THE PAPER MUSEUM

THE PAPER MUSEUM OF CASSIANO DAL POZZO

CITRUS FRUIT

THE PAPER MUSEUM OF CASSIANO DAL POZZO

SERIES B - PART I

David Freedberg and Enrico Baldini

CITRUS FRUIT

Introduction by Francis Haskell and Henrietta McBurney

The ‘Museo Cartaceo’ or ‘Paper Museum’, a collection of over 7,000 drawings assembled by the great seventeenth-century antiquary and natural scientist Cassiano dal Pozzo, constitutes one of the most remarkable projects in the history of collecting. While part of the collection is a significant record of classical and medieval antiquities, the 3,000 or so representations of natural history subjects provide the visual evidence for some of the most crucial developments in the modern study of palaeontology, mycology, botany and zoology.

The present volume catalogues a series of spectacular drawings of citrus fruit in watercolour and gouache, most of which were commissioned to illustrate Giovanni Battista Ferrari’s Hesperides, an ambitious attempt at a complete taxonomy and classification of the entire citrological world, which was published in Rome in 1646. Cassiano dal Pozzo played a fundamental role in this project. Acting as something of an impresario, he carried out a considerable portion of the preliminary research, organized much of the necessary funding, collected the bulk of the first-hand citrological material from gardeners, noblemen, clerics and even ship’s captains all over Italy and gathered information from his correspondents across Europe. It was also he who commissioned and supplied most of the drawings and then arranged for them to be engraved for Ferrari’s projected work.

The citrus drawings — grouped in the Catalogue under the headings of citrons, lemons, oranges, pummelos, hybrids, monstrosities and unidentified citrus fruit — are reproduced in full colour and are accompanied by a wealth of comparative material which includes the Hesperides engravings, additional drawings and photographs of actual specimens, mainly of the monstrous kind. In addition to detailed scientific descriptions of the specimens themselves, the catalogue also gives art historical information on watermarks, annotations, types of mount, provenance and literature.

The introductory essays explain Cassiano’s method of gathering information from a network of correspondents around Europe and consider the relationship between these drawings and other natural history subjects commissioned by Cassiano. The authors discuss the work of the artists involved in the project and assess the major contribution made to the classification of citrus fruit by the collaborative efforts of Cassiano and Ferrari.

344 pages, 282 illustrations, 116 in colour Bibliography, Concordances, Indexes

Buy this book from Amazon.co.uk