journal of the history of collections · 2012. 4. 16. · paula findlen this essay investigates the...

Journal of the History of Collections i no. i (1989) pp. 59-78

THE MUSEUM: ITS CLASSICALETYMOLOGY AND RENAISSANCE

GENEALOGYPAULA FINDLEN

This essay investigates the social and linguistic construction o/musaeum in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture. As aconcept which expressed a pattern of activity transcending the strict confines of museum itself, the idea o/musaeum was an aptmetaphor for the encyclopaedic tendencies of the age. Mediating between public and private space, between the humanistic notionof collecting as a textual strategy and the social demands of prestige and display fulfilled by a collection, musaeum was anepistemological structure which encompassed a variety of ideas, images and institutions that were central to late Renaissanceculture.

It is never a waste of time to study the history of a word.

LUCIEN FEBVRE

'MUSEUM,' wrote the Jesuit Claude Clemens, 'mostaccurately is the place where the Muses dwell.'1 Toinvestigate the museums of the late Renaissance, wemust first begin with the word itself. Musaeum. Howdid it function in contemporary usage and to whatsort of structures—intellectual, institutional andotherwise—did it allude? On a general level, thisstudy explores the ways in which musaeum structuredsignificant aspects of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture. As a concept which expressed apattern of activity transcending the strict confines ofmuseum itself, the idea of musaeum was an aptmetaphor for the encyclopaedic tendencies of theperiod. Most compelling about the usage of the termmusaeum was its ability to be inserted into a widerange of discursive practices. Linguistically, musaeumwas a bridge between social and intellectual life,moving effortlessly between these two realms, and infact pointing to the fluidity and instability ofcategories such as 'social' and 'intellectual', and'public' and 'private', as they were defined during thelate Renaissance. From a philological standpoint, itspeculiar expansiveness allowed it to cross and con-fuse the intellectual and philosophical categories ofbibliotheca, thesaurus, and pandechion with visual con-structs such as cornucopia and gazophylacium, andspatial constructs such as studio, casino, cabinet/gabinetto, galleria and theatro, creating a rich andcomplex terminology that described significantaspects of the intellectual and cultural life of earlymodern Europe while alluding to its social configura-

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tion.2 Mediating between private and public space,between the monastic notion of study as a contem-plative activity, the humanistic notion of collecting asa textual strategy and the social demands of prestigeand display fulfilled by a collection, musaeum was anepistemological structure which encompassed avariety of ideas, images and institutions that werecentral to late Renaissance culture.

My purpose here is to consider the social andcultural definitions of musaeum and the vocabulary ofcollecting. In organizing my discussion initiallyaround the language of collecting and then aroundthe conceptual spheres within which such termscirculated, I base my work on the premise that adetailed socio-linguistic analysis of certain keywords—in this instance those encompassing theexperience of collecting—provides insight into thecultural processes of past societies.

The word musaeum, however, is merely a startingpoint: a means of entering a wide range of philo-sophical discussions of knowing, perceiving andclassifying that emerged in the humanistic and ency-clopaedic traditions which collectors embraced andultimately transformed during the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries. Through this approach, amanifest taxonomy of terms emerges. Althoughscores of words described collecting, collections andmuseum-like activities, no one term was as compre-hensive as musaeum itself. While the rich andvariegated vocabulary of collecting emerged from amultitude of social practices and intellectual tradi-tions, the use of these terms was regulated by theirrelationship to musaeum—the most expansive modelfor the activity of collecting. The idea of musaeum

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provided the syntax in which the grammar of collect-ing could be played out; to borrow Baudrillard'sphrase, it was structured as 'an immense combin-atorial matrix of types and models' that expanded, asneeded, to incorporate the new and diverse para-digms of collecting which arose.3

Examining a word as rich and complex asmuseum—a word very much in transition during thisperiod—we learn much about the society that trans-formed its definition and the territorial implicationsof its usage. For the museum was certainly an attemptto make sense of the collector's environment; henceits structure was inherently dependent on contem-porary discursive practices. As Robert Harbisonargues, the museum was—and still is—an 'eccentricspace', a setting peculiarly susceptible to the culturalstrategies of its creators.4 As a repository of pastactivities, created in the mirror of the present, themuseum was above all a dialectical structure whichserved as a meeting point in which the historicalclaims of the present were invoked in memory of thepast.

Our current use of the term 'museum' places itentirely within the public and institutional domain.Yet the original usage emphasized its private andexclusionary functions. The transition of the museumfrom private to public, from an exclusive to an inclus-ive construct, in a period in which the relationshipbetween 'private' and 'public' activity was signi-ficantly redefined,5 suggests that the museum didnot evolve in isolation, but was deeply and pro-foundly formulated by the pattern of sixteenth- andseventeenth-century society.

The Humanists rediscover the Muses

'At last my little Museum merits such a name,' wroteGiacomo Scafili to Athanasius Kircher upon receiptof his book, 'now rich and complete with theMusurgia, the great work and gift of you, Father; evenif there were nothing else in it save for this lone book,it could rightfully be called the room of the Muses[stanza delle Muse] because the book contains themall."

The etymology of museum is itself a fascinatingsubject for study. While the practice of collectingemerged primarily in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, we need to understand its background toappreciate the role of medieval and early Renaissancelearning in setting the stage for the widespreadappearance of museums in the early modern period.Rejecting the classification of the collection at the

Roman College as a galleria, a term referring primar-ily to its physical organization and to collections'made solely for their magnificence', the JesuitFilippo Bonanni, who restored Athanasius Kircher'smuseum to its original splendour at the end of theseventeenth century, explained:

Nor is the collection in question here of this kind, because itis improperly named Galleria. One should more properlysay Museo, a term originating from the Greek according toPliny, which means the same as Dominiculum Musis dicatumpro diversorio erudilorunt, which Strabo refers to in his lastbook, apudAlexandriam fuisse Museum celebratissimum. Spartandiscusses it in his life of Adrian, saying: Apud Alexandriam inMusio multas questiones Professoribus proposuit . . . or, asmusaeum alludes, one says a place dedicated to the Muses

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Originally musaeum had two definitions. It was mosttraditionally the place consecrated to the Muses (locusmusts sacer), a mytiiological setting inhabited by thenine goddesses of poetry, music, and the liberal arts.8

'They are called Muses,' wrote the Chevalier deJaucourt, 'from a Greek word which signifies "toexplain the mysteries", /zvsiv, because they havetaught men very curious and important things whichare from there brought to the attention of the vulgar.'And, as the Encyclopedie article continued, 'The nameof Muses, goddesses and protectresses of the FineArts, was uncontestably the source of museum."More specifically, musaeum referred to the famouslibrary at Alexandria, the fiovotiov described byStrabo, which served as a research centre and con-gregating point for the scholars of the classicalworld.10 Even in its original usage, musaeum wastransformed into an institutional setting in which thecultural resources of a community were ordered andassembled, implying that the classical writers too hadrecognized the expansiveness of museum as acategory of experience.

The fact that the classical conception of museumdid not confine itself either spatially or temporallywas important for its later usage. As Pliny and Varroremind us, nature was the primary haunt of theMuses, and therefore a 'museum' in the most literalsense. Pliny's conflation of grotto and museum in hisNatural History further emphasized the image ofmuseum as a potentially pastoral setting, a contem-plative place found in nature." Given the passion forconstructing grottoes in the gardens of RenaissanceEurope, it is obvious that nature's potential to beperceived as a museum expanded in the intricateinterplay between art and nature that unfolded in thefamous gardens—Boboli, Bomarzo and Pratolino to

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cite only a few—of the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies.12

In a seminal study of late Renaissance and Baroqueculture entitled L 'Anti-Rinascimento, Eugenio Battisticharacterized the garden as a 'conceptual system."3

The same might well be said of the museum as itevolved during this period; in its crystallization as acategory which incorporated and ultimately unified avariety of—from our own perspective—seeminglydisparate activities, the museum was indeed a centralorganizing principle for cultural activity by the latesixteenth century. It was a conceptual system throughwhich collectors interpreted and explored the worldthey inhabited. 'Those places in which one veneratedthe Muses were called Museums,' explainedTeodoro Bondini in his preface to the 1677 catalogueof Ferdinando Cospi's museum in Bologna. 'Like-wise I know you will have understood that, although agreat portion of the Ancients approved of the nameMuse only for the guardianship of Song and Poetry,none the less many others wished to incorporate allknowledge under such a name.'14 Thus the museum,as the nexus of all disciplines, became an attempt topreserve, if not fully to reconstitute, the encyclo-paedic programme of the classical and medievalworld, translated into the humanist projects of thesixteenth century, and later die pansophic vision ofuniversal wisdom that was a leitmotif of seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century culture.

