From your [letter], I see that Your Excellency wants to make me a cinnamon from a bramble, a whale from a sardine, and an elephant from a fly.
Leone Tartaglini to Ulisse Aldrovandi, 22 December 15711
∵
The rise of natural history in sixteenth-century Europe was accompanied by the feverish creation of hundreds of collections designed to showcase the materials of nature. Their creators, ranging from erudite physicians to modest apothecaries and priests, often shared a university affiliation and a medical background alongside a desire to use their collections actively to explore the truths of the physical world. Unlike aristocratic Kunst- und Wunderkammern, it was not just the exceptional or rare that found representation in their theatrum rerum naturalium (theatre of natural things), but also the commonplace and the useful – an elegant cauliflower grown in the kitchen garden, or the skin of a hare hunted in the woods nearby. The manufactured quality of these Renaissance museums has been examined so far in relation to their few ethnographic exotica and collections of drawings, often the contribution of renowned artists.2 The fabricated quality of their organic specimens, however, has yet to receive due attention.
Most sixteenth-century cabinets of naturalia sported instances of highly manipulated natural items. At a basic level, before their insertion in a collection, plants, animals and minerals had to be prepared for display and conservation – cleaned, pared down, dried, lightly seasoned with spices or fully gutted and stuffed. But the fabrication did not end there. Collections regularly featured credible fakes, ersatz or imitation specimens and mythological creatures. These included dragons and sea monsters ‘[as described by] the Ancients’; multi-headed hydras – a gift for kings, feared for their gaze and poisonous breath – with miniature bodies combining the features of lion and eagle; and misshapen beasts like the two-headed calf, which natural philosophers, following Aristotle, considered preternatural creatures produced accidentally by excess or lack of matter, or by the mother’s imagination affecting the womb.3 There were anthropomorphised mandrakes, and toads with a snake’s tail artificially attached – the Bolognese polymath Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) owned two, distinguished by the fact that one toad had teeth and the other did not (fig. 14.1). A must-have was the bird of paradise or manucodiatum – peculiar because it was said to live airborne without ever resting, after it began arriving from the Moluccas with its feet cut off (fig. 14.2).4 Not all “false” specimens were frauds or monsters. Naturalists sometimes resorted to artificial compositions to make their collectables more lifelike and better entertain their genteel audience. The Leiden apothecary Christiaen Porret (1554–1627), for example, owned a bird’s nest which he adorned ‘with five or six little birds, very beautifully constructed of feathers in all colours’.5 Nor were all such fakes put together by hand. Several were natural materials which, whether by misidentification or fraudulent mis-selling, had taken on the identity of fabled materials prized for their healing, symbolic and magical properties, such as the unicorn horn (a narwhal tusk), the griffin’s claw (an ox’s horn), and the adder’s tongue (a shark’s tooth) (fig. 14.3).
‘Bufo mostrificus cauda anguina’. One of the two monstrous toads with a tail owned by Aldrovandi. Engraving from Ulisse Aldrovandi, Serpentum et draconum historiæ (Bononiæ 1640), book 1, 61
Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, Washington, DC
Over the years Aldrovandi collected watercolours for several kinds of bird of paradise. This specimen, however, captured on paper as a lifeless skin waiting to be mounted, offers an interesting contrast to most birds featured in his watercolour collection, which appear in formulaic lifelike poses, either perched on a branch or standing on a stone or amid the grass, sometimes lifting one leg, sometimes clutching some food (BUB, Fondo Aldrovandi, Tavole, vol. 2 Animali fol. 67)
Courtesy of the Biblioteca Universit aria, Bologna
Glossopetrae or ‘tongue stones’ (shark teeth), believed by many in the early modern period to be of mineral origin. Engraving from O. Worm, Museum Wormianum (Leiden 1655), 67
Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, DC
Although some of these items were reputed genuine, by the second half of the sixteenth century growing numbers of naturalists were ready to admit that fantastical creatures like the hydra, and more plausible exotica like the manucodiata, were either handmade or had been tweaked to suit an enduring fable. In their new compendia of flora and fauna, Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501–1577), Guillaume Rondelet (1507–1566), Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) and Aldrovandi began to expose such specimens as clever tricks by sailors, apothecaries and especially charlatans (circulatores, ciarlatani), those monster-mongers and peddlers of miraculous remedies for which Italian cities like Venice were famous. And yet they continued to collect fakes and ersatz with relish, and to recommend to their readers those observed in other notable collections. Identifying something as fake did not make it less worthy of collecting. Indeed, these doctored specimens remained central to natural historical cabinets until the mid-eighteenth century (fig. 14.4).6
Cabinet of the apothecary Ferrante Imperato in Naples, from F. Imperato, Dell’Historia naturale (Naples 1672), folded plate. Two separate counterfeit dragons can be spotted in the top left corner and in the top right corner respectively, the latter next to a specimen of manucodiata. Misshapen animal specimens are scattered across the ceiling.
Author’s Private Collection
While the early modern enjoyment of mirabilia and wonders is well documented, the practice of assembling counterfeit naturalia in collections designed to teach about nature with new accuracy is, at the very least, intriguing. This is especially so when we consider that this surge in counterfeit specimens coincided with the wider humanist project of eliminating all forgeries of content and authorship, a project embraced by subsequent generations of jurists, theologians, and physicians, the professions to which most naturalists belonged. What, then, was these objects’ appeal? If authenticity was not at stake, what kind of mimicry did they offer and what was its function? But for a handful of celebrated hoaxes exposing the gullibility and vanity of experts, the role of forgery and counterfeiting in natural history, and in the material history of early modern science more generally, remains understudied.7 If it is true that ‘each society, each generation, fakes the thing it covets the most’ (Jones 1990, 13), then counterfeits of nature should be considered a response to a specific epistemological juncture and set of desires.
