title list is meant as a bibliographical complement to an online slideshow (in four parts). Both draw upon the holdings of the Department of Special Collection. More about the exhibits on which this list and slideshow are based »
Part I (see slides)
Conrad Gesner (1516-1565).
Historiae animalium [Lib. I-V]. Zürich: Apud Christoph. Froschoverum, 1551-1587.
Shown here: Book I, De quadrupedibus viviparis (1551), and Book III, De avium natura (1555).Call number: 741691 & 775912, oversize.
The encyclopedic tradition is closely related to the development of early museums. Perhaps no other Renaissance scholar better represents the passion for the encyclopedic than Conrad Gesner, the Zurich physician whose prolific output included works in bibliography, linguistics, philology, medicine, and natural history. Gesner collected avidly: he maintained a small “museum” in his home, but formed his collections primarily as a basis for his massive zoological and botanical books. His work, and that of his contemporary, Ulisse Aldrovandi, helped to inspire a fashion for collecting in 16th-century Italy.
The Historia animalium appeared in five large folio volumes, the fifth posthumously. (A sixth, on insects, never saw print.) Gesner oversaw the production of the woodblocks and quite possibly made some of the drawings from which the woodcuts were derived. Many illustrations were based on live or preserved specimens; others copied depictions of animals Gesner had never seen. The illustration of the rhinoceros, for example, owed much to Dürer's. Gesner's successors likewise copied many of his illustrations.
Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605).
Bound together: Historiam naturalem in gymnasio bononiensi profitensis ornithologiae, hoc est De avibus historiae libri XII. Bologna: Apud Franciscum de Franciscis senensem, 1599.
Ornithologiae tomus alter. Bologna: Apud Apud Io: Bapt. Bellagambam, 1600.
Ornithologiae tomus tertius ac postremus. Bologna: Apud Io: Bapt. Bellagambam, 1603.
Call number: Thordarson 51, oversize.
Ulisse Aldrovandi, professor at the University of Bologna, curator of its botanical garden, and member of a well-to-do family with connections to the papacy, had resources and contacts sufficient to assemble a vast collection of natural objects. A decade before his death, the collection already consisted of some 11,000 animals, fruits, and minerals, and 7,000 plants pressed in 15 volumes. More than 8000 drawings and hundreds of woodblocks were commissioned, at considerable expense, to illustrate the thick folio volumes Aldrovandi was beginning to publish. This publishing venture, which enjoyed financial assistance from the Pope, transformed the collection into printed volumes that preserved and spread its fame.
Aldrovandi was able to publish only four volumes of his work. The first, on ornithology, appeared in 1599, when he was 77 years old. Ten more large folios appeared a decade after his death, but much of his work remained unpublished. The manuscripts today reside in the university library in Bologna. Aldrovandi left his collections to the city of Bologna, where they became the core of Bologna's natural history museum.
Unlike the encyclopedias of Gesner and Aldrovandi, the books below are catalogs of natural history collections, collections that were often open to scholars or the public for study or amusement. Formed by pharmacists and physicians, these early museums served as repositories for the study of the nature and “virtues” of plants and animals, as well as their medicinal value.
Benedetto Ceruti (?-1620) and Andrea Chiocco (?-1624).
Musaeum Franc. Calceolari. Verona: Apud Angelum Tamum, 1622.
Call number: CA 443, oversize.
Francesco Calzolari (ca. 1521-ca. 1606), a Veronese pharmacist, formed one of the most famous of the 16th-century Italian museums. The museum became something of a laboratory, and he readily opened it to friends and visitors from all over Europe. An early, brief catalog was published in 1584. Calzolari's grandson inherited the collection, continued to add to it, and commissioned two Veronese doctors, Benedetto Ceruti and Andrea Chiocco, to compile an extensive and handsome catalog, shown here. Before the turn of the century, the famous collection was dispersed; much reappeared in the museum of Moscardo. The catalog of Moscardo's collection is included elsewhere in this list.
Ferrante Imperato (1550-1625).