If musaeum was indeed a place consecrated to theMuses, dien the Renaissance itself can be describedas a 'museum'; more than any odier period, thecultural and intellectual programmes of the periodfrom the fourteenth to the seventeenth centurymanifested an overwhelming concern with the verydisciplines patronized by the Muses. Tellingly,musaeum was a term little used during the MiddleAges; at best it was related to the idea of stadium, for itdoes not seem to have had any independent meaningof its own, save for scattered references to its classicalroots, until the late sixteenth century. As LilianeChatelet-Lange points out in her study of sculpturecollections, as late as the sixteenth century musee didnot appear in any French dictionary.15 In reviving theliberal arts, the humanists self-consciously placedthemselves in the grove of the Muses, creating'museums' as they did so, to stress their direct tieswith ancient wisdom. 'Almost all other rich mensupport servants of pleasure,' wrote Marsilio Ficinoto Lorenzo de' Medici regarding his patronage ofhumanists, 'but you support priests of the Muses.'16

References to the Muses are abundant in the texts of

the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 'The wood-land pleases the Muses,' observed Petrarch, 'the cityis hostile to the poets.'17 The attitude that decreed itnecessary to separate oneself from public life in orderfully to engage in intellectual activity—a monasticideal translated into the language of humanism-persisted well into the sixteenth century. As August-ine queried of Petrarch in their imagined dialogue inPetrarch's Secretum:

Do you remember with what delight you used to wander inthe depth of the country? . . . Never idle, in your mind youwould ponder over some high meditation, with only theMuses as your companions—you were never less alone thanwhen in their company . . ."

For Petrarch and his contemporaries, the image ofthe Muses, and concomitantly of musaeum, wasdirectly tied to their personal and collective attemptsto enter die world of antiquity, regardless of temporaland physical constraints.

More than the claims of erudition or the revival ofclassical texts through philology, humanism wasstructured around the objects that served as a basisfor most intellectual and cultural activities. Whetherit was the Roman ruins that occupied Ciriacod'Ancona and Francesco Colonna,19 which graduallyemerged as more than just a clutter of objects todefine 'antiquity' from the late fourteenth centuryonwards, or the jumble of natural objects that servedas the basis for a new reading of nature in die works ofRenaissance natural philosophers such as Aldro-vandi, Cesalpino, Gesner, and Mattioli, the philo-sophical programmes that constituted Renaissancehumanism could not have existed without the pro-liferation of artefacts that provided food for diought.Humanism was primarily an archaeological enter-prise in the sense that it reified scholarship by trans-lating vague antiquarian and philosophical concernsinto specific projects, whose existence was predicatedupon the possession of objects. From this perspect-ive, die proliferation of museums in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries can be seen as a logical out-come of the desire to gather materials for a text. Thepursuit and revival of classical language, literature,and philosophy that have most commonly beenidentified as the core of die humanists' programmescould not have arisen without die recognition diat thepiles of information, scattered throughout the world,might be shown to mean something were diey to bebrought into die study and compared: collecting wasabout the confrontation of ideas and objects, as oldcosmologies met new ways of perceiving, that fuelled

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the learned and curious discourses of early modernEurope.

More importantly, the museum fulfilled the newsense of history as sketched by the humanists. 'Anti-quity' could only serve as a reference point to'modernity' once the two had been defined as beinginherently more 'advanced' (and therefore compat-ible) than the intermediary period that Petrarchwould call the Middle Ages. Thus the direct linkbetween contemporary museums and the ancientmusaeum stressed the classical images of eruditionand learning to reinforce the image of the Renais-sance as a newly constituted version of the etymo-logically ordained home of the Muses.

Reviewing the classical literature on musaeum, it isevident that the idea of collecting was simultaneouslyan open and a closed concept. While gardens andgroves were museums without walls, unlocatable intime or even place, the conflation of study withmusaeum spatially confined it. The comparative andtaxonomic functions of humanist collecting needed adefined space in which to operate, in part to identifythe producers of and the audience for the museum,that is, the intellectual elite of the Renaissance whoidentified themselves as patrons of learning; thusmusaeum was a locating principle, circumscribing thespace in which learned activities could occur.

The growth of humanist circles in the courts,churches, academies and publishing houses offifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe signalled thebeginnings of a more social and contemporaneoussetting for the Muses. Praising the writing of Lorenzode' Medici inspired by the 'vernacular Muses', thephilosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola clearlydelineated the difference between professional andamateur notions of scholarship within a humanisticframework. 'To them [Dante and Petrarch] theMuses were their ordinary and principle employ-ment,' remarked Pico, 'to you, an amusement and arelaxation from cares.'20 Developing the Ciceroniantheme of intellectual activity as the complement ofand ideal preparation for the vita activa, Pico laudedLorenzo's ability to combine stadium with otium.

By the sixteenth century, museums as studies pro-liferated throughout Europe, claiming direct inherit-ance from their classical antecedents. Perhaps themost explicit example of the Muse-Museum analogyoccurred in the decoration of Paolo Giovio's museumnear Como. Built on the supposed ruins of Pliny'sfabled villa at Borgo Vico between 1538 and 1543,Giovio's museo fulfilled its classical paradigm to theletter and became the prototype for many other

museums which followed. Visiting the villa shortlyafter its completion in 1543, Anton Francesco Doniwrote to Agostino Landi of its wonderous contents.He particularly praised 'a most miraculous Roomdepicting all of the muses one by one with theirinstruments . . . [which] . . . one calls properly theMuseum.'21 Equally we can point to Leonellod'Este's studio at Ferrara, decorated with images ofthe Muses, or Federigo da Montefeltro's Tempiettodelle Muse, strategically located below his famousstudiolo at Urbino.22 In all of these instances, formrevealed function; for the images reinforced the con-templative and literally 'museaF purpose of therooms.

The culmination of this phase of humanism,emphasizing the dialectical relationship betweenactive and contemplative purposes of study, is bestillustrated by a famous and often-cited passage fromMachiavelli. In a letter of 1513 to the Florentineambassador to Rome, Francesco Vettori, Machiavellielegantly suggested the ways in which his personalrelationship with the study of antiquity shaped hisintellectual and political life. Describing his dailyactivities in exile, Machiavelli underscored thefacility with which he translated his persona from onecontext to another:

In the morning, I get up with the sun and go out into a grovethat I am having cut; there I remain a coupie of hours to lookover the work of the past day and kill some time with thewoodsmen, who always have on hand some dispute eitheramong themselves or among their neighbours . . . When Ileave the grove, I go to a spring, and from there into myaviary. I have a book in my pocket, either Dante or Petrarchor one of the minor poets, as Tibullus, Ovid and the like. Iread about their tender passions and their loves, remembermine, and take pleasure for a while in thinking about them.Then I go along the road to the inn, talk with those who passby, ask the news of their villages, learn various things, andnote the varied tastes and different fancies of men . . . In theevening, I return to my house and go into my study[scrittoio]. At the door I take off the clothes I have worn allday, mud spotted and dirty, and put on regal and courtlygarments. Thus appropriately clothed, I enter into theancient courts of ancient men, where, being lovinglyreceived, I feed on the food which is mine alone and which Iwas born for; I am not ashamed to speak with them and toask the reasons for their actions, and they courteouslyanswer me. For four hours I feel no boredom and forgetevery worry; I do not fear poverty, and death does not terrifyme. I give myself completely over to the ancients."

What is particularly interesting to note here is theway in which Machiavelli utilized both the pastoraland monastic ideals of musaeum, interspersing his

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moments of intellectual reprieve with more sociablepractices, to develop one of the most politically awarestatements of the early sixteenth century, The Prince

Yet at the same time it is obvious that he con-sidered his study an inner sanctum—'cubiculumsecretius, ubiquis studio velscripturaevacat', as Du Cangedescribed it.24 More closely, Machiavelli's scrittoioresembled the cubiculum in which Poggio Braccioliniconducted his studies of antiquity in the earlyfifteenth century.25 Like Tasso's Malpiglio, Machi-avelli entered his studio to flee the multitude (Juggir lamoltitudine).u We are still far from the institutionalideal of cultural activity as connoted by the currentuse of museum. None the less it is important to notethe specific grounding of intellectual (or rathermuseum-like) activities in the context of the studio. 'Iwish to bring together all of my books, writings andmaterials for study [cose da studio],' wrote the prelateand papal nuncio Ludovico Beccadelli in 1555 to hiscousin, who was planning a studio for Beccadelli'ssecretary, Antonio Giganti, upon his return toBologna. Later in the century, the humanist Gigantidescribed his collection as 'my studio, more thanstudio one calls it a collection of various foreign andnatural trinkets.'27 For the sixteenth- andseventeenth-century humanists and collectors, morethan their predecessors, it was the explicit identifica-tion between musaeum and studio, and a number ofother terms discussed below, that shaped the socialand ultimately the public function of the museum.

Encyclopaedic Strategies

At first instance, the Renaissance notion of museumdefined imaginary space. Born of the humanist desireto codify the intellectual experience of the self-proclaimed scholar, it was a methodological premisethat translated itself into a wide variety of social andcultural forms.

One of the most important intellectual traditionswith which the practice of collecting aligned itselfwas that of encyclopaedism. While the medievalencyclopaedic tradition emphasized knowledge as acontinuum, an unbroken plane of information, thesixteenth- and seventeenth-century encyclopaedictradition delighted in discontinuities.28 Nowhere wasthis more evident than in the structure of themuseum. Using the term musaeum as a starting point,we can trace the foliation of this structure, as wordafter word from the encyclopaedic corpus—theatre,treasure, mirror, forest, and microcosm to list only a

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few—became identified with the language of collect-ing. My purpose here is to relate the presence ofmuseums to the explosion of encyclopaedic tradi-tions, both old and new, that supported and shapedthe activity of collecting through the explicit identifi-cation of musaeum with encyclopaedic paradigms.