1 The Fake and Different Regimes of Knowledge
Focusing primarily on the monstrous genera of hydras, cockatrices and basilisks that adorned princely collections, so far historians have studied counterfeits of nature at the intersection of two traditions: the learned interest in the marvellous, and the commercialisation of nature that began in response to the rise of natural historical collecting itself. They have documented the fascination of medieval and Renaissance scholars with the literary and mythological prodigies that populated bestiaries, herbals and lapidaries, as with the more vernacular marvels exhibited in broadsides and at fairs. The German physician Lorenz Hoffman (d. 1630), for instance, owned a dragon in a box, the skeleton of a four-week-old child, and a hen made out of real feathers (Kenseth 1991, 86–87). The collection of such an ensemble could be explained by a complex mix of secular and religious motives. Scholars were led to be ecumenical in their interests both by the quest for encyclopaedic knowledge that characterised humanism, and by the belief that to collect enabled one to know more about God. Alongside preternatural events like earthquakes, floods and comets, misshapen humans and beasts were traditionally considered tokens of God’s displeasure at human sin, or ‘portents’, prophetic signs of fearsome happenings to come, such as war or a royal death. Concurrently, the conviction that nature’s error, the oddity embodied by the wonder, would best reveal the true laws of God’s creation, became a central tenet of early modern natural philosophy, sparking a vivid interest in teratology. Wonders and portents became collectables like other prized naturalia. By the seventeenth century, it was not just that naturalists procured their specimens from the market, but also that merchants and retailers actively responded to the desires of the educated public by opening specialist shops where collectors could find ready-made curios to furnish their cabinets.8
Fake specimens cannot be explained by wonder, naïveté or cupidity alone, however. In this chapter, I shall reconsider these objects’ association with natural history and with the pharmaceutical and medical culture of Renaissance Italy – whence most manufacturers and consumers of counterfeit naturalia came. I will argue that for this audience the fake embodied a particular category of the natural, and that owning a fake was not simply a concession to wonder and a taste for mannerist aesthetics. Rather, it could be conceived as a pedagogical exercise.
For Renaissance naturalists, who approached nature as a problem of description and identification, the fake presented a double jeopardy. Scholars did not know all that was in the world (indeed, Nature was playful, even in known categories, as Lisbet Tarp’s essay in this volume shows.) Therefore, asserting that a particular kind could not exist among God’s creation was both epistemologically arrogant and theologically problematic. Engendering further humility, the momentous discovery of the New World had deeply confused scholarly knowledge of fauna and flora even as it drastically expanded the range of known entities (Pagden 1993, 17–49). Among this cornucopia of real and imagined forms, the boundary between true and false could be difficult to discern.
It is at this epistemological juncture of deep uncertainty about the limits of the physical world that counterfeit naturalia gained their pedagogical appeal. As they harnessed dreams about new geographies, fakes played on notions of the possible and the exotic. As they created new species from old materials and masqueraded known textures and forms, counterfeit bodies asked naturalists to pay close attention to their specimens’ materiality, the outward properties of organic matter, its docility towards preservation, and its afterlife once mounted in a collection.
To explore these issues, I will focus on the zoological craftwork of the medical charlatan Leone Tartaglini da Fogliano (fl. 1550–1576). A native of Tuscany active in Venice, mastro Leone described himself as a herbalist (herbolajo) and surgeon (chiruico). He sold wonder drugs from a stall in Saint Mark’s Square, prepared with herbs sourced from his physic garden on Murano. He was especially famous for a powder against intestinal worms, over which the Venetian Senate granted him a temporary monopoly.9 Like other professors of secrets, he dabbled in publishing, printing at his own expense a booklet on the nature of sleep which included recipes for some of his preparations against common ailments like warts, mange, and dog bites. His figure, predicting ill health (mala sorte) from a stage with a raven perched on his shoulder, is immortalised in a 1585 survey of Renaissance professions by Tommaso Garzoni, who also mocked him for ‘receiving his doctorate from Lizzafusina’, a fishing settlement on the estuary of the Brenta river, where the barges sailing up from the mainland stopped before delivering their catch to Venice. Indeed, in natural historical circles, Tartaglini acquired a reputation as a supplier of rare marine life from the Adriatic sea, and for his skill in fashioning credible fakes out of fish skins, which were avidly consumed by northern Italian collectors.10
Tartaglini excelled in the genre of the basilisk or flying dragon (draco volans), and his fame is tied to the specimens he supposedly manufactured in the 1560s and 1570s for the cabinets of Aldrovandi in Bologna and the apothecary Francesco Calzolari (1522–1609) in Verona (fig. 14.5). Calzolari’s dragon, most probably inherited by Count Ludovico Moscardo (1611–1681), is still visible in Verona’s Museum of Natural History (fig. 14.6), while one of Aldrovandi’s specimens may have made its way into the Museum of Natural History of Venice (MSNVE-16722) (figs. 14.7, 14.8).11 Crucially, unlike the princely hydras, which were usually considered imaginary creatures (an inventio according to Aldrovandi), the basilisks produced by Tartaglini and his colleagues were ersatzes, replicas of a species believed to exist in nature in Libya, Egypt and Ethiopia. Part dragon and part serpent, as described in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia (AD 77, book 8, chap. 33) and corroborated by authoritative travellers to the East like Pierre Belon (1517–1564), the fearsome basilisk had the power to destroy its surroundings with its breath and subjugate all beasts with its gaze.12
The four-footed basilisk belonging to the apothecary Francesco Calzolari. Engraving originally published in B. Ceruti & A. Chiocco, Musaeum Francisci Calceolari Iunioris Veronensis (Verona 1622); reprinted in Forti (1928), [249]
Lodovico Moscardo’s flying dragon with ribbon and bulging eyes (possibly the Calzolari original)
Courtesy of the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale, Verona
Watercolour of one of the two counterfeit draco volans – ‘raia exsiccata in formam draconis a circulatoribus efficta’ – in the Aldrovandi collection, obtained as specified by drying a ray (BUB, Fondo Aldrovandi, Tavole vols. 4–1, fol. 117r)
Seventeenth-century Draco volans in the Museo di Storia Naturale, Venice; possibly the second specimen owned by Aldrovandi
Courtesy of the Museo di Storia Naturale, Venice
I will suggest that, in approaching this mimetic craftwork, naturalists like Aldrovandi made reference to two distinct settings where fraudulence was a concern in material mimetic terms. The first was the world of crafts, and particularly the drug market. Pharmacy exposed naturalists to sophisticated manipulation techniques for naturalia, and gave them one way to conceptualise how substitution – the replacement of the prescribed by the adulterated – affected notions of ingredient authenticity and goodness. The second setting was humanism, which had inaugurated the use of artefacts as evidence to support textual analysis as early as the fourteenth century. While the humanist material or “archaelogical” turn greatly influenced sixteenth-century scholarship, it was not without its challenges. As it opened new avenues for corroboration and action, it also made humanist scholars, in the words of Christopher Wood, ‘peculiarly prone to credulity’ (Wood 2012, 166; also Burnett 1992).