Historia naturale. [2nd ed.] Ed. Giovanni Maria Ferro (?-1682). Venice: Presso Combi, & La Noù, 1672.
Call number: 764001, oversize.
Imperato, a pharmacist and curator of the botanical garden in Naples, and working at approximately the same time as Aldrovandi and Calzolari, completed only one volume of his natural history, based on the collection of plants and animals he assembled. First published in 1599, the catalog's two subsequent Italian editions and a Latin translation published late in the 17th century testified to Imperato's prestige and preserved his collection on paper long after the actual collection was dispersed. The edition of 1672 featured, in reverse, a well-known engraving of the museum. Elsewhere in the volume the combination on the same page of engraving and letterpress speaks to the care and expense taken in its publication.
Giovanni Maria Lancisi (1654-1720).
Metalloteca…opus posthumum. [2nd ed.] Rome: Apud Io: Mariam Salvioni…, 1719.
Call number: Duveen 1135.
Nicolaus Steno (1638-1686).
Elementorum myologiae specimen: Seu musculi descriptio geometrica. Cui accedunt Canis carchariae dissectum caput, et Dissectus piscis ex canum genere. Amsterdam: Apud Johan. Janssonium à Waesberge, & Viduam Elizei Weyerstraet, 1669.
Call number: QZBMM.ST4
Michele Mercati (1541-1593), physician to Pope Clement VIII and curator of the Vatican's botanical garden, assembled a large collection of rocks, minerals, and fossils, and was compiling a catalog when he died at the age of 52. The manuscript and many fine copperplate engravings passed to Carlo Dati of Florence, who, unable to publish it, made it available to others. They included Nicolaus Steno (Niels Stensen) who used the well-known plate illustrating the shark's head for his own Canis carchariae dissectum caput of 1667. (We show here an edition of Steno's work published in 1669.) Dati's heirs in turn gave the manuscript to Pope Clement XI. The Italian physician Giovanni Maria Lancisi published it in 1717, illustrated with the original 16th-century copperplate engravings. A second edition, with appendix, was published in 1719, as included here.
Lorenzo Legati (?-1675).
Museo Cospiano annesso a quello del famoso Ulisse Aldrovandi e donato alla sua patria dall' illustrissimo Signor Ferdinando Cospi. Bologna: Per Giacomo Monti, 1677.
Call number: 759527, oversize.
Lodovico Moscardo, conte.
Note overo memorie del museo del Conte Lodovico Moscardo. Padua: Per Paolo Frambotto, 1656.
Call number: 797554 noncurrent, oversize.
Formed by noblemen more interested in prestige than in scientific value, Cospi's and Moscardo's museums emphasized the curious and startling rather than the common plant or animal. Similarly, the catalogs served to publicize collection and collector, not to present scientific information.
Ferdinando Cospi (1606-1686) donated his collection to the state in 1657, and it was merged with Aldrovandi's collection. Lorenzo Legati of the University of Bologna cataloged it in 1677. Listed here is the first of three catalogs of the collection formed by Lodovico Moscardo.
Michael Bernhard Valentini (1657-1729).
Museum museorum, oder Völlstandige Schaü-Bühne. 3 vols. in 2. Frankfurt am Main: In Verlegung Johann David Zunners, 1704-1714.
Call numbers: CA 13723 & 13724, oversize.
In his “museum of museums,” Michael Bernhard Valentini, Hessian physician and professor at Giessen University, described many collections assembled in the 16th and 17th centuries. The work also included the text of one of the earliest theoretical essays on collecting. In the latter, Kiel physician Johann Daniel Major (1636-1693) set out reasons for collecting and procedures for arranging collections and caring for the objects. Valentini saw his own work as a manual for collectors, an encyclopedic guide combining practical instruction with detailed description of natural history specimens and their properties. Experimental apparatus and machines, including the wares of noted Dutch instrument-maker Jan van Musschenbroek, also figured in these volumes. The work remains an important source of information on collections, now dispersed, for which no catalogs were published.