On a more abstract level, the process of wideningthe horizons of musaeum operated in a fashion similarto the premise of the Renaissance encyclopaedia.Musaeum became the axis through which all otherstructures of collecting, categorizing, and knowingintersected; interweaving words, images, and things,it provided a space common to all.29

The use of the term musaeum was not confined onlyto the tangible; museum was foremost a mentalcategory and collecting a cognitive activity that couldbe appropriated for social and cultural ends. As anironic comment on the construction of collections inthe late seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Brownecreated a guidebook to an imaginary museum entitledthe Museum Clausum, or Bibliotheca Abscondita ('TheEnclosed Museum or Secret Library'). 'I am Bold topresent you with a list of a collection, which I mayjustly say you have not seen before.'30 Dismissing theencyclopaedic projects of Aldrovandi, Gesner,Kircher, and other subscribers to the Aristotelian andPlinian paradigms, Browne invoked the mentalstructure of collecting to attack its premise, creating amuseum so complete and so closed that no one hadever penetrated it. Filling in the gaps in his hypo-thetical museum of knowledge with improbablemarginalia—a cross made out of a frog's bone, theworks of Confucius in Spanish and the like—he criti-cized the epistemological framework of the museumwhich gave a macrocosmic gloss to every object itencountered. 'I have heard some with deep sighslament the lost lines of Cicero; others with as manygroans deplore the combustion of the library of Alex-andria: for my own part, I think there be too many inthe world, and could with patience behold the urnand ashes of the Vatican.'31

In asking ourselves to what extent the language ofcollecting penetrated other activities, we need first toconsider the fact that the descriptive models ofcollecting co-opted the linguistic paradigms ofencyclopaedism. Certainly the expansion of categor-ies such as teatro and cornucopia, words relevant in amuch more general context which initially held littleor no meaning for collecting, suggests that thecollectors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesdrew on a broad humanistic heritage in developingmore precise and differentiated ways to articulate the

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experience of musaeum. A museum was not the only'theatre of nature'; Kircher described Sicily in exactlythe same words due to the natural diversity andfecundity that he observed in his visit to the islandduring the eruption of Vesuvius in 1660." From thesame perspective, the microscope was 'both recept-acle and Theatre of the most miraculous Works ofNature' because the lens created a panoramic effect,reinforcing the relativity between museum as theatreand the theatrum mundiP

The language of collecting during this period alsosupported the conflation of museum and theatre.Francesco Calzolari's natural history collection was amuseum because it was gathered 'dum uno in theatro,aut Musaeo.' Or as Giovanni Porro wrote of themuseum in the botanical garden at Padua, 'And inthis little Theatre, almost a little world, one willorchestrate the spectacle of all of nature's wonders.'14

Similarly the ideal of a studio was a closed space: aroom without windows that achieved completenessthrough closure.33

Musaeum was a classificatory structure for a widevariety of texts, whose sorting and organizing pro-cesses fulfilled the taxonomic principle of collection.Numerous books—ranging from collections of poetrysuch as Lorenzo Legati's Musei Poetriarum (1668) toMabillon and Germain's famous guidebook, theMuseum Italicum (1687-89)—utilized the image ofmuseum to denote the process of compiling andcollating.36

Similarly the logic of collecting supported the useof parallel structures to describe the mental processof collecting. In 1549 Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605)was called to Rome on suspicion of heresy. Quicklycleared of the charges, Aldrovandi spent the rest ofthe year exploring the ancient ruins of the city. Theresulting book, Delle statue romane antiche (1556), wasone of the first guidebooks to antiquarian collectionsin Rome. Reflecting on the process of writing thetreatise, Aldrovandi emphasized the ways in whichthe creation of the book itself had taken the shape of a'museum' (scrivere et raccogliere, come in un Theatro)}1

Written and collected in the 'theatre' or rathermuseum of the mind, Aldrovandi's words gaveexpression to the breadth of the encyclopaedic spiritthat guided the collecting projects of the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries.38

Emphasizing the diversity, variety, and above allthe copiousness of the Museum Hermeticum (1678), theanonymous editor assured his readers that they wereabout to enter a museum of alchemy that reduced theliterature on this subject to a manageable entity.3'

PAULA FINDLEN

Similarly the emerging scientific journals oftenincluded words such as 'repository', 'collection', and'museum' in their titles to underline the reductivenature of the enterprise, for the pages formed intel-lectual walls in the same way that the perfect shape ofthe theatre closed and completed a concept. If adictionary, a collection of words, could be called agalleria di parole, as the first Crusca vocabulary was,then it was evident that almost any book which func-tioned in a similar manner would also fall under therubric of'museum'.40

The language used to describe museum cataloguesbest illustrates the flexible relationship between textand context. If nature, for example, was the text fromwhich the Renaissance naturalists chose their mater-ials, then their museums were literally the 'con-texts';likewise the textuality of the artefacts was borne outby the catalogues which described and representedthem. The apothecary Ferrante Imperato wasdescribed by contemporaries as the 'author of so richand celebrated a Museum'—an authorship attestednot only by the publication of his Historia naturale(1599), but more concretely by the existence of histheatre of nature. Aldrovandi described his fellowcollector Calzolari's catalogue as 'his printedMuseum', again to distinguish it from the equallytangible one that he visited in Verona in 1571;similarly Kircher's assistant Gaspar Schott asked forthe Galleria descritta while writing his book on uni-versal magic. The Milanese cleric Manfredo Settala,on the other hand, distinguished between his 'ver-nacular Museum' and his Latin museum as texts fortwo different types of audiences.41 The catalogue as 'areduced Museum' or 'little Museum' functioned asthe museum's own microcosm.42 The encyclopaedicprocess was one that needed to unfold from begin-ning to end; like Russian dolls or Chinese boxes,there was always the anticipation of an even smaller,overlapping version of the preceding object.

Beyond museum catalogues, most collectorsunderstood their writings to belong to the largervision of the encyclopaedic enterprise. Remarking onthe richness of Hernandez's descriptions of Mexicanflora and fauna, which had recently come into thepossession of the Accademia dei Lincei, Marc Welsercommented that the manuscript 'merits the name oftreasure [thesoro] and not of book'. The founder of thesame academy, Federico Cesi, described his ownresearch as a 'Theatre of Nature', a term mostfrequently used for the natural history collections ofthe period.43

Aldrovandi designated his own publication

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schemes as 'the history of my Museum'. At times hismanuscripts were referred to more simply as themusaeum itself, and they were certainly remarkedupon by visitors as being one of the richest aspects ofhis legacy.44 The text, as storia, furnished what thecollection could not, completing it in the process.'Besides what I have lately observed in my Museum, Ihave also written a history entitled the Thesaurus rerumnaturalium ... here one will find all of the things . . .that are not in our Museum.' Urging his brotherFrancesco to underwrite the publication of Aldro-vandi's texts as early as 1576, Ferdinando de' Medicipraised the manuscripts as 'almost a part of thatstudio'.*s The museum was located neither in the textnor in the context; rather it was the interplay betweenthe two that shaped its function and completed itspurpose.

Museums were textual structures both in a literaland figurative sense. Created from the materialsavailable to the Renaissance collector, they served asreference points for the reading that the humanisteducational programme required of the educatedelite. In understanding why a collector acquired orcoveted a particular object, one needed to participatein the textual strategy of encyclopaedism. 'Moreoverhow much light would we glean from interpreting thepassages of writers, principally Pliny, if we had insight those things which he told only with words,'lamented Federico Borromeo in his Musaeum(1625).46 The existence of the museum testified to thememory of the texts which shaped it, creating copiesof'originals' that had long since disappeared.

In a classical and medieval sense, most compendiawere museums because, like Pliny's Natural History orthe medieval encyclopaedias, they compiled andstored knowledge in a comprehensive fashion. AsPliny outlined in the preface to his monumental work:

[It] is not books but store-houses [thesauros] that areneeded; consequently by perusing about 2000 volumes, veryfew of which, owing to the abstruseness of their contents[secretium materiae] are ever handled by students, we havecollected in 36 volumes 20,000 noteworthy facts obtainedfrom one hundred authors that we have explored, with agreat number of other facts in addition that were eitherignored by our predecessors or have been discovered bysubsequent experience.47

Such a literal and quantitative schematization wasalso evident in the acquisitive nature of Renaissancecollecting. Surely Aldrovandi's and Gesner's dreamsof an alphabetically organized, perfect universefulfilled (or at least attempted to fulfill) Pliny's

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encyclopaedic paradigm. Like Pliny, Aldrovandi wasobsessed with the size of his collection; not a weekpassed without his re-counting the total number of'facts' he had accumulated. 'If I wanted to describethe variety of fish observed, depicted and dried byme, that can be seen by everyone in our microcosm,truly it would be necessary to consume many pagessimply to name them .. .'48 The collector's activitywas one that absorbed him completely; whenJacopino Bronzino described Aldrovandi as 'con-sumed in the history of natural things'4' he aptly sum-marized the encyclopaedic passion for workingwithin one's material, allowing it to absorb thescholar in the process.