My contention is that in medical and natural historical circles, counterfeit naturalia met two new scientific needs tied to the emerging values of observation, empiricism, and peritia: the need to examine nature at first hand, and the need of a cautionary tale warning of the difficulty of that labour of interpretation. The body of the fake not only activated the imagination but demanded a renewed attention, as it tested both the limits of nature and the scholar’s knowledge of it.
2 Making the Fake
Sixteenth-century accounts are replete with humorous stories of charlatans employing fake basilisks alongside dried snakes and other venomous creatures as theatrical props to persuade the public to purchase their antidotes (fig. 14.9). The general method to confect a basilisk is outlined by Gessner in the volume On fish of his Historiae animalium (1558). Tartaglini’s colleagues utilised types of saltwater fish with flat, cartilaginous bodies and whip-like tails – stingrays, skates, monkfish and roughsharks, all available in Mediterranean waters – and supplemented them at need with the skins of snakes, rabbits, and rats (fig. 14.10). After the fish was cleaned of its meat, its skin was stretched out, cut, and reshaped through several stages of soaking and drying in smoke or hot ashes. The head was pushed up to create torso and snout, the pectoral fins pushed up to make wings or split to add legs, and the tail either curled or made to shoot up straight in the air. This exoskeleton was then filled with straw or wool, or simply dried until it reached the consistency of thick parchment.13 With time the skin turned an ochre or brown colour. Ranging between 10 cm and 30 cm in length and height, these creations were small; yet, mounted with open wings, as if in mid-flight, and a snout filled with sharp teeth, their aspect was intended to be fierce. In the seventeenth century, collectors added more overt decorative touches, sometimes actively modifying earlier specimens. This is particularly visible in Moscardo’s (formerly Calzolari’s) dragon, which acquired striking glass eyes, and chains and ribbons to suspend it from the ceiling – props that would quickly have betrayed its artificial nature.14
Giovanni Maria Mitelli, ‘Charlatan holding a snake’, from Di Bologna l’Arti per via d’Annibal Carracci (Rome 1660), plate 39
Courtesy of the Well come Collection (CC B Y 4.0)
One type of ray commonly used by charlatans. ‘De raia asteria aspera’, from Guillaume Rondelet, Libri de piscibus marinis (Lyon 1554–1555), 352
Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, Washington, DC
In fact, artifice was already common in Renaissance museums. Suspension of disbelief was an operative principle of collecting. Collections worked through synecdoche and metonymy, presenting the viewer with suggestions of objects, fragments that stood in for the whole or for something else – the plant had to be imagined from the leaf, evidence for a unicorn found in a piece of horn. Specimens, moreover, did not arrive directly from nature. Raw materials were turned into objects of study after processes of selection and manipulation that ensured their longevity and their mimicry of a lifelike state that made them better legible to the naturalist (fig. 14.11).15 Preservation was a major area of intervention. Flora and fauna were treated with substances and techniques borrowed from pharmacy, cookery and hunting, such as exsiccation and immersion in fluids. Plants, for example, were dried by gentle heat, hooked from the rafters above the fireplace. Roots and small animals like lizards and toads were pickled in liquid, while larger animals were either skinned or mounted. If some preservatives came from the kitchen, such as honey and wine, most arrived from the apothecary shop, where salt, vinegar, wormwood leaves, alum, potash and diluted resins were used both to preserve and remove undesirable qualities in medicinal ingredients. Alcohol and spirits did not become common for zoological specimens before the seventeenth century’s end, and remained an unstable medium of preservation due to evaporation and the unpleasant downside of turning most specimens a dull grey.16
Mounted pelican from Aldrovandi’s museum. BUB, Fondo Aldrovandi, Tavole vol. 6, Animali, tomo 2, fol. 109
Courtesy of the Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna
Such methods were still rudimentary, and often failed to halt decay and insects. Mounted specimens were frequently ruined by perishable tissues left inside. In 1622, Francesco Calzolari jr was forced to replace, at great cost, the chamaeleon acquired sixty years earlier by the elder Calzolari from the Venetian patrician Daniele Barbaro, because the animal had rotted away. Nor did naturalists always master basic procedures: they often showed little manual dexterity. Their correspondence records cases of half-baked fish covered in soot, or plants going mouldy because of insufficient wrapping during transport. In consequence, expertise was often contracted out and specimens bought ready cured from professional intermediaries. Among these specialists was Tartaglini, first introduced to Aldrovandi by the apothecary Gianbattista Fulcheri as a mountebank who offered a catalogue of Adriatic fish for sale.17 Of all creatures, fish were the most intractable: their vibrant colours were destined to fade, their soft tissues almost impossible to keep, and their shapes easily distorted. Well into the eighteenth century, the best-preserved fish specimens were those that had been reduced to dry skins and flattened onto a board, like plants in herbaria.18 The extant sixteenth-century basilisks in north Italian museums are a testament to the charlatans’ virtuosity in competently handling such unwieldy matter.
Struggles with preservation – the dark side of Renaissance collecting – left their mark on collections. They affected their content – the average cabinet specialised in plants and minerals, easier to handle and replace, and featured few animal species, generally those smaller and with shells and harder parts that were easier to procure and keep. They also affected the naturalists’ intellectual projects, which rarely engaged systematically with zoology before the seventeenth century.19 The production of hydras, dragons and other counterfeit naturalia should be framed within this wider material phenomenon embedded in the birth of early modern museums. Like the mounted pelican or the stuffed blowfish increasingly adorning sixteenth-century cabinets, fake specimens were experiments in embalming and taxidermy, techniques which were still evolving and which naturalists borrowed directly from artisans who specialised in working with leathers and pelts, from tanners and furriers to fishermen and bird-trappers. It was not uncommon for naturalists to display their counterfeits alongside a dried sample of the fish from which they derived. The fact that scholarly mentions of hydras and dragons featured in specialist herpetologies, ichthyologies, and ornithologies further supports the impression that the interest was at least in part in the tangible properties – the ‘affordances’ – of the fish and snakes hiding behind the fake.20 Behind the passion for handcrafted specimens, in other words, lay a fascination with materials and the ways these could be manipulated by a skilled hand.