Part II (see slides)
Giorgio de Sepi, or Georgius de Sepibus.
Romano Collegii Societatis Jesu Musaeum celeberrimum. Amsterdam: Ex officina Janssonio-Waesbergiana, 1678.
Call number: CA 749, oversize.
Filippo Buonanni (1683-1725).
Rerum naturalium historia nempe quadrupedum insectorum piscium variorumque marinorum corporum fossilium plantarum exoticarum ac praesertim testaceorum exsistium in Museo Kircheriano. Ed. Giovanni Antonio Battarra. 2 vols. Rome: In Typographio Zempelliano [Apud Montem Iordanum], 1773-1782. Includes treatises by Pasquale Amati, Giovanni Paolo Simone Bianchi, Fabio Colonna et al.
Call number: 777688 noncurrent, oversize.
The collections of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) at the Collegio Romano served both as a museum attracting visitors from all over Europe and as an encyclopedic source for his own voluminous work. The collection owed much to Kircher's correspondence with the missionary Jesuits in China, Japan, Africa, and America, who shipped back crates of plants, birds, and animals, as well as ethnographic and historical artifacts. Kircher also assembled a large collection of experimental apparatus. Kircher's museum was eventually installed in a special hall in the Collegio Romano, as depicted in the frontispiece to the first catalog shown here. Kircher's assistant in the museum, Giorgio de Sepi, was responsible for its compilation.
After Kircher's death, the museum fell into decay and suffered from vandalism until the appointment in 1698 of Filippo Buonanni as curator. Buonanni reorganized and restored the collection, undertook its expansion into new quarters, and published a handsome catalog in 1709. Listed here is a later edition of Buonanni's catalog. Some of its illustrations were clearly influenced by Robert Hooke's Micrographia, of which Special Collections holds two copies.
With the papal suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773, parts of the museum were transferred to the Vatican. In 1825 it was returned to the control of the Jesuits and, under a new curator, revived once more, but the museum eventually became the property of the state after the government confiscated Jesuit holdings. The collections then went to several state institutions. Thus the seven printed catalogs of Kircher's great attempt at an “encyclopedia” of the world remain the only lasting record of his museum.
Claude du Molinet (1620-1687).
Le cabinet de la Bibliothèque de Sainte Geneviève … divisé in deux parties. Paris: Chez Antoine Dezallier, 1692.
Call number: CA 15295, oversize.
A very different cabinet associated with a religious institution was that at the abbey of Ste. Geneviève in Paris. When a new library was built in 1675 for the abbey, Father Claude du Molinet assembled a cabinet to supplement the library - a learning center, we would now say, containing items "utiles aux sciences, aux mathématiques", but above all useful for natural history. However, the greater part of the impressive catalog, published after Du Molinet's death, concerned antiquities, weights and measures, and coins.
Ole Worm (1588-1654).
Museum Wormianum. Seu historia rerum rariorum, tam naturalium, quam artificialium, tam domesticarum, quam exoticarum …. Leiden: Ex Officina Elseviriiorum, 1655.
Bound with: Aldrovandi. Quadrupedum bisulcorum historia. Frankfurt-am-Main: Sumptibus Joannis David. Zunneri, et Petri Havboldi, typis Caspari Rôtelii, 1647.
Call number: CA 15474, oversize.
A strong collecting tradition developed in Denmark during the 17th century within both the nobility and the scientific community. The most influential collection was that formed by Ole Worm, professor of classics, natural philosophy, and medicine at the University of Copenhagen, and personal physician to King Christian IV. The elaborate catalog of his collection, published a year after his death by his son, includes illustrations from drawings made under his supervision, as well as plates reproduced from the works of Aldrovandi and Gesner and the Historia naturalis Brasiliae of Piso and Markgraf.
The same year the catalog was published, Worm's collection was acquired by the Danish monarch Frederik III, also a collector, and incorporated into what was to become the Royal Danish Kunstkammer.