'[I am] hoping to see something beautiful in yourcare,' wrote Aldrovandi to Alfonso Pancio, physicianto the d'Este family in Ferrara, 'not ever being satedby the learning of new things. Not a week passes—Iwill not say a day—in which I am not sent somethingspecial. Nor is it to be wondered at, because thisscience of nature is as infinite as our knowledge.'50

Drawing upon Pliny's list of Greek titles in themanner of Giovio, Aldrovandi named his largestproject, under which all others were to be subsumed,the Pandechion Epistemonicon, which he defined as 'auniversal forest of knowledge, by means of which onewill find whatever the poets, theologians, lawmakers,philosophers and historians . . . have written on anynatural or artificial thing one wished to know about orcompose.>S1 Throughout the half-century in whichAldrovandi was active as a collector he constantlystrove to fill the space he had created. Words, images,and texts were all incorporated into the universalencyclopaedia of knowledge that he visualized.

The omnipresence of Aldrovandi's pandechionevidenced itself in his flexible use of the term. Likeother encyclopaedic terms, it was a semanticstructure organized to include 'not only the notion ofabundance itself but also the place where abundanceis to be found, or, more strictly, the place and itscontents.'52 On the most general level, Aldrovandidescribed his collection of objects as a 'cimilarchioand pandechio of the things generated in this inferiorworld'. Thus the encyclopaedia was tangible, definedby the experiential data which constituted one part ofhis collection. Although he rarely used this term torefer to any but his own collection, the Tuscan GrandDuke's collection also merited such a name, becauseit was 'full of an infinite number of experimentalsecrets'.53 Not surprisingly, the principle of plenitudewas operative in his decision to designate it as anencyclopaedic structure. In similar fashion, the first

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cataloguer of Francesco Calzolari's natural historymuseum in sixteenth-century Verona called it, amongother things, a cornucopia.54 If nature was the 'cornu-copian text' which held the interest of the naturalist,then the museum itself was the receptacle of copia.

Discussing with Matthias Lobel some of his raredessicated plants, 'which I conserve pasted in fifteenvolumes in my Pandechion of nature for the utility ofposterity', Aldrovandi reiterated the textual nature ofthe artefacts, which became 'books' organizedaccording to his taxonomy of nature. 'For a fullsupply of facts [copia rerum] begets a full supply ofwords', counselled Cicero.55

Most importantly, there was the Pandechion proper:eighty-three volumes containing scraps of paperwhich Aldrovandi and his assistants had meticulouslycut and alphabetically organized until i58o,.S6 Almostunintelligible to the modern reader, this compen-dium functioned as a lexicon on almost any knownsubject. Responding to Lorenzo Giacomini's ques-tions on wine-making in a letter of 1587, Aldrovandiquoted Pliny but could not remember the exactcitation. 'But where he [Pliny] teaches it, for now Ican't recall, though I have seen it and glossed it fromhead to foot. And if you were able to run through myEpistemonicon, you would have found it and infiniteother observations . . . ' " For Aldrovandi the encyclo-paedia was located neither in the text nor in dieobject alone; rather it was die dialectic between resand verba that fully defined die universality of hisproject.

The Jesuits put their World in Order

While Aldrovandi's encyclopaedic schemes confinedthemselves to the territory that the Aristoteliancorpus had previously defined, his commentary serv-ing as a gloss on predefined categories, the specu-lations of seventeenth-century natural philosophersmoved beyond this realm. In contrast to sixteenth-century encyclopaedism, which attempted to fill dieparadigms prescribed by die classical canons, dielogic of seventeendi-century collecting precludedsuch an unmitigated acceptance of earlier categories,particularly because die frustrated attempts of pre-decessors such as Aldrovandi and Gesner to flesh outancient collecting projects indicated that newmethods needed to be found and new questionsneeded to be asked.

The influx of artefacts from die New World andother parts of the globe now reached by Europeanspaved die way for new models of knowledge, as

collectors found traditional explanations to beincreasingly unsatisfactory for die information diatthey could now incorporate in dieir museums.58

Simultaneously, events such as the Reformation anddie ensuing religious and political batdes wagedacross Europe from die early sixteendi century untildie Peace of Westphalia in 1648, destabilized diesocial, political, and religious order diat had seemedunshakable only a century before (although its rootshad certainly eroded long before 1517 in anticipationof diese changes). Thus the seventeendi-centurynatural philosopher, die creator of die new encyc-lopaedia, was in search of a new model to explain aperplexing, increasingly illogical and pluralisticworld.

'How truly enormous is die field of knowledge',exclaimed Federico Cesi, founder of die Accademiadei Lincei at the beginning of die century, 'large inthe copiousness of speculations as in die copiousnessof readings.'59 While the activities of Cesi and hisacademicians aligned diemselves firmly widi diecamp of Galileo and die 'new' science of die period, aresponse diat effectively eliminated die significanceof the encyclopaedic project by refashioning it into aheuristic category,60 die speculations of Jesuits suchas Adianasius Kircher (1602-80) and Gaspar Schotttook a more eclectic turn. As R. J. W. Evans describesin his study of Habsburg intellectual life, die philo-sophical trajectories of Catholic Reformation culturelent an exoticism to intellectual discourse diat wasnot evident in scholarship of die previous century."The Jesuit response to die relativity of dieir worldwas to expand outward, in ever-increasing concentriccircles, incorporating bodi old and new widiin atraditional yet flexible framework, as attested by dieirmissionary activities in Europe, die New World andAsia. The quest for pansophia reached its apex in dieeclectic attempts by die Jesuits (and later, in a differ-ent context, Leibniz and Wolff) to develop universalstructures diat syndiesized humanist philosophiesand non-Western cultures widi the more program-matic and dogmatic policies of die post-Tridentinechurch.

The encyclopaedic impulse was not confined tothe Cadiolic world alone, aldiough it was undoubt-edly more pervasive in an atmosphere in which dieretention of ancient models of knowledge was linkedto the persistence of orthodoxy and tradition. For diepurpose of limiting my study, due to die richness ofmaterial on Italian collecting and die readily appar-ent links between die persistence of encyclopaedicmodels and the role of collecting in die seventeendi-

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century courts and ecclesiastic circles, I have chosento focus on Catholic collecting rather than looking atboth Protestant and Catholic activities together.While I do not believe that collecting and religiousaffiliation were inevitably intertwined, in manyinstances—particularly in the case of Kircher inRome and his contemporary and fellow clericManfredo Settala in Milan—religious conviction didplay a part in the shape and function of seventeenth-century museums.

Spending most of his life in Rome, clearing-housefor the Jesuit missionary activities, Kircher was ableto draw on the resources of an entire order to sate histhirst for knowledge of non-Western civilizations;books, artefacts, and reports from all corners of theglobe flowed into his museum at the Roman Collegeweekly. From these Kircher derived his theories onuniversal language and the universality of many otheraspects of the natural and supernatural world, all partof the Christianizing mission of the post-Tridentinechurch.62

One of his most interesting (and, in the minds ofmodern Egyptologists, most infamous) projects con-cerned the decipherment of hieroglyphs. Happeningupon a book on the obelisks of Rome, probably theone written by Michele Mercati (keeper of theVatican minerological collection and sculpturegarden) in 1589, Kircher recognized the value of themysterious emblems for his studies of language andreligion. 'Immediately my curiosity was aroused and Ibegan to speculate on the meaning of these hiero-glyphs', he wrote in his autobiography. 'At first I tookdiem for mere decoration, designs contrived by theimagination of the engraver, but then, on reading thetext of the book I learned that these were the actualfigures carved on ancient Egyptian monuments.From time immemorial diese obelisks and theirinscriptions have been in Rome and so far no one hasbeen able to decipher them.'63

Like so many other things studied by the Jesuit, thehieroglyphs were signs, richly encoded, thatpromised to unlock the mysteries of past civilizationsand, most importantly from his theological perspect-ive, would prove to be a means of demonstrating theinherent compatibility of Christianity with ancientpagan wisdom. A symbol, Kircher posited, 'leads ourmind through a kind of similitude to an understand-ing of something very different from the things whichoffer themselves to our external senses; whose prop-erty is to be hidden under a veil of obscurity.'64 ThusKircher's studies of Egyptian symbols, like his in-vestigations of Chinese philosophy, ciphers and

musical theories of universal harmony, and hisattempts to draw forth a theory of universal mag-netism or panspermia from the natural world, wereshaped to fit a hermetic and metaphoric image of theworld which assumed diat every object was codedwith a larger, more universal significance. Applied tothe passion for collecting, hermeticism postulatedthat the museum would be a visually coded presenta-tion of occult knowledge. The world itself was atangled web of meanings; it remained only for thecollector to penetrate its layers through the com-parative, taxonomic, and ultimately encyclopaedicnature of his project.