This was true also of the (fewer) botanical fakes. Beneath Mattioli’s scorn at the tricks of charlatans who sold human-shaped mandrake roots to infertile women, claiming they would help with conception, there was a certain admiration. Mattioli had learnt about the method of fashioning mandrakes from a mountebank he treated for syphilis in Rome. First, roots of briony were carved into the desired shape. Then they were punctured with a stylus and replanted with a layer of barley grains covering “sown” in those sections of the where it was desired to grow filaments to mimic human hair and beard. Such deceptions concealed a precise understanding of how certain botanical species germinated, developed, and reacted to soil and additives. These manipulators may have lacked any theoretical and philological lore of the flora they handled; but they were able to harness the very knowledge of how to bring about a transformation in living plants that loftier contemporaries like the Dutch horticulturalist Carolus Clusius were eagerly seeking in their selective breeding of ornamental plants and flower hybrids.21
An appreciation for the craftsmanship behind the fake was a strong reason for collecting it. Aldrovandi explicitly praised the ‘marvelous artifice […] of [the] craftsmen of our age who have wished to imitate the Hydra of the ancient poets, concerning which there were so many opinions, some having described it with seven heads, others with five, eight, nine, fifty, ninety and more’, and asked his correspondents to refer precisely ‘for both your honour and mine, by what material [the hydra] has been counterfeited, and […] its colours […] so that I may report it accurately and thus honour the inventor’.22 These zoological fakes were produced with such ‘ingegnum’, such virtuosity and creativity, that their manufacture could be aligned with the artistic reinterpretation of nature visible in the Kunstkammer’s artificialia – decorative artwork and fantastically shaped ceremonial utensils, obtained precisely by combining different natural materials (such as ivory and silver) and by playing with different material registers (the natural and the wrought).23 In his Serpentum et draconum historiae, Aldrovandi (1640, 313) further linked the counterfeit dragon with cleverly contrived ‘mechanica experimenta’, including an underground spring system built by the Romans, which was able to issue warm water continuously by curling its pipes in the manner of a dragon’s tail. The fake, then, was not just an instance of material technology. It embodied one of the driving concepts of Renaissance culture and art, that of ingenuity, and taught observant naturalists to see organic matter as an aesthetic category.24
At least in the case of Tartaglini, however, there was no simple dichotomy between artisan producer and learned consumer. While his dragons were certainly produced with a select audience in mind – naturalists, readers of travel narratives, and curiosi attracted by the bizarre in nature – it is not clear how many were sold to private collectors or reached the marketplace, or for what kind of money. For Aldrovandi, who had first seen a dragon in Tartaglini’s home in 1571 while touring Veneto collections, the acquisition may not have been a purchase at all. The two exchanged several specimens and watercolours, and the counterfeit may have belonged to this standard circulation of natural historical commodities.25 Unlike most hired hands contributing to Renaissance museums, moreover, Tartaglini had a documentable interest in the study of nature, as demonstrated by his lost treatise The herbal (1558), and his ownership of three volumes of watercolours of fish and plants and a small collection. A partial description of the latter appears in Tartaglini’s will of 1576, redacted shortly before he succumbed to one of the worst plague outbreaks to hit the Venetian mainland, which also took his wife Lucia Franco. The will distributed his curiosities among former patrons and acquaintances. The Venetian Senator Simone Zen received the bronze statuette of a lion kept in the charlatan’s study, ‘my most prized possession’. Fifteen watercolours of rare fruits painted on vellum by a young Jacopo Ligozzi (1547–1627) went to Giovanni Grimani, Patriarch of Aquileia, together with ‘the marble hand of a giant’. Three boxes of ‘minerals, drugs, and seeds’ went to the Venetian apothecary Cechino Martinelli and his brother Alberto. The apothecary Francesco Calzolari received skins of Indian fishes and all of the ostrich ‘that could be saved [from decay]’. Calzolari also acquired ‘a wooden man’ kept in an iron crate with wheels and a cord attached, possibly an automaton, an unusual presence in an artisan’s collection, despite the contemporary popularity of mechanical dolls (Brusegan 1996, 24–34; Bredekamp 1995, 2–3). This list of gifts places Tartaglini and his counterfeits in a different light: rather than a mere seller of nature, his artistry with materials was mediated by his membership of the community of north Italian naturalists.
Yet one should note that, even for those craftsmen who remained outside this community, the preparation of this craftwork – were its mimicry to succeed – demanded not only manual dexterity and a feeling for materials, but also specific knowledge. The charlatan needed the same eye for mimesis and truth-to-life that naturalists asked of their draftsmen and woodcutters. Tartaglini had been responsible for hiring and supervising a Venetian artist for Aldrovandi’s collection of watercolours, and himself owned drawings of naturalia by Ligozzi which, according to Calzolari, ‘can pass for live ones, it’s miraculous’.26 Just as importantly, the charlatan needed an eye for the development of natural history itself, an ability to recognise shifts in the discipline’s epistemological and visual sensibilities. I have already mentioned the arrival of exotica. Expertise on nature among the charlatan’s educated audience was also growing at a steady pace, bringing with it a reconfiguration of gullibility that inevitably affected the aesthetic parameters and the construction of the counterfeit itself. As Tartaglini put to Aldrovandi: ‘my mother experience taught me in this matter [of naturalia] that while many things appear similar, they are not, however, the same’.27
3 Studying the Fake
What of the conceptual use of fakes and ersatz? Interestingly, confected dragons and misshapen beasts were not the only counterfeits in the theatrum naturae. Counterfeit samples of medicinal ingredients and remedies featured in abundance. Aldrovandi’s cabinet, for example, displayed several kinds of adulterated terra sigillata, a red clay traditionally imported in small tablets from the Levant, and used to stanch wounds and prepare plasters: ‘In many pharmacies one finds many red earths used in place of the true terra lemnia […] many display Turkish seals and all are false. Pierre Belon in his History of Greece and Africa […] mentions 24 varieties, all falsified. All can be seen in my museum’ (fig. 14.12). This practice was certainly connected to Aldrovandi’s medical training and his appointment as protomedico of Bologna in 1578 alongside Antonio Maria Alberghini – a role that took him into the city’s pharmacies every three months, to oversee the production of compound remedies and inspect the stock, weeding out defective ingredients and preventing the use of cheaper and less effective substitute drugs.28
Three samples of terra sigillata from early modern Germany, in the Science Museum, London
Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection (CC B Y 4.0)
Indeed, the marketplace, particularly craft production and food services, was the main setting where fraud and authenticity were discussed in the sixteenth century. Both civic authorities and guilds were concerned to define product quality, in order to ensure the dignity and well-being of the civitas. Yet defi- nitions of authenticity were never epistemic absolutes. In this institutional context, the master displayed ‘sincerity’ by not deviating from the prescribed recipe or the set of ingredients, weights and manufacturing techniques sanctioned by the guild. Counterfeiting consisted less in outright invention and forgery than in substitution: replacing the licit with the illicit, the optimal with the inferior quality material – older, less durable, local rather than imported. In Padua, for instance, the public was warned about the Lenitive Electuary, which often contained counterfeit tamarinds – in fact a paste combining old cassia and badly preserved dates to create a superficial likeness to the leguminous fruit. While, in the artistic trades, the ability to mimic and deceive (for example by making wood resemble marble) could be a source of aesthetic appreciation and an index of the artist’s skill, in most other crafts it was perceived as a threat. Craftsmen were even forbidden from making their wares “look better”: fishermen should not freshen up their catch with seaweed, nor ragmen brighten old cloths with sulphate. Infractions were punished with fines and the destruction of merchandise.29 It was such mimetic tricks that officials like Aldrovandi set out to unmask. They cultivated the skill of detecting deviation from the standard, of recognising when one material dissolved into another and perception was played upon. Sight was only one means of assessment, generally the least reliable. More often, touch, taste and smell served the evaluator better. When assessing a ship’s worth, the texture and veneer of birch and oak, their tensile quality, had to be felt. Similarly, sophisticated balsam oil could only be uncovered by tasting it and suspending it in water, which would separate the wax, myrtle oil and honey it was counterfeited with.30