Kunstkammeret (Copenhagen, Denmark).
Muséum regium; seu, Catalogus rerum tam naturalium, quàm artificalium, quae in basilica bibliothecae augustissimi Daniae Norvegiaeq[ue] monarchae Christiani Quinti Hafniae asservantur. Compiled by Oliger Jacobaeus (1650-1701). Copenhagen: Literis reg. Cels. Typogr. Joachim Schmetgen, 1696.
Call number: FN C78 cutter, oversize.
As in many cabinets formed by members of the nobility, natural history occupied a lesser place in the royal Danish cabinet. By this edition of the catalog, descriptions of coins and medals predominated, although the plate also included depictions of astronomical instruments, sports of nature, and Scandinavian antiquities and curiosities.
Georg Eberhard Rumpf (1627-1702).
D'Amboinsche Rariteitkamer. Amsterdam: Gedrukt by [sic] François Kalma Bockverkorper, 1705.
Call number: 1248308, oversize.
Seashells figured in most collections of naturalia from the Renaissance on, and some collections were devoted exclusively to shells. Georg Rumpf based his study of mollusks on the large collection he formed while on the East Indian island of Amboina as an agent of the Dutch East India Company. His son helped complete the text and illustrations. Though a specialized monograph, the work imitated the popular cabinets of curiosities in title, format, and plates. The portrait shows Rumpf, who became blind after finishing his book, working with his specimens. The engraved title page depicts cherubs and servants in classical garb hauling in containers of shells for scholars to peruse.
Rumpf's collections were dispersed, but some of its contents, sold to Cosimo III de’ Medici in 1682, are now preserved in a museum in Pisa.
Albert Seba (1665-1736).
Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri accurata descriptio, et iconibus artificiassimus expressio, per universam physices historiam … tomus I. Amsterdam: Apud J. Wetstenium, & Gul. Smith, & Janssonio-Waesbergios, 1734. Bound with 111 plates.
Call number: MV SE2 cutter, flat.
The Amsterdam pharmacist Albert Seba was one of the most avid collectors in the 18th century. A successful businessman, he made his collecting profitable as well, selling and trading individual artifacts, and in 1717, selling his entire collection to Peter the Great.
He began immediately to build a second collection via correspondence with naturalists and travellers far and wide, and eventually published a massive catalog in four illustrated folio volumes, large enough to portray many specimens in full size. Only two volumes were issued before Seba's death. In order to complete publication of the final two volumes, the collection itself was put up for sale in 1752, and widely dispersed. The catalog itself, conceived to make his museum available to those who could not travel to see it, functions as an elaborate “printed museum.”
Levin[us] Vincent.
Elenchus tabularum, pinacothecarum, atque nonnullorum cimeliorum, in gazophylacio Levini Vincent. Harlem: Sumptibus auctoris, 1719.
Call number: CA 15471.
About this contemporary of Rumpf and Seba little is known. He wrote and self-published what is now a very rare description of his collection, first in 1706 as Wonderstooneel der nature, subsequently in Latin and French. The description consisted of a series of eight engravings of the cabinets in the museum, with brief accompanying text and an engraved frontispiece. As such, it presumably illustrated what visitors to these early museums actually saw.
Johann Christian Kundmann (1684-1751).
Promtuarium rerum naturalium et artificalium vratislaviense praecipue quas collegit vratislaviensis. Breslau: Apud Michaelem Hubertum, 1726.
Call number: AM401 K85.
Rariora naturae & artis, item in re medica, oder, Seltenheiten Der Natur und Kunst des Kundmannischen Naturalien-Cabinets ... Breslau and Leipzig: Bey Michael Hubert, 1737.
Call number: CA 15473, oversize.
In his first catalog (1726), Kundmann, a Breslau physician, provided a listing of the objects in the collection. It included extensive references to earlier literature on the artifacts, along with a lengthy section of medical observations, but no illustrations. The work of 1737 shown here boasted a more lavish format, complete with two-color title page, engraved portrait, and plates illustrating items in the collection. Kundmann's collection was sold at public auction in 1753, and dispersed.