The social configuration of such grandiose projectscould only have been the libraries and museumscreated to organize and assimilate the explosion ofknowledge experienced by the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries. What was a bibliotheca but a collec-tion of books, a 'multitudo librorum' as Comeniusdefined it?65 Libraries formed an essential part ofcollections; rarely did a museum not have a libraryattached to it.66 Carlo Antonio del Pozzo's library inRome was described as a 'true hotel of the Muses',reinforcing the idea that the library was indeed amuseum; likewise the Medici library in Florence wasdescribed by Diderot as so copious that 'only the[term] musaeum Florentinum can justly represent thismagnificent cabinet.'67

While the emergence of public libraries during theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries signalled thecreation of a public sphere of reading, as RogerChartier has argued,68 truly the most magnificentexamples of book collecting remained the privatelibraries of papal Rome, and in general those withinthe monastic orders throughout Europe, as evidencedby the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome and the Bib-liotheque de Sainte Genevieve in Paris." The papalnipote Francesco Barberini, favourite of Urban VIIIand an active member of Cesi's Lincean Academy,amassed a collection that was still the wonder ofRome a century later. 'There are other wonderfullibraries in Rome,' observed Diderot after surveyingthe Vatican holdings, 'particularly that of CardinalFrancesco Barberini, which is reputed to contain25,000 printed volumes and 5000 manuscripts.'70

Barberini's collection of books, as well as art andnatural objects, was so well known that scholars viedwith each other to give him their books. Over thecourse of several years the Paduan AristotelianFortunio Liceti presented Barberini with his mostrecent publications, hoping that the Cardinal wouldhonour him by making place for them in his 'most

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noble Museum'.71 As Liceti recognized, Barberini'scollection was truly a musaeum, his own small offeringabout to be subsumed within its universal and uni-versalizing structure.

Not surprisingly, collectors who prided themselveson their ability to organize knowledge also turnedtheir attention to the classification of books. Aldro-vandi, for example, dissected the subject organizationof libraries with the same passion that he cataloguednature and every other part of the human experience.Like the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner, Aldrovandiperceived his encyclopaedia of nature to be depend-ent on his more general encyclopaedia of knowledgeitself. Thus bibliographies were hoarded as if thenames of the books themselves symbolically con-veyed the possession of their contents.72

Strategies for collecting were not only designed tofulfil the humanistic desire for prisca scientia:museums and libraries of this period also conveyedpolitical and religious messages. Claude Clemens,librarian to Philip III of Spain, described the Escorialas 'this Museum of Christendom'; attuned to therhetoric of the Catholic Reformation he proposed alibrary that collected and ordered knowledge in orderto control it. Not only were libraries necessary fortheir public utility for a growing community ofscholars; they also protected the Catholic world fromfalse erudition.73 In an age in which even the Jesuitshad been refused their privilege to use prohibitedbooks that had not been corrected by the officialcensors (though one wonders how Kircher was ableto transgress this rule), there was a great fear of in-formation falling into the wrong hands. A number oftimes during his career, Aldrovandi had to submit hislibrary for Inquisitorial inspection, and found manyof his books—those by Cardano, Delia Porta andPomponazzi for example—confiscated as a result.74

The encyclopaedic vision of knowledge, born ofthe humanist desire to recapture the knowledge of theancient world, was used for a variety of purposes bythe seventeenth century. The museum had becomenot only an instrument of erudition, but a means forproselytizing. While Kircher's brand of intellectualpyrotechnics was undoubtedly too eclectic (andpotentially philosophically dangerous) for the main-stream Catholic Church, none the less his work wasallowed to coexist alongside more orthodox philo-sophy in an atmosphere fraught with the tension ofthe Galileo condemnations.75 While we cannotpretend to do anything more than speculate on thereasons for such laxity, it is possible mat the Church,already overly dependent on the Jesuit educational

programme, recognized the social value of a highlypublic figure such as Kircher, even if they were suspi-cious of the intellectual premise of his research. Mostimportantly, Kircher's willingness to submit all of hisfindings to a strictly hierarchical notion of theuniverse, was in keeping with the Thomist basis ofthe Jesuit teachings.

From the universal strategies of the sixteenth-century natural philosophers such as Aldrovandi,Cardano, and Gesner to the Christian strategies oftheir seventeenth-century counterparts within theCatholic Church, the museum was designed as themost complete response to the crisis of knowledgeprovoked by the expansion of the natural worldthrough the voyages of discovery and exploration, theconcomitant explosion of information about theworld in general and, more particularly, the moraland social imbalance created by the religious andpolitical events of the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies. In an age of religious plurality, to 'know'was fraught with tensions; the humanist response ofAldrovandi and his contemporaries was to be open toany available strategy for framing the world, an open-ness that frequently brought them into trouble withthe institutional church, as attested by Aldrovandi's,Cardano's and Delia Porta's brushes with the In-quisition and the actual condemnations of Bruno andCampanella.76 The seventeenth-century responsediffused potentially 'black' magic through the puri-fication rituals of the Jesuit scientific work in the caseof Kircher and his disciples, subsuming naturalphilosophy to Christian theology, while still leavingthe encyclopaedic framework intact. This was mostapparent in the structure of museums which, until theend of the eighteenth century, continued to conjoinart and nature in fulfillment of Pliny's premise thateverything in this theatre of the world was worthy ofmemory. From mental to textual to actual museums,the structure of lAusaeum was designed to intermingleharmoniously the natural and the artificial, the realand the imaginary, and the ordinary and the extra-ordinary, to underscore not only the fecundity of theuniverse but the breadth of the human faculties forcomprehending and explaining the theatrum mundi.

Texts and Contexts: Defining Museal Space

Returning to an earlier theme—how did the museummake the transition from private to public?—we needto re-enter the social world of collecting to tracebriefly the development of the 'public' museum.While Machiavelli, encamped in his scrittoio, con-

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ceived his intellectual pursuits to be a means of re-entering public life in absentia through the medium ofliterature, he did not conceive of scholarship perse asa socially-grounded enterprise. Despite the imprintof the Alexandrian museum as a paradigm of collect-ive intellectual activity, manifested in the formationof humanist circles around the ntusaei of PietroBembo and Guillaume Bude for example, the idea ofstudy outside of the university studio was predom-inantly an isolated and isolating process.77 In contrastto the notion of the academy, one of the most import-ant centres for extra-university intellectual and cul-tural activity from the sixteenth century onwards(whose emergence was distinct from the museumthough later influential in its institutionalization), themuseum was at first defined by the domestic, andtherefore private, space which it inhabited.78

In his will of 5 March 1604 the apothecaryFrancesco Calzolari left 'the studio di antichita that isin my house in Verona' to his nephew.7' Certainaspects of collecting reinforced the notion that amuseum needed to be circumscribed by domesticactivity. 'And he who delights in letters must not keephis books in the public study [scrittoio comune], butmust have a studiolo apart, in the most remote cornerof the house. It is best and healthy if it can be near thebedroom, so that one can more easily study.'80

Surviving plans for late Renaissance museumssupport such an organization. The studio of AntonioGiganti in Bologna, secretary to Ludovico Beccadelliand to Gabriele Paleotti and a friend of Aldrovandi,testifies to the conscious placement of a collectionwithin the interior space of a house; its only entrancewas the 'door that opens into the bedroom'.81 Thecollector, called by the Muses, retired to his study inthe same way that he retired to his bedroom.Similarly cabinet, as it evolved in seventeenth-centuryFrench, connoted the closet beyond the main bed-chamber.82 As Carlo Dionisotti points out, however,the distinctions between public and private need tobe considered with care in order to understand theirrelevance for the early modern period; a bedroom,theoretically the most intimate of spaces, was notfully private, nor for that matter was a museum.83

Advice to construct museums, libraries and studiesin proximity to the most 'personal' space in the homedrew not only on contemporary experience with thearrangement of such rooms, but also on Alberti'sclassically inspired designs. Describing the layout ofa country house in his Ten Books on Architecture (1415),Alberti specified that 'The Wife's Chamber shouldgo into the Wardrobe; the Husband's into the

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Library.'8"1 While Alberti sharply defined the studio asexclusively masculine space, an image borne out bythe relative absence of women in the sphere ofcollecting, we can point to several noteworthy excep-tions—the Grotta and studiolo of Isabella d'Este atMantua being one of the most famous examples.85

For the most part, however, collecting emerged out ofa private and domestic culture that was almostexclusively male: a space reserved within the homefor scholarly activity (analogous to the contemplativespace of the private family chapel) whose purposewas not entirely divested of public life. A museumwas created as much for self-promotion as out ofgenuine interest in the artefacts assembled in it: inthis respect it was at once public and private, mascu-line space within the domicile, and therefore bynature public in the broadest sense of the term.86

The museum, as orbus in domo, mediated betweenpublic and private because it quite literally attemptedto bring the world into the home. The endless flow ofgoods, information, and visitors that appeared on thedoorsteps of the most well-known museums deter-mined that the collections of the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries could no longer be the hiddenworlds suggested by medieval and monastic images ofstudiumF 'If after the arrival of my scribe, GiovanCorneglio, I have not responded to your letter asquickly as you wished,' wrote Aldrovandi to thehumanist Giovan Vincenzo Pinelli from his museum,'Your Most Illustrious Signor will excuse me forhaving been continuously occupied in various nego-tiations, public as well as private.'88 The antiquaryGiovan Vincenzo della Porta, 'a man no less learnedthan unusual for the vast knowledge which hepossesses', was singled out for 'having through hisown efforts created a most noble Museum to whichscholars come from the furthest corners of Europe,drawn by its fame.'89 As we know from the inventoriesof his brother's home in 1615, the Della Porta collec-tions were indeed private yet open spaces, publicizedthrough the informal networks of correspondencethat formed the basis of the scientific and intellectualcommunities of late Renaissance Europe. In askingourselves how did the 'private' become 'public' weneed to dissect the sociological process of collectingthat identified collectors to each other as well as for alarger audience.90