If, for artisans like shipbuilders and tanners, this deception concerned primarily the manipulation of monetary value, in health trades like pharmacy, the implications of fraud could be more sinister. Concerns about drug and foodstuff adulteration had been routine since the medieval period, as apothecaries had no choice but turn to substitutes whenever bad weather or a wayward cargo made standard ingredients unavailable. The sixteenth century, however, witnessed a new anxiety about the identity and reliability of the materials of nature. The rediscovery of Greco-Roman materia medica in the fifteenth century, coupled with increased travel both East and West, had greatly expanded the canon of medicinal ingredients. Yet with greater variety came dire problems of identification and nomenclature. What to make of new imports, and how to distinguish the ingredients described by the ancients among all the herbs at the apothecary’s disposal? One of the most conspicuous outcomes of this confusion was the development of what I have called elsewhere a ‘language of truth’. From the 1540s, pharmacopoeias, botanical treatises and naturalists’ letters register a new way of wading through the plenitude of ingredients, by qualifying them according to their proximity to a putative original and its purity. Prestigious remedies inherited from anti- quity, such as the famous poison antidote theriac, were now described as containing ‘true’ cinnamon, ‘true’ amomum, ‘legitimate’ cardamom, and being in danger from ‘false’ hedicroo. ‘False’, like ‘true’ and ‘legitimate’, was a taxonomic category, used to describe naturalia approximating, but not quite identical, to the original species described by ancient authors. Thus, false Dictamnus deviated from Dioscorides’s True Dictamnus only in its thicker leaves and milder aroma. These predicates were not just a philological or pedagogical exercise, but spoke of a reconfiguration of authenticity and mimesis: to the traditional understanding of ‘goodness’ and ‘sincerity’ as the absence of adulteration, sixteenth-century scholars added the aspiration of being truthful to nature, of recovering its original forms as described by the ancients (Pugliano 2017, 255–266).
Collecting became a primary activity through which apothecaries and physicians learnt and honed these distinctions. By displaying correct and incorrect samples of medicinal ingredients side by side, apothecaries could build prepare a catalogue against which to evaluate the appropriateness of their wares. Professors of natural philosophy like Aldrovandi, who regularly lectured on materia medica at Bologna using the specimens in his museum (Findlen 1994, 254), could teach his students how to calibrate between deceptively similar naturalia, and how to detect common market frauds. In the case of terra sigillata, texture and colour provided the clues: ‘there is one kind, very red and powerful which doesn’t stain one’s hand red as the common one does, which is adulterated and mixed with red soil’. This was valuable preparation for future practising physicians who would eventually prescribe remedies and possibly shoulder the responsibility of the protomedicato. The display also acted as a warning to less experienced colleagues who visited the museum.
4 Materials for an Expanded World
Did such pedagogical use of counterfeit medicinal items translate to fake specimens and ersatz exotica? In his popular De varietate rerum (1557), the Milanese physician Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576) devoted some pages to describing the natural and artificial content to be found in a thesaurum, a princely collection, and how to detect the man-made among those of its mirabilia that seemed to stretch the possibilities of nature. Sadly for the neophyte, Cardano asserted that plants could only be exposed with a good knowledge of botany. But for animals there was a way: one must inspect the specimen’s external anatomy, paying special attention to joints and sutures which would give away its fabricated nature.31
This work of detection is recorded in an interesting set of letters that Aldrovandi exchanged in April 1595 with Luigi Zenobi (1547/1548–1602), a renowned musician at the court of Ferrara, and owner of a seven-headed hydra. Although Zenobi declared up front that his specimen was artificial, the discussion illuminates how a fake could be employed to test one’s natural historical acumen. Inspecting a watercolour of the monster, Aldrovandi wrote: ‘I cannot understand how [the artisan] was able to reduce a rabbit and the scales of the snake Scorzone to the likeness of a hydra’. The drawing reproduced puzzling ‘red and green colours and […] some lines traversing the body’ which Aldrovandi had never witnessed in the said snake. Conversely, the hydra sported bulbous protrusions similar to those he had observed on the back of a chamaeleon arrived from Africa. This prompted him to inquire whether the hydra displayed a third order of protrusions beside the two covering its dorsal spine, and whether the colours used in the drawing truly reproduced those of the ‘fake body’ (corpo finto) or had been added ‘to impart some beauty to it’.32 Aldrovandi viewed colour as one of the most reliable markers of identity both when examining actual specimens, even more so where art in the service of science was concerned. He is also known to have compiled colour lists in which he catalogued hue variations by referencing naturalia in his cabinet (Pugliano 2015, 377–383). Yet his concern here was to resurface those traces of labour that the taxidermic process had actively effaced. At issue for the naturalist was not authenticity, but reconstructing how the process of mimesis had unfolded. Had he been able to view the fake in person, Aldrovandi would likely have handled it to detect qualities indetectible by eye, such as weight and texture. This full sensory engagement with specimens has since been sanitised from our encounters with collections, but was typical of early modern museums, where visitors fully expected to be able to hold and touch the displays, and even to scrape off part of their surface with a knife if the urge took them (Classen 2007). Relying only on second-hand information, Aldrovandi eventually rejected the idea that the hydra was entirely fabricated: ‘Truthfully I believe that your Hydra was composed from the body and tail of the real flying dragon born in Arabia and Egypt, to which the heads of other animals were added by art, while the wings, which resemble those of a bat, and the feet were cut off, seeing how the lower part of its body stands empty.’33
By participating in the deception while denouncing it, Aldrovandi effectively created a subtle dichotomy between expert and non-expert, particularly important outside the pedagogical context of the university. Mattioli had made much of the foolishness of uneducated women (donnicciole). In his Serpentum et draconum historiae (1640), Aldrovandi confirmed that it was the populace (vulgus) and the inexperienced (imperitii) in things natural who would be easily deceived.34 Yet, even among naturalists, not everyone possessed the expertise to make the right judgment. For example, Friar Gregorio da Reggio (d. 1618), who had alerted Aldrovandi to the Ferrarese hydra, and had ‘touched it, and examined it well’, avoided drawing conclusions himself: ‘if it’s artificial, it’s a marvel; if it’s natural, it’s a great wonder’.35 The worldlier Danish physician and collector Ole Worm (1588–1654), who owned one manucodiatum ‘with feet’, remained convinced that his specimen was a ‘lesser variety’.36 In this shared culture of spectacle and awe, the fake could become an unexpected prop to the scholar’s self-fashioning, and a stress test for measuring the knowledge of his guests.