Basilius Besler (1561-1629).
Rariora Musei Besleriani quae olim Basilius et Michael Rupartus Besleri collegerunt. Ed. Johann Heinrich Lochner (1695-1715). [Nuremberg: s.n.,] 1716.
Call number: 814139, oversize.
Like many founders of early natural history collections, Besler was a pharmacist and supervised a botanical garden. His magnificent catalog of the garden of Prince Bishop of Eichstätt, Hortus Eystettensis (1613) is one of the most famous of flower books. An avid collector, he published a beautiful description of his museum in Fasciculus rariorum et aspectus dignorum varii generis quae collegit … curavit B. Besler (1616) and Continuatio rariorum … (1622), complete with a lively illustration of a gentleman displaying his cabinet. Besler's nephew, Michael Rupert Besler (1607-1661), inherited the collection, expanded it, and published his own account in Gazophylacium rerum naturalium e regno vegetabili, animali & minerali depromptarum (1642). A final, rather modest catalog, published in 1716, is exhibited here.
Part III (see slides)
Elias Ashmole (1617-1692).
Museum Tradescantianum, or A collection of rarities preserved at South-Lambeth neer [sic] London by John Tradescant. London: Printed by John Grismond, and are to be sold by Nathaneal Brooke …, 1656.
Call number: Thordarson T 2490.
The collecting of natural history and other rarities developed rather later in England than in Italy. The first significant collection was that of John Tradescant. Tradescant traveled frequently and far (even to Russia), developing his own collections and those of his patrons. In a large house and grounds in Lambeth near London, he and his son established a museum open to the public for a fee. The fame of "Tradescant's Ark" spread, and attracted royal visits and naturalists alike.
The modest book shown here was compiled and paid for by Elias Ashmole, with the help of the physician Thomas Wharton. The first printed catalog of an English museum, it is simply a catalog. Though dedicated to the Royal College of Physicians, it contained little by way of detail useful to physicians. It did, however, spread the fame of the collection, and attracting gifts from many benefactors. This copy came from the library of Ashmole's contemporary, Francis Willoughby (1635-1672), who had studied ornithological specimens in the Tradescant collection.
The Ashmolean Museum
A catalogue of the Ashmolean, descriptive of the zoological specimens, antiquities, coins, and miscellaneous curiosities. Oxford: Printed by S. Collingwood, 1836.
Call number: AM101 O82, reference.
Elias Ashmole, a controversial man of many reputations, figured prominently in the intellectual and social life of 17th-century England. Astrology, alchemy, botany, medicine, and mathematics were just a few of his enthusiasms; all paled, however, in comparison to his passion for collecting. Much of his large collection of books, coins, and artifacts was later destroyed by the Great Fire of 1666.
Ashmole's friendship with the Tradescants was cultivated perhaps with an eye to acquiring the contents of the “Ark,” and in 1659, on the death of his son, Tradescant deeded the museum to Ashmole. Ashmole acquired it only after much legal difficulty with Tradescant's widow. In 1683, Ashmole gave his collection to the University of Oxford, where it was established in separate quarters as the Ashmolean Museum.
Displayed here is the first printed catalog of the Ashmolean, showing the building and the School of Natural History.
Robert Plot (1640-1696).
The natural history of Oxford-shire being an essay toward the natural history of England. Oxford: Printed at the Theater in Oxford; and are to be had there and in London at Mr. S. Millers ..., 1677.
Call number: MV45 P72, oversize.
Edward Lhuyd (1660-1709).
Lithophylacii Britannici ichnographia. Editio altera novis quorundam speciminum iconibus aucta, subjicitur authoris praelectio de stellis marinis, &c. Oxford: E typographeo Clarendoniano [etc.], 1760.
Call number: 876060.
Martin Lister (1638?-1712).
Historiae animalium Angliae. London: Apud Joh. Martyn, 1678.
Call number: CA 160.
