From Private to Public
Natural Collections and Museums
Marco Beretta, editor
“...focuses on one of the signal developments in natural history: the growth and transformation of collecting practices and museums from antiquity through the nineteenth century. The twelve essays in this volume offer a rich and diverse spectrum of examples culled from virtually every region in Europe. The result is a very useful snapshot of the role of collecting in natural history and allied fields such as anatomy and chemistry, not to mention emerging specialties such as geology.”—Early Science and Medicine
“…a particularly interesting volume in that it bridges a number of different approaches to the study of the history of natural history…raises many important issues pertaining to ownership, the use of collections ( beyond the purposes of classification or social standing ), the definition of “collection,” and the private/public continuum of collections…the volume shows how much more we can expand our overall narratives and how rich the subject is…” Isis, 98 : 1 (2007)
“…In his excellent preface, Beretta discusses the idea that the emergence of natural history as an independent discipline ‘was closely connected to the possession and domination of nature, rather than its contemplation’. Thus it was the passion for collecting natural-history artefacts from the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century that drove the establishment of the discipline…From a natural historian’s viewpoint, these papers are far removed from the more familiar accounts of how collections, collectors and specimens contributed to our knowledge of the natural world, as they also address the largely unexplored subject of how the collections affected their collectors…well produced with many relevant illustrations.” —Nature
“Seeking to balance Natural History's traditional emphasis on specimens and collections over writings, From Private To Public sheds a judicious and scholarly light upon humankind's quest to better understand the surrounding world. An excellent contribution to community and academic library Natural History study shelves.” —The Midwest Book Review
Contents
Preface
The Museum of Alexandria: Myth and Model , Giovanni di Pasquale
Natural Collections in the Spanish Renaissance, Susana Gómez López
Wunderkammer vs. Museum? Natural History and Collecting during the Renaissance, Alessandro Tosi
Pierre Pomet’s Parisian Cabinet: Revisiting the Invisible and the Visible in Early Modern Collections, E. C. Spary
Uses and Publics of the Anatomical Model Collections of La Specola, Florence, and the Josephinum, Vienna, around 1800, Anna Maerker
Taste, Order and Aesthetics in Eighteenth-Century Mineral Collections, Jonathan Simon
Collected, Analyzed, Displayed: Lavoisier and Minerals , Marco Beretta
Owning and Collecting Natural Objects in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Samuel J.M.M. Alberti
The Swedish Museum of Natural History and the “Linnaean Tradition, ” Jenny Beckman
Do Collections Make the Collector? Charles Darwin in Context, Janet Browne
The Museum of the Geological Survey of Portugal the Role of the “Bilobites” Collection in a 19th-century Palaeoichnological Controversy, Ana Carneiro
Re-Humanizing a Sleeping Beauty, A Historian’s Vision of Natural History Collections, Christoph Meinel
Notes on Contributors
Index of Names
Uppsala Studies in History of Science 32
European Studies in Science History and the Arts 5
September 2005, 272 pages, illustrated, ISBN 0-88135-360-4, clothbound and jacketed, $39.95
Also of Interest
Marco Beretta
Imaging a Career in Science
The Iconography of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
2001, ISBN 0-88135-294-2, $29.95
William R. Shea, editor
Science and the Visual Image in the Enlightenment
2000, ISBN 0-88135-285-3, $39.95
© 2010 Watson Publishing International LLC