The constellation of terms used to describecollecting by the late sixteenth century created aunified conceptual sphere that fully demonstrated themuseum's roles in the public and private realms. Bynow 'study' connotes a room for private study with

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'museum' as its public counterpart. Yet the polariza-tion of these two categories has evolved only in thenineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the images of'public' and 'private' have also become fixedopposites. Conversely, as discussed earlier, it wasonly in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that thesocial and philosophical purposes of museum andstudio were conjoined; it remained for the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries to begin the processof extraction that ultimately set the two words apart.Aldrovandi's collection of natural rarities in Bolognawas called simultaneously museo, studio, theatro,microcosmo, archivio, and a host of other related terms,all describing the different ends served by his collec-tion and, more importantly, alluding to the analogiesbetween each structure." In the mid-seventeenthcentury, Ovidio Montalbani, superintendent of theStudio Aldrovandi, distinguished between the publicAldrovandi collection which he oversaw (Museum)and his personal, and therefore private, collectionthrough the use of the diminutive (privatumMuseoIum;Museolum meum).n

As Claudio Franzoni suggests in his study of anti-quarian collecting, one of the most important lin-guistic divisions within the vocabulary of collectingconcerns- the distinction between terms whichdefined a collection spatially and those which alludedto its philosophical configuration." Words such asstanza, casa, casino, guardaroba, studiolo, tribuna, gal-leria, organized the domestic and civic terrain of themuseum. 'One can truly call your Casino a house ofnature, where so many miraculous experiments aredone', wrote Aldrovandi to Francesco, alluding to theGrand Duke's domestication of nature in his al-chemical laboratory at San Marco.94 The famous col-lection of Flavio Chigi in seventeenth-century Romewas described as a 'room of curiosities'; again the col-lection was defined by the space which it inhabited aswell as by the nature of its contents.95 Through asimilar process, the idea of musaeum became asso-ciated increasingly with the physical space of thestudio. Many letters of the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, most notably those of Aldrovandi and Cesi,are signed 'ex Musaeo nostro' or 'written from theCesi museum'.96

Equally intriguing is the well-documented con-fusion over the naming of the famous studiolo ofFrancesco I (1569-87) in Florence. The humanistVincenzo Borghini, who designed the literary topoi ofthe room, called it a stanzino, 'by which I mean that itserves as a wardrobe [guardaroba] of things rare andprecious both for their value and for their craftsman-

ship'. As Lina Bolzoni and Scott Schaefer havepointed out, the room was most often identified asstanzino or scrittoio by contemporaries.97 Studiolo, amicrocosm of museum, described a cabinet, theKunstschrank that populated the Renaissance courtsof northern Europe. 'The Grand Duke has had anebony studiolo made of his own design, which is com-posed according to all of the rules of Architecture',wrote Raffaelo Borghini.98 Thus the studiolo was liter-ally a piece of furniture, not unlike a cassone in itsfunction, containing the treasures of its owner inminiature; accordingly it was located within adomestic context, albeit a courtly one, and thereforereinforced the private image of collecting.

The transformation of studiolo from a domesticconcept to a more public one perfectly illustrates theways in which the museums of the late Renaissancecontinued to incorporate both private and publicnotions of space in their conception and utilization.While the studiolo of Federico da Montefeltro atUrbino served largely personal functions and theGrotta of Isabelle d'Este, entered only through herstudio,™ was secreted within the palace at Mantua, thestudiolo of Francesco I operated in both contexts.Situated in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, the seatof government, off the Sala Grande and leading intothe private family chambers, it was a strikingtransition point: a room in which the Grand Dukecould seclude himself without entirely leaving therealm of public affairs.100 Yet, on the whole,Francesco's study was more private than public; veryfew descriptions exist of it because few people-besides the court humanist Borghini who designedthe original iconographic program of its invenzioni,Vasari, and the other artists who worked on theroom—were ever allowed access to it. Surrounded bythe political intrigues of the Tuscan court, the studioloand its contents were for the Grand Duke's eyesalone.

The privatizing tendencies of musaeum in a courtcontext created hermetic space. From a socialperspective, the princely studio was hermetic becauseits function was exclusionary. Equally, museumswere hermetic because they were primarily intel-lectual rather than social constructs, fabricated out ofthe eclectic humanistic schemes of the Renaissancevirtuosi. 'Museum is a place where the Scholar sitsalone, apart from other men, addicted to his Studies,while reading books', wrote Comenius.101 Scholar-ship was a process which absorbed its participants(studiis deditus) and the locus of study, the museum,created an impermeable physical barrier between the

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scholar and the outside world.102 Even as late as theeighteenth century, an age in which the museum hadtruly become a public spectacle, illustrations ofmuseums reinforced their image as secretive andengrossing environments.103 Interestingly enough,the most important-and elaborate of the scrittoii builtby Vasari for Cosimo I between 1559 and 1562 wascalled, among other things, the scrittoio segreto andseems to have been the main precursor to his sonFrancesco's studiolo.w From this perspective, thescholar, as frequenter of the museum, was as muchalchemist as humanist, enhancing his reputation bythe hidden nature of his work.

The conflicting demands of the civic and hermeticnotions of a museum, both different strands of thehumanistic goals of collecting, allowed the museumsof the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to vacillatebetween openness and closure, depending on theindividual goals of their creators. Explicitly contrast-ing his own civic designs for a chemical laboratorywith Tycho Brahe's aristocratic laboratory andastronomical observatory at Uraniborg, the chemicalphilosopher Andreas Libavius placed the discourseon secrecy versus openness within its scientificcontext:

Thus we are not going to devise for him [the ideal naturalphilosopher] just a chymeion or laboratory to use as a privatestudy and hideaway in order that his practice will be moredistinguished than anyone else's; but rather, what we shallprovide for him is a dwelling suitable for decorous parti-cipation in society and living the life of a free man, togetherwith all the appurtenances necessary for such an exist-ence.105

Libavius's attack on the private studio indicated hisparticipation in, and more importantly awareness of,the debate on secrecy versus openness that entered awide range of discursive practices in the early modernperiod.106 The laboratory, argued Libavius, was acivic and not an aristocratic construct; thus themuseum had to answer to the humanistic and laterBaconian notions of utility that placed knowledgewithin the public sphere through its service tosociety.

The advent of printing and the development of anexpanding literate culture outside of the courts,universities and the church signalled the decline ofthe notion of intellectual privacy presupposed by themedieval and, to a lesser extent, Renaissance notionof collecting. By the seventeenth century the museumhad become more of a galleria than a studio: a spacethrough which one passed, in contrast to the static

principle of the spatially closed studio. Describing theimportance of Aldrovandi's collecting projects toVincenzo Campeggi, one of the gonfaloniere ofBologna, Fra Giovanni Volura praised 'his Theatre ofnature, visited continuously by all of the scholars thatpass through here . . .'107 The civic notion of museumplaced it in motion; forever opening its doors tovisitors, the museum as galleria—a term standardizedby the public character of the Galleria degli Uffiziand made linguistically normative through theCrusca dictionaries of the seventeenth and eight-eenth centuries—was the antithesis of the hermeticand individually defined studio, ironically promotedby the same creators of the former category.

The gallerie of Kircher and Settala in seventeenth-century Rome and Milan perfectly exemplified thisaddition to the tropes of collecting, for the twomuseums were mentioned in most of the major traveljournals of the day as 'must-sees' on the serioustraveller's itinerary. '[N]o foreign visitor who has notseen the museum of the Roman College can claimthat he has truly been in Rome', boasted Kircher.108

The galleria was set in motion by the constantlychanging selection of objects as well as visitors thatcontinuously filled the space it created—public inconception, due to the expanded realm of sociabilitythat the museum promised and to the open-endednature of the contents that it revealed to the gaze.

Despite frequent avowals of the utilitarian ends ofthe museum, made particularly by scientific col-lectors, it is obvious that the emergence of a publicstrategy of collecting did not fully eclipse the privateone. Unlike the Medici, Aldrovandi and Kircherdepended on patronage for the survival of theirprojects, and this patronage most often came fromrulers who themselves had a personal interest incollecting. While Aldrovandi proclaimed that hisstudio was 'for the utility of every scholar in all ofChristendom', borne out by its accessibility duringhis lifetime and by the donation of the museum to theSenate of Bologna in 1603, he had nothing but praisefor the more self-serving activities of his patronFrancesco I.109

In defining a collection as 'public' versus 'private',what sort of criteria can we use that would be applic-able to an early modern context? Certainly museumssuch as those of Aldrovandi, Kircher, and Settalawere not public in the sense that they were open topeople from all walks of life. The first museum toproclaim its fully public status was the AshmoleanMuseum at Oxford, which opened its doors in 1683.Given to the university by Elias Ashmole, a dabbler in

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chemistry, magic, and natural philosophy, the access-ibility of the collection was remarked upon with dis-favour by certain educated visitors in the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries. 'On 23 August we wished togo to the Ashmolean Museum,' wrote the Germantraveller Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach in 1710,'but it was market day and all sorts of country-folk,men and women, were up there (for the leges that hangupon the door parum honeste (Zliberaliter allow every-one to go in). So as we could have seen nothing wellfor the crowd, we went down-stairs again and saved itfor another day.'