Historiae sive Synopsis methodicae conchyliorum et tabularum anatomicarum, edito altera. Recensuit et indicibus auxit Gulielmus Huddesford (1732-1772). Oxford: E Typographeo Clarendoniano, 1770. Includes engraved title page with same title. London: Aere incisus, sumptibus authoris, 1685. Susanna et Anna Lister Figuras pin.
Call number: CA 738, oversize.
Most naturalists formed collections in order to compile their own books rather than to create museums, though many such collections eventually found their way into museums. Robert Plot, the first curator of the Ashmolean, in the course of compiling his natural history of Oxfordshire, gathered many specimens which became part of the Ashmolean Museum. Edward Lhuyd, who succeeded Plot as curator, deposited all the specimens illustrated in his work on British fossils described in his Historia animalium Angliae. The beautiful Historiae…conchyliorum, with plates illustrating the shells from Lister's collection, was engraved by Lister's wife and daughter.
Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753).
Catalogus plantarum quae in Insula Jamaica sponte proveniunt. London: Impensis D. Brown, 1696.
Call number: NP974 SL5.
Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753).
A voyage to the islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica…in two volumes. Illustrated with figures of the things described, which have not been heretofore engraved; in large copper-plates as big as the life.London: Printed by B.M. for the Author, 1707-1725. Vol. 1 shown here.
Call number: 1179430 & 1179431, oversize.
Authentic copies of the codicils belonging to the last will and testament of Sir Hans Sloane. London: Printed (by order of the Executors) by Daniel Browne, 1753.
Call number: CA 6734.
The general contents of the British Museum: With remarks serving as a directory in viewing that noble cabinet. 2nd ed. London: Printed for R. and J. Dodsley, 1762.
Call number: AM101 B85 1762.
John van Rymsdyk (fl. 1750-88); Andrew van Rymsdyk (?-1780).
Museum Britannicum, or A display in thirty-two plates in antiquities and natural curiosities by John and Andrew van Rymsdyk, Pictors. 2nd ed., revised and corrected by P. Boyle. London: Printed for the Editor, by J. Moore, 1791.
Call number: Thordarson T 4136, flat.
Sir Hans Sloane, president of the Royal Society and of the Royal College of Physicians, was perhaps the most famous of all collectors of natural history, and the story of his immense collections and their eventual transformation into the British Museum is well known. Sloane never published a catalog, although apparently a 38-volume manuscript inventory was begun by Sloane and continued by his assistant James Empson.
Sloane's collection incorporated two notable 17th-century English cabinets -those of James Petiver (1658-1718) and William Charleton (1642-1702). Petiver, a London pharmacist and fellow of the Royal Society, acquired his collection largely through wide correspondence with travellers. In his account in the Philosophical transactions of the first fascicle of his catalog Musei Petiveriani (1695), Petiver exhorted all “practitioners in Physik, Sea-Surgeons or other curious persons who travel into foreign countries” to collect for him. Sloane was well acquainted with Petiver, and purchased his collection for £4000 after Petiver's death.
After three visits to Charleton's London house, John Evelyn described Charleton's cabinet as more impressive than any he had seen in all his trips abroad. Sloane, on his return from Jamaica, had given to Charleton, “my very particular and intimate friend, … whatever I brought with me, that he wanted in his extraordinary museum.” Charleton repaid this friendship many times over by bequeathing his collection, worth an estimated £8000, to Sloane. There was no printed catalog of Charleton's collection.
Sloane's own natural history collecting began with his voyage to Jamaica, where he served as physician to the royal governor from 1687 to 1689. Most of his plant specimens survive as the Sloane Herbarium in the British Museum, but the zoological specimens, after their transfer to what became the British Museum, had an unhappier fate: over the years they were discarded or destroyed because of decay or replaced by better specimens.
The botanical and zoological specimens formed the basis for his Catalogus plantarum and the two massive volumes of his Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica.