The exercise of collecting and deconstructing counterfeits was pedagogically compelling not simply because uncertainty lingered about the nature of wonders, but also because the standards of evidence applied to artefacts were at this time less stringent than those applied to textual evidence. This was a function of the material or archaeological turn that scholarship underwent in conjunction with humanism. With renewed enthusiasm for the material legacy of antiquity, and its promise of improving upon scarce documentary sources, came some measure of credulity towards material evidence more generally. Almost counterintuitively, according to Christopher Wood, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century scholars, ‘presented with a material artifact, tended to underrate the possibility of an unreliable or wandering transmission and instead to presume a strong connection between the artifact and its referent’. This ‘learned credulity’ toward objects paved the way for a soaring culture of forgery, which extended to all relics from the ancient world, including statues, medals and coins. It also led scholars into all sorts of errors and misattributions: they misdated often by centuries, seeing the antique in the medieval, taken in by changes in dyes, an old-looking patina, the addition of rust (Wood 2012, 178, 164). Naturalists (many of whom were humanistically trained and cultivated antiquarian interests) shared, at least in part, this good faith in materials, and found it difficult to discount the identity and reliability of the naturalia on which they got their hands. The resonance of Pliny in a charlatan’s fraud was almost enough to convince its learned viewers that they were seeing the vile monster described by the Roman sage. And, as the example of Aldrovandi judging on the basis of impressionistic drawings reminds us, the difference between copy and original was still being worked out in natural history.
Within sixteenth-century natural history, a skeptical disposition toward material culture was still the domain of the few.37 This is understandable, as naturalists faced not only the challenge of learning to read objects, but also of coming to terms with a line of plausibility that had been dramatically redrawn by travel and discoveries. Counterfeit naturalia brought this into relief. Understanding the fake challenged the viewer’s zoological knowledge, because it demanded a mental work of comparison and recombination of traits from different species. Of the seven-headed hydra sold to the King of France (see fig. 14.12), Conrad Gessner commented that ‘The ears, tongue, nose, and faces are different from the nature of all species of serpents’, adding that, had the maker not been simple-minded, and had he limited himself to using a single species, he would easily have fooled his viewers.38 Tartaglini’s craftwork, in this sense, was even more problematic, as he did not produce abnormally featured monsters meant to shock his audience, but naturalistic representations of plausible animals, probably helped in this by his surgical experience of suturing superficial wounds and setting bones. Despite a seemingly standard morphology, the flying dragon was difficult to categorise correctly because of variations between the individual samples. To render a supposedly single species, craftsmen not only employed the skins of different animals, but also added and subtracted features at will. Some dragons had four feet, while others lacked them altogether; were they exceptions, like the manucodiata, or some kind of snake? Some had two feet and a beak rather than a snout; were they ordinary birds? Together with behaviour and habitat, foot typology, the number of limbs and skin texture were key morphological criteria in the zoological classifications that naturalists began to devise in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – Gessner and Aldrovandi in primis.39 If counterfeit dragons had the uncomfortable ability to call into question the validity of these new taxonomic choices, other fabricated specimens seemed to push the very boundary between the vegetable and animal worlds, or between inanimate and animate – such as the famous Lamb of Tartary (the manipulated rhizome of the fern Cibotium barometz), an ovine believed to grow like fruit from a central Asian plant. Attached to it by an umbilical cord, the lamb grazed around until all accessible foliage was gone, whereupon both plant and animal died (Appleby 1997).
Seven-headed hydra owned by the King of France, from C. Gessner, Historia animalium, liber IV: De piscium et aquatilium (Zurich 1558), 459
Courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, Washington, DC
The counterfeits’ instantiation of fabled creatures afforded a unique sensory experience to the naturalist, who, through his hands, nose and sometimes even tongue, was able to conjecture about the paths that nature could take or could have taken, and test his own theories about generation, genealogy and groupings. The opportunity to witness these creatures first hand in a museum setting was prized by contemporaries. When the Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin (1616–1680) exposed as a fake the basilisk owned by Frederik II of Denmark, he presented as one of his arguments the fact that he had seen several artificial specimens during his travels on the Continent. Similarly, careful comparison between the mouth of a live pachyderm and his own ‘giant’s teeth’ enabled Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) to reclassify the latter as elephant teeth (Bondeson 2014, 180; Jaffé 1992, 158). Not simply a good instructional device, the fake, in the words of Mark Jones (1990, 12), could be ‘determinant in changing boundaries of belief’.