Von Uffenbach's displeasure at the literal open-ness of the Ashmolean translated into pointedcomments about the general definition of 'public'institutions in England. Not only did the open admis-sion standards disintegrate the gender and classbarriers that defined the private, hence exclusive,nature of the museum—'even the women are allowedup here for a sixpence'—but the establishment of theprice of admission commodified the experience ofscholarship. His experience in the 'world-famedpublic library of this University', the Bodleian, onlyconfirmed his worst fears about the dangers of thepublic in a scholarly setting:

But as it costs about eight shillings and some trouble to gainan entrance, most strangers content themselves with acasual inspection. Every moment brings fresh spectators ofthis description and, surprisingly enough, amongst thempeasants and women-folk, who gaze at the library as a cowmight gaze at a new gate with such noise and trampling offeet that others are much disturbed."0

The pinnacle of his trip to England, a visit to thefamed Royal Society, provoked equal disillusion.Finding the Society and its museum to be in completedisarray, Von Uffenbach commented on the inevit-ability of its state.

But that is the way with all public societies. For a short timethey flourish, while the founder and original members arethere to set the standard; then come all kinds of setbacks,partly from envy and lack of unanimity and partly becauseall kinds of people of no account become members; theirfinal state is one of indifference and sloth.'"1

The discomfort of Von Uffenbach and othervisitors with the public agenda of Baconian scienceonly reinforced the perception that the relationshipbetween private and public that existed on the con-tinent, as far as education was concerned, was moresubtly gradated. 'In Italy one finds hardly any fullypublic museums', commented Michael BernhardValentini in his Museum museorum (1714)."2 Beyond

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Valentini's distinction between rulers and 'Privat-Personen', museums such as Aldrovandi's studio were'public' because they were open to any scholar withan appropriate introduction or to anyone of exaltedrank. '[Everything in my museum] is seen by manydifferent gentlemen passing through this city, whovisit my Pandechio di natura, like an eighth wonder ofthe world', boasted Aldrovandi. In many instancesvisitors arrived with a letter of introduction. 'This[man] is my dear friend,' explained Alfonso Cataneo,professor of medicine and natural philosophy at theUniversity of Ferrara, to Aldrovandi, 'whom I havedirected to Your Excellence upon his arrival inBologna, since he is a doctor and a gentleman, worthyof seeing certain little things [cosette] that interesthim. I know that you will not neglect to show him theusual courtesy for love of me.'113

The humanist notion of utility also distinguishedthe public yet inaccessible nature of court collectionsfrom the privately owned yet open museums ofcollectors such as Aldrovandi, whose universityaffiliation gave his collection a public use through itspedagogical utility, and Kircher, who also conductedexperiments and demonstrations in the RomanCollege museum as part of his teaching duties. TheRoman patrician Alfonso Donnino cited his 'desirefor public good' as one of the reasons for the gift of hiscollection to the Roman College in 1651."4 EquallyFilippo Bonanni, Kircher's eventual successor askeeper of the Jesuit science museum, praised theBritish collector James Petiver for making his privatemuseum public through the publication of his Cen-turies, inexpensive guidebooks to his ever-expandingnatural history collection.115

Certainly Aldrovandi's desire for the establishmentof a Biblioteca pubblica was prompted by a, sense ofcivic obligation. 'And therefore, wishing that mymany labours be continued after my death, for thehonour and utility of the City, and so that they maynot have been for nothing, I have elected to conservethis Museum and Library of printed books and myown works, leaving it to the most Illustrious Senate ofBologna . . . ' " ' The Senate, responding in kind,transferred Aldrovandi's collection to their mostpublic building to underline its part in the respublicaof the city. In 1660, when the Bolognese senatorFerdinando Cospi requested that his own collectionbe added to the civic museum, the decree ratifyingthis addition described the location as the 'StudioAldrovando in Pubblico Palatio Bononae'."7

The visitors' books that have survived intactprovide unique and important documentation on

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Aldrovandi's museum as a public institution. Uponseeing the museum in 1604, shortly before Aldro-vandi's death, Pompeo Viziano marvelled at thenumber of people who had visited the naturalist'sstudio:

[I]n two large books, that he conserves among the others, aninfinite number of Princes, Cardinals, Prelates, Cavallieri,and other people of note [alto affare et di elevato ingegno] thathave passed through Bologna, attest in their own hand tohaving seen and diligently considered [the museum] withgreat satisfaction."8

To begin with, it was not common practice in thisperiod to have a list of visitors; most collectors didnot have such a well-defined sense of their audience,or more importantly, such a public image of their ownposterity through their collections, as to record whohad visited their museums. 'Cardinal EnricoGaetano, legate to Bologna, saw the mirabilia ofnature in the studio of doctor Ulisse Aldrovandi', readone entry for 1587.'" Besides the book for exaltedguests, commemorating their visits, there was also abook which recorded all of the visitors to themuseum. Composed mainly of signatures, written onscraps of paper by Aldrovandi, his assistants and thevisitors themselves, and later pasted into the sectionswhich organized the names by location and pro-fession, the sheer number of visitors testifies to theBolognese naturalist's willingness to open up hisTheatre of Nature to the world.120 Aldrovandi, how-ever, not only kept records throughout his lifetime,but specified that the names should continue to berecorded after his death. 'It would also please me', hespecified in his gift of 1603, 'if the Gentlemen andMen of Letters who have visited and will visit theMuseum after my death will continue to write theirnames in my two books designated for thispurpose.'121 The visitors' books, rendering a degreeof eternity to the museum through the memoria oftheir lists, testified to the public nature of thescientific collecting enterprise, emerging out of theuniversities, academies, and professional organ-izations of the doctors and apothecaries in the six-teenth and seventeenth centuries.

While the idea of a fully public museum would notemerge in Italy until the early eighteenth century,with the establishment of the museum of the Istitutodelle Scienze under Luigi Ferdinando Marsili'ssponsorship, subsuming both Aldrovandi's andCospi's collection in the process, and the formationof Scipione Maffei's 'public Museum of Inscriptions'in Verona,122 the collections of the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries set the stage for this develop-ment. During the late Renaissance the parameters ofmusaeum expanded to include more public connota-tions. No longer simply hidden worlds, a growingnumber of collections foreshadowed the utilitarianand didactic tendencies of the late seventeenth- andeighteenth-century ideals of the museum. The mostobvious change in this realm was the increasedinstitutionalization of the museum, which became apervasive social artefact in the courts, academies, anduniversities of early modern Europe. The success ofthe social grounding of musaeum was due in no smallpart to its coordination with the long and complexintellectual tradition of collecting outlined above.The museums of the late Renaissance mediatedbetween public and private space, straddling thesocial world of collecting and the humanistic vocabu-lary which formed its philosophical base. In its abilityto transcend cultural and temporal boundaries themuseum stood apart from other institutions, synthes-izing new cosmologies with old. The syntheticprocess that forged the Renaissance notion of musa-eum reflected not only the syncretic abilities of six-teenth- and seventeenth-century culture,emphasizing the flexibility of humanism as a modusoperandi, but also its desire to collect and be col-lected. Drawing on Du Cange's false etymologicalcomparison between museum and mosaic, Bonannidefined the newly reconstituted museum at theRoman College. 'Let us say with Du Cange that,since by the word Opus Musiuum dicitur Mud quod tessel-latum est lapillis variorum colorum, thus in the placesdesignated to the meanderings of the erudite theremay be various things, which not only delight the eyeswith the Mosaic, but enrich the mind.'123 Themuseum, as mosaic, brought together the pieces of acosmology that had all but fallen apart in the courseof several centuries. Organizing all known ideas andartefacts under the rubric of museum, the collectorsof the period imagined that they had indeed come toterms with the crisis of knowledge that the fabricationof the museum was designed to solve.

Address for correspondence

Paula Findlen, Department of History, University of California(Berkeley), Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A.

Notes and references

Aspects of this essay were presented at the Renaissance Societyof America's annual meeting at Harvard University in March,

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74 PAULA FINDLEN

1989.1 would like to thank Randolph Starn for his criticism andcomments on an earlier draft of this paper.

1. C. Clemens, Musei she bibliothecac tarn prwataequampublicaeextructio, euro, usus (Leiden, 1634), sig. %".

2. Regarding the appearance of these and numerous otherterms, considered analogous to musaeum, see L. Berti, //principe dello studiolo (Florence, 1967), pp. 194-5, andL. Salerno, 'Arte e scienza nelle collezioni del Manier-ismo', in Scritti di storia dell'arte in onore di Mario Salmi(Rome, 1963), II, pp. 193-214. Other words that should beconsidered are area, cimtlarchio, scrittoio, pinacotheca, metal-lolheca, Kunst- und Wunderkammer, and Kunstschrank.

3. J. Baudrillard, Selected Writings (ed. Mark Poster) (Stan-ford, 1988), p. 15. Michel Foucault's comments on 'the vastsyntax of the world' also suggest that musaeum, as a frame-work of activity, can be placed within a general framework,stressing resemblance and repetition, that was the mainorganizational tool of late Renaissance discourse; see hisThe Order of Things (English tr., New York, 1970), p. 18.

4. R. Harbison, Eccentric Spaces (New York, 1977). Harbison'snotion of an eccentric space implies permeability andfluidity—it is a space specifically designed to hold margin-alized information and to be easily reshaped by the par-ticular strategies of its users while still retaining itsnormative function.