The Catalogus plantarum served as prologue to the large folios of the natural history of Jamaica. One of the best engravers in London, Michael vander Gucht (1660-1725), produced illustrations of flora for the latter, based on crayon drawings made in Jamaica and on Everhard Kickius' drawings from the dried specimens in Sloane's collection. Sloane's will provided for the acquisition of his vast collections by the British government and the eventual establishment of the British Museum. Displayed here is a copy of Sloane's will, the first printed catalog of the British Museum, in which most of the entries describe the Collectio Sloanianai, and finally, the more impressive, illustrated second catalog of the British Museum, that by John and Andrew Van Rymsdyk.
Part IV (see slides)
Conrad Gesner (1516-1565).
Conradi Gesneri historia plantarum. Facsimile edition. Ed. Heinrich Zoller, Martin Steinmann, and Karl Schmid. Dietikon-Zürich: Urs Graf-Verlag, [1972- ].
Call number: CA 5060, oversize.
Before his death from plague in 1565, Gesner had completed work enough for a whole faculty; but the great encyclopedia of botany, Historia plantarum, to which he had devoted so much of his energies and interest, remained a chaotic mass of manuscripts and drawings. His literary executor, unable to bring it to publication, sold it in 1580 to Nuremberg botanist Joachim Camerarius (the younger), who pirated some of the illustrations for his own work but did not publish the text. In 1744 the huge manuscript passed to Christoph Jacob Trew, who enlisted Casimir Christoph Schmidel, a professor of botany at Erlangen, to publish Gesner's Opera botanica. Two large folio volumes with hand-colored plates appeared in 1754 and 1771.
Gesner's manuscript then disappeared until its rediscovery in 1929 by Bernard Milt, a Swiss historian of science. The watercolor illlustrations prepared by Gesner, which are now in the library of the University of Erlangen, have been reproduced in facsimile in large, handsomely produced volumes.
Some collectors included scientific instruments and mechanical models in their cabinets; others, especially practicing natural philosophers, assembled working and teaching collections of such instruments. Both are represented in these two wall cases. Also represented is a popular genre of books that began to appear in the last quarter of the 16th century: the so-called theaters of machines.
Even though these books represent no actual collections of machines, they can be viewed as akin to printed natural history catalogs. They advertised the newly invented, advanced the prestige of the inventor, and demonstrated to practitioner or artisan the use of the artifacts in question.
Jacques Besson (?-1573).
Theatre des instrumens mathematiques et mechaniques. Geneva: Par Jacques Chouët [et Jean de Laon], 1594.
Call number: 724794, oversize.
The earliest of the theaters of machines, that of Besson, enjoyed multiple editions. The first was evidently published without text altogether, and was followed by French, Latin, Italian, German, and Spanish editions over three decades. Besson himself held the title Master of the King's Engines under Charles IX of France, and the publication of his Théatre enjoyed royal subsidy. Most apparatus depicted in theaters of machines was large in scale — capable of spanning rivers, raising ores and obelisks, demolishing enemy fortifications — but there were also handheld measuring instruments, as illustrated in Besson's work.
Heinrich Zeising (?-1613).
Theatri machinarum. So in sechs Theil bestehend ... Mehrtheils aus fremden Sprachen versetzt durch Hieronymum Megesium. Leipzig: In Verlegung Friedrich Lanckischens Erben, 1673.
Call number: 1377420 noncurrent.
The German text of this theater of machines was based on similar works not in German; many of the plates are likewise derivative. The first edition appeared shortly after Zeising's death. Included here is an edition of 1673.
Christian Heinrich Eilenburg.
Description du Cabinet Roial de Dresde touchant l'histoire naturelle. Dresden and Leipzig: Ches [sic] George Conrad Walther, 1755.
Call number: CA 15472.
This catalog, with text in French and German, represents the reorganization of the old Wunderkammer of Dresden into numerous specialized collections, in which the odd and curious — gold and silver "transmuted" from copper and lead — still had a place. The last chapter described a model of Solomon's temple. Foldout engraved floor plans showed the arrangement of collections, fountains, and landscaping.