And it is precisely in relation to the ferment of the American discoveries and increased connections across Eurasia that the study of the fake and its heterogeneity finds its best justification (fig. 14.14). While mythological and Biblical monsters transmitted through texts and sermons were gradually being dismissed in educated circles, the horizon of possibility for what concerned the physical world had expanded rather than shrunk. Faced with an ever-increasing cornucopia of natural forms arriving from afar, wondrous to a European eye used to the morphologies of a temperate climate, the naturalist could not dismiss the unusual a priori, but was obliged to consider each case on its own. It is not difficult to see how the ersatz’s appearance might find credibility in the new wave of exotica, when we consider how these exotica were supported by often unverifiable travellers’ tales, and how they were absorbed epistemologically by painters and writers, namely through a combinatory process (much like that of the fake) that rendered the new by collating parts of the old. Thus, the armadillo, among the most popular Americana featuring in early modern collections, was routinely described as having the head, ears and hooves of a horse, the behaviour and tail of a pig, and a turtle’s carapace (Margócsy 2011; Ashworth 1991, 116–117, 121). Hence the slippery ontological nature of Tartaglini’s fakes. They are fictitious, but they might instruct by default about something actually out there – especially as his dragons were supposedly replicas of an African species (draco aethiopicus) that most naturalists would not have seen.40 Their mimicry is therefore inherently approximative, mutable, suggestive rather than prescriptive. They reflect the excitement and uncertainty felt by naturalists in the face of an expanded geography.
Seventeenth-century engraving inserting the allegedly real Aethiopian dragon (top left) in an exotic menagerie that includes a camel, a giraffe and a chamaeleon. The dragon’s features are lifted wholesale from the much plagiarised sixteenth-century depiction of it given in Pierre Belon’s Les observations des plusieurs singularitez et choses memorables (Antwerp 1554). Engraving by D. Loggan, 1663, after Wenceslaus Hollar (London 1674)
Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection (CC B Y 4.0)
A second counterfeit dragon from the seventeenth century, once owned by the Veronese herpetologist Edoardo De Betta (1822–1896) and now in Verona’s Museo Civico di Storia Naturale.
Photo: Forti (1928), [242] Courtesy of the Museo Galileo , Florence
Like most fakes and ersatzes across time and cultures, from seventeenth- century Dutch imitation porcelain to contemporary Chinese replicas of prêt- à-porter handbags, nature’s counterfeits reflected the sense of history of their makers and intended consumers. Their special appeal lay in their ability to make that history more concrete. In this, they again displayed an interesting resemblance to contemporary antiquarian forgeries. According to Wood, antiquarian error, and the ready acceptance of supposedly ancient objects that to our eyes seem an improbable pastiche, were not the result of naïveté. More often it was a matter of ‘looking through’ the artefact’s inauthenticity and “recentness” to a referent ‘far behind it and so to its true meaning’. Pre-modern scholars understood artefacts and evidence as parts of a chain of substitutions meant to revive and corroborate an evanescent past. The fraudulent document was often introduced to substitute for an original that must have existed and whose “spirit”, if not necessarily form, it kept intact. In the process, the distinction between being and replacing became blurred.41
I would argue that naturalists too, engaging as they were in a new scholarly field that relied heavily on material evidence, were looking for such tangible immediacy. According to Charles Mitchell, antiquarian scholarship was a matter of fleshing out the bare skeleton of antique remains with interpretive imagination.42 This the dragons accomplished both materially and conceptually. Part of their persuasive power derived precisely from their corporeality and wholeness, a material state that contrasted with the fragmentary and latent content in most collections of naturalia – leaves, teeth, horns, bones. Just as the eighteenth century resuscitated ancient sculptures by turning found fragments into coherent wholes, the basilisk maker created an ‘illusion of completeness’ (Jones 1990, 14) that enabled the naturalist to see and touch faraway lands. Yet, unlike most medieval and Renaissance antiquarian forgeries, nature’s fakes were not connected with recovering and emulating an idealised past, but with present practices and future encounters. If humanist evidence derived its value from “looking old”, organic counterfeits were more presentist. The confected dragon stood in for a natural world that the naturalist considered likely to be out there, and only a matter of time before it was found and experienced.
5 Conclusion
Concealed in the extraordinary folds, limbs, and stitching of the fake’s body were deeper anxieties and desires concerning the mastery of an enlarged natural world, the probing of materials, and the moral policing of the world of commodities. Depending on the constituency, material mimesis could work as a vector of value, time, or geography. For sixteenth-century healers and naturalists, counterfeit objects gained visibility as protagonists both of ingenious antiquarian frauds and of the wider discussion on substitution, authenticity and fraud in the marketplace. If, in humanist circles, fakes often constituted a reputational downfall, in the practice of pharmacy they were heuristic tools. Natural history borrowed from both stances. For naturalists, fakes were not just challenges to scholarly reputation, but material and intellectual puzzles. They offered a means to learn about and work with the organic limits of materials, and, with their subtle mimicry, taught scholars to perceive matter as an aesthetic as well as epistemic category.
Fakes also clearly contributed to the development of a critical tradition in the emerging field of natural history. They prompted naturalists – at least the more observant ones – to question their knowledge of the natural world, and offered a tangible immediacy to geographies and pools of naturalia that for most European scholars would remain inaccessible until modern times. As mimetic performances of the possible, however, they remained difficult to pin down. It is for this reason that they were such effective instructional devices, and answered a novel scientific need. While they satisfied scholars’ desire for new materials of study, counterfeits also acted as a timely warning about the difficulty of interpreting nature and the dangers that a misinterpretation might bring, be it failing health or a reputation for ignorance. Exposing the fake then became a demonstration of connoisseurship and a display of authority.
Mostly untold remains the other side of the story. If fakes ‘teach us the fallibility of experts’, they can also reveal the expertise of their semi-literate producers and their familiarity with élite cultural vogues. The forger, as Tony Grafton has observed, is often the most accomplished critic (Grafton 1990; Jones 1990, 11).
Acknowledgements
An early version of this chapter, ‘Leone Tartaglini’s basilisks: fake specimens and explorations in the boundaries of scientific connoisseurship’, was presented at the 2nd Watson Seminar in the History of Material and Visual Science, Museo Galileo, Florence, 7 June 2013. I thank the organisers Marco Beretta and Maria Conforti for the opportunity to discuss early ideas on the topic. The commentary then given on my chapter by Alessandro Tosi appeared with revisions as Tosi 2014.
Bibliography
Aldrovandi, Ulisse, Ornithologia. Hoc est de avibus historiae Libri XII, Bologna 1599.
Aldrovandi, Ulisse, Serpentum et draconum historiae libri duo, Bologna 1640.
Ashworth, William S., ‘Remarkable humans and singular beasts’, 113–144, in: The age of the marvelous (J. Kenseth, ed.), Hanover 1991.