5. See P. Aries and G. Duby (eds.), Histoirc de la vie privee(Paris, 1985-7), esp. vols. III-IV; both R. Sennett's The Fallof Public Man (New York, 1977) andj. Habermas' Struktur-wandel der Offentlichkeit (1962) [French edn.: L'espacepublique, tr. M. B. de Launay (Paris, 1978)] see the eight-eenth century as a critical turning point in the expansion ofthe public sphere. Though little work has been done toelucidate directly the relations between public and private(as opposed to looking at simply one or the other), theinference that can be drawn by comparing the work onprivate life to that on the public sphere is that the twodomains are intimately and necessarily intertwined, some-thing I hope to demonstrate in my discussion of theentrance of museums into the public sphere in the periodfrom the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

6. Pontificia Universita Gregoriana (hereafter PUG), Kircher,MS 568 (XIV), f. 143' (Trapani, 15 June 1652).

7. Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (hereafter ARSI),Rom. 138. Historia (1704-29), XVI, f. 182' (FilippoBonanni, Notizie circa la Galleria del Collegia Romano,10 January 1716).

8. Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (Leipzig, 1936-46), VIII, p. 1702;Lexicon Totius Latinitatis (Padua, 1871), III, p. 318.

9. Chevalier de Jaucourt, 'Musee', in Encyclopedic X (1765),pp. 893-04.

10. Ibid., Thes. Ling. Lai. VIII, p. 1702; C. Neickelius, Museo-graphia (Leipzig, 1727), pp. 1-2; J. Alsop, The Rare ArtsTraditions (New York, 1982), p. 163.

11. Lex. tot. lot. II, p. 318; C. T. Lewis and C. Short, A LatinDictionary (Oxford, 1958), p. 1179; Felice Feliciano, in hisdescription of a trip taken by Mantegna and the antiquaryCiriaco of Ancona in 1464 described their arrival at 'green-swards like heavenly gardens in the most delicious dwell-ing places of the Muses', in C. E. Gilbert, Italian Art1400-1500 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1980), p. 180.

12. J. Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove: The Italian RenaissanceGarden in the English Imagination 1600-1750 (London, 1986);D. Coffin (ed), The Italian Garden (Washington, DC, 1972);

L. Zangheri, Pratolino: ilgiardino delle meraviglie (Florence,1979); M. Fagiolo (ed.), La citta effimera e I'univeno artificialedelgiardino (Rome, 1980).

13. Cited in L. Tongiorgi Tomasi, 'Projects for botanical andother gardens: a sixteenth-century manual', Journal ofGarden History (1983), p. 1.

14. 'Protesta di D. Teodoro Bondini a chi legge', in L. Legati,Museo Cospiano (Bologna, 1677), n.p.

15. L. Chatelet-Lange, 'Le "museo di Vanres" (1560).Collections de sculpture et musees au XVIe siecle enFrance', Zeitschriftfur Kunstgeschichte, 38 (1975), p. 279; seealso Du Cange's definition of museum which, aside from abrief reference to the museum at Alexandria, does not givethe term the broad framework alluded to by laterdefinitions.

16. The Letters of Marsilio Ficino (New York, 1985), I, p. 28.17. Petrarch, Epist. 2.3.43, m E. Cochrane and J. Kirshner

(eds.), The Renaissance, Readings in Western Civilization(Chicago, 1986), V, p. 66.

18. Ibid., pp.51-2.19. C. R. Chiarlo, '"Gli fragmenti dilla sancta antiquitate":

studi antiquari e produzione delle imaggini da Ciriacod'Ancona e Francesco Colonna', in Memoria dell'anticoncllartc italiana, ed. Salvatore Settis (Turin, 1984), I,pp. 271-87.

20. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, 'Praise of Lorenzo', inD. Thompson and A. F. Nagel (eds.), The Three Crowns ofFlorence: Humanist Assessments of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio(New York, 1972), pp. 148,152.

21. A. Doni, Tre libri di lettere (Venice, 1552), p. 81 (Como,20 July 1543); see also the conference proceedings of PaoloGiovio: ilRinascimento e la memoria (Como, 1985).

22. S. J. Schaefer, The Studiolo of Francesco I de' Medici in thePalazzo Vecchio in Florence, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation(Bryn Mawr College, 1976), pp. 116-17; C. Franzoni,'"Rimembranze d'infinite cose": le collezioni rinasci-mentali di antichita', in Memoria dell'antico nell'arte italiana(Torino, 1984), I, p. 309.

23. Letter to Francesco Vettori, 10 December 1513 in Coch-rane and Kirshner, op. cit. (note 17), pp. 183-4; for theItalian see N. Machiavelli, Lettere, ed. F. Gaeta (Milan,1961), pp. 301-6.

24. D. Du Cange,'Scriptorium', in Glossarium MediaeetlnfimaeLatinitatis (Paris, 1846), VI, p. 132. This definition corre-sponds well with the medieval image of privatus as amonastic ideal, as discussed in G. Duby, 'Private power,public power', in P. Aries and G. Duby (eds.), A History ofPrivate Life, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA,1988), II. p. 5.

25. Epist., Ill, ep. XV to Niccolo Niccoli, in Franzoni, op. cit.(note 22), p. 305; see also Two Renaissance Bookhunters: TheLetters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Niccolis, tr.P. Gordan (New York, 1974).

26. T. Tasso, 'II Malpiglio Secondo, overo de fuggir la molti-tudine', in his Dialoghi (ed. E. Raimondi) (Florence, 1958),II, tome 2, esp. pp. 569-70.

27. Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, MS Pal. 1012, fasc. 1, c. 13"(Beccadelli to Petronio Beccadelli, 20 October 1555);Florence, Riccardiana, Cod. 2438, pane I, lett. 66' (Gigantito Lorenzo Giacomini, Bologna, 11 December 1584); fordetails of the history of these collections, see G. Fragnito,'II museo di Antonio Giganti', in Scienze, credenze occulte,livelli di cultura (Florence, 1982), pp. 507—35; L. Lauren-

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cich-Minelli, 'L'indice del Museo Giganti', Museographiascicntifica i (1984), nos. 3-4, pp. 191-242.

28. See L. Thorndike, 'Encyclopedias of the fourteenthcentury', in his A History of Magic and Experimental Science(New York, 1923-41), III, pp. 546-67; R. Popkin, 'Theoriesof knowledge', in Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner(eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cam-bridge, 1988), pp. 668-84.

29. Foucault, op. cit. (note 3), p. 38.30. S. Wilkin (ed.), Sir Thomas Browne's Works (London, 1835-

6), IV, p. 239.31. Sir Thomas Browne, 'Religio Medici', II, p. 35. In an

earlier passage (p. 31) he attacked such literary curiositiesas 'pieces fit only to be placed in PantagrueFs library'.

32. A. Kircher, The Vulcano's: or Burning and Fire-VomitingMountains... Collected for the most part out of Kircher's Subter-raneous World (London, 1669), p. 34.

33. Legati, op. cit. (note 14), p. 215.34. G. B. Olivi, De reconditis et praecipius collectaneis (Verona,

1584), p. 2; G. Porro, L'orto dei semplici di Padova (Venice,1591), sig. +5 ' .

35. This was particularly true of Francesco's studiolo, though itis also evident in the design of other studies.

36. Legati, professor of Greek at the University of Bologna,discussed his 'Museo delle Poetesse' in his correspond-ence with the Tuscan scientist Francesco Redi; Florence,Laurenziana. Redi, 222, c. 34' (22 November 1667) and c. 42(27 April 1668).

37. Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna (hereafter BUB), Aldro-vandi, MS 21, III, c. 428'. For the details of Aldrovandi'sbrush with the Inquisition, see G. Olmi, Ulisse Aldrovandi:Scienza e natura nel secondo Cinquecento (Trento, 1976),pp. 44—66, passim; C. Renato, Opere, documenti e testamoni-anze (ed. A. Rotondo) (Florence, 1968), pp. 224-7 (Fram-menti del processo di Ulisse Aldrovandi).

38. C. Vasoli, L'Enciclopedismo delSeicento (Naples, 1978), esp.p. 27.

39. Museum Hermeticum (Frankfurt, 1678), preface, n.p.; 'Dehac vera transmutatione metallorum, quae solo Elixire seulapide philosophorum perficitur, hie nobis potissimumsermo est, de quo etso multorum authorum libri exstant, uthie ipse liber Musaeum hermeticum nuncupatum, qui iamaliquot abhinc annis in lucis prodiit, attamen cum haudparva authorum chemicorum sit copia, magnaque script-orium diversits & varietas, ita ut unus altero clavius &apertius scribat, aliusq.'

40. D. Kronick, A History of Scientific and Technical Periodicals2nd edn. (Metuchen, NJ, 1976), p. 27; G. Nencioni, 'La"Galleria" della lingua', in Paola Barocchi (ed.), Gli Uffizi:quattro secoli di una galleria (Florence, 1983), I, pp. 18, 34.

41. Stelluti, Persio, p. 170, quoted in G. Gabrieli, 'L'orizzonteintellettuale e morale di Federico Cesi', Rendiconti della R.Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei ser. 6, 14 (1938-9), fasc. 7-12,pp. 678-9; 'La vita d'Ulisse Aldrovandi (1586)', in L. Frati(ed.), Intorno alia vita e alle opere d

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