Nicolas Grollier de Servière (1677-1745).
Recueil d'ouvrages curieux de mathématique et de mécanique, ou Description du cabinet de Monsieur Grollier de Servière. 2nd ed. Lyons: D. Forey, 1733.
Call number: 764793.
Grollier de Servière, French army officer and engineer, invented a number of the machines depicted and described in this work. This is the second, enlarged edition of the description of his cabinet; the first appeared in 1719. Clocks and automata often figured in both cabinets of curiosities and theaters of machines.
Joseph Sigaud de la Fond (1730-1810).
Description et usage d'un cabinet de physique experimentale. 2 vols. Paris: Chez P. Fr. Gueffier, 1775.
Call number: Cole Coll C 1256.
Sigaud de la Fond, one of the most influential and popular of French 18th-century lecturers in natural philosophy, relied in his teaching on an extensive collection of “philosophical instruments.” A measure of his prestige was this two-volume catalog describing his cabinet de physique expérimentale and its use. The work also served as advertisement, as the page facing the title page suggests: “The Author begins teaching his physics course every year after the feast of St. Martin, in his cabinet of machines, rue St. Jacques ….”
Nehemiah Grew (1641-1712).
Musæum regalis societatis. Or a catalogue & description of the natural and artificial rarities belonging to the Royal Society and preserved at Gresham Colledge [sic]. Whereunto is subjoyned the comparative anatomy of stomachs and guts. London: Printed by W. Rawlins, for the Author, 1681.
Call number: Thordarson T 1845, oversize.
The Royal Society of London was the only scientific society founded in the 17th century to establish and maintain a sort of museum. In 1666 the Society announced the acquisition of an important cabinet of curiosities, that of Robert Hubert, described two years before in a work entitled A catalogue of many natural rarities ... dayly to be seen at the place called the Musick House at the Miter, near the west end of St. Pauls Church. Already in the hands of the Society was the collection of one of its founders, John Wilkins. Together, Hubert's and Wilkins' collections comprised the Society's Repository, which the Society hoped would grow through further donations.
The botanist Nehemiah Grew published his description of the Society's Musæum in 1681, after false starts by Hooke and John Aubrey. In arguing for the broadest possible gathering of specimens, Grew criticized the practice, so common to most cabinets, of emphasizing the unusual, obscure, and astonishing. In the end, even the Society's own Repository, by its reliance on gifts, reflected more the interests of amateur naturalists and collectors and less the full Baconian inventory of nature intended by its founders. Ultimately, the Society offered its Repository to the British Museum in 1779.
Grew's catalog also included a listing, unillustrated, of the Society's experimental apparatus. The section entitled “Of Things relating to the Mathematicks, and some Mechanics” included such items as a reflecting telescope contrived by Newton, an instrument for multiplying and dividing numbers, two dipping needles “designed for the taking of longitudes,” and, less predictably, a “tamahauke, or Brasilian Fighting-Club” and a “Quiver made of the Skin of the Beast, somewhat like the Pig-Badger.” Listing such curiosities as the “tamahauke” and quiver must, we assume, have galled Grew.
Agostino Ramelli (1531-ca. 1600).
Le diverse et artificiose machine. Paris: In casa del' autore, 1588.
Call number: 38332, oversize.
Out of fear that the detailed engravings in his theater of machines would be pirated, Ramelli, who served as military engineer to Henry III of France, also served as his own publisher. Böckler's work shows that Ramelli's fears were not unfounded.
Georg Andreas Böckler (fl. 1648-1685).
Theatrum machinarum novum, das ist, Neu-vermehrter Schauplatz der mechanischen Künsten. Nuremberg: In Verlegung Paulus Fürsten, gedruckt bey Christoff Gerhard, 1661.
Call number: 972042 noncurrent, oversize.
This handsome volume imitated 16th-century machinery books in more than format: it contained 18 plates copied from Ramelli alone. The reversal of images is the product of tracing the Ramelli originals onto the new copperplates.