Belon, Pierre, Les Observations des plusieurs singularitez et choses mémorables trouvées en Grece, Asie, Judée, Egypte, Arabie, et autre pays éstranges, Antwerp 1554.
Bondeson, Jan, The Feejee mermaid and other essays in natural and unnatural history, Ithaca, N.Y. 2014.
Boumediene, Samir & Valentina Pugliano, ‘La route des succédanés: Les remèdes exotiques, l’innovation médicale et le marché des substituts au xvie siècle’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 66, No. 3 (2019), 24–54.
Bredekamp, Horst, The lure of antiquity and the cult of the machine: The Kunstkammer and the evolution of nature, art, and technology, Princeton, N.J. 1995.
Burnett, Andrew, ‘Coin faking in the Renaissance’, 15–22, in: Why fakes matter: Essays on problems of authenticity (M. Jones, ed.), London 1992.
Cardano, Girolamo, De varietate rerum, in: G. Cardano, Opera omnia, Lyon 1663.
Cermenati, Mario (ed.), Francesco Calzolari da Verona e le sue lettere ad Ulisse Aldrovandi, Rome 1910.
Ceruti, Benedetto & Andrea Chiocco, Musaeum Francisci Calceolari Iunioris Veronensis, Verona 1622.
Classen, Constance, ‘Museum manners: The sensory life of early museums’, Journal of social history, 40, No. 4 (2007), 895–914.
Cooper, Alix, Inventing the indigenous: Local knowledge and natural history in early modern Europe, Cambridge 2007.
Dance, Peter, Animal fakes and frauds, Maidenhead 1976.
Daston, Lorraine, ‘The glass flowers’, 223–254, in: Things that talk: Object lessons from art and science (L. Daston, ed.), New York 2004.
Daston, Lorraine & Katherine Park, Wonders and the order of nature 1150–1750, New York 1998.
Davis, Peter, ‘Collecting and preserving fishes: A historical perspective’, 149–165, in: Naturalists in the field: Collecting, recording and preserving the natural world from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century (A. MacGregor, ed.), Leiden & Boston 2018.
Eamon, William, Science and the secrets of nature: Books of secrets in medieval and early modern culture, Princeton, N.J. 1996.
Egmond, Florike, The world of Carolus Clusius: Natural history in the making, 1550–1610, London 2010.
Egmond, Florike, Eye for detail: Images of plants and animals in art and science 1500–1630, London 2017.
Enenkel, Karl A. E. & Paul J. Smith (eds.), Zoology in early modern culture: Intersections of science, theology, philology, and political and religious education, Leiden & Boston 2014.
Findlen, Paula, Possessing nature: Museums, collecting and scientific culture in early modern Italy, Berkeley & London 1994.
Findlen, Paula, ‘Inventing nature’, 297–323, in: Merchants and marvels: Commerce, science and art in early modern Europe (P.H. Smith & P. Findlen, eds.), London 2002.
Forti, Achille, ‘Del drago che si trovava nella raccolta Moscardo e di un probabile artefice di tali mistificazioni’, Madonna Verona, 8 (1914), 26–51.
Forti, Achille, ‘Il basilisco esistente al Museo Civico di Storia Naturale a Venezia e gli affini simulacri finora conosciuti. Contributo alla storia della Ciarlataneria’, Atti Istituto Veneto, 88, No. 2 (1928–1929), 225–238.
Garzoni, Tommaso, La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, Venice 1587.
Gentilcore, David, Medical charlatanism in early modern Italy, Oxford 2006.
George, Wilma, ‘Alive or dead: Zoological collections in the seventeeth century’, 179–187, in: The origins of museums: The cabinet of curiosities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe (O. Impey & A. MacGregor, eds.), Oxford 1985.
Gessner, Conrad, Historiae animalium, Liber IIII qui est de piscium, Zürich 1558.
Grafton, Anthony, Forgers and critics: Creativity and duplicity in Western scholarship, Princeton, N.J. 1990.
Grafton, Anthony, ‘Inventions of traditions and traditions of inventions in Renaissance Europe: The strange case of Annius of Viterbo’, 8–38, in: The transmission of culture in early modern Europe (A. Grafton & A. Blair, eds.), Philadelphia 1998.
Jaffé, David, Rubens’ self-portrait in focus, cat. Canberra, Australian National Gallery, Brisbane 1988.
Jaffé, David, ‘Peiresc and new attitudes to authenticity in the seventeenth century’, 157–173, in: Why fakes matter: Essays on problems of authenticity (M. Jones, ed.), London 1992.
Jones, Mark, ‘Introduction: Why fakes?’, 11–16, in: Fake? The art of deception (M. Jones, ed.), Berkeley & Los Angeles 1990.
Katritzky, M. A., Women, medicine and theatre 1500–1750: Literary mountebanks and performing quacks, Aldershot 2007.
Kenseth, Joy, ‘A world of wonders in one closet shut’, cat. nos. 29–39, 25–59, in: The age of the marvelous (J. Kenseth, ed.), Hanover, NH 1991.
Larsen, Anne, ‘Equipment for the field’, 358–377, in: Cultures of natural history (N. Jardine, J. A. Secord & E. C. Spary, eds.), Cambridge 1996.
Lawrence, Natalie, ‘Making monsters’, 94–111, in: Worlds of natural history (H. A. Curry, N. Jardine, J. A. Secord & E. C. Spary, eds.), Cambridge 2018.
Lugli, Adalgisa, Naturalia et mirabilia: Il collezionismo enciclopedico nelle Wunderkammern d’Europa, Milan 1990.
Mackenney, Richard, Tradesmen and traders: The world of guilds in Venice and Europe, c.1250–c.1650, London & Sydney 1987.
Margócsy, Daniel, ‘The camel’s head: Representing unseen animals in sixteenth-century Europe’, Nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek, 61 (2011): 62–85.
Mattioli, Pietro Andrea, I Discorsi ne i sei libri della material medicinale di Pedacio Dioscoride Anazarbeo, Venice 1557.
Mitchell, Charles, ‘Archaeology and romance in Renaissance Italy’, 455–483, in: Italian Renaissance studies. A tribute to the late Celia M. Ady (E.F. Jacob, ed.), New York 1960.
Moscardo, Lodovico, Note overo Memorie del Museo del Conte Lodovico Moscardo, nobile Veronese, Padua 1656.
Nagel, Alexander & Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, New York 2010.
Niccoli, Ottavia, Prophecy and people in Renaissance Italy, Princeton, N.J. 1990.
Ogilvie, Brian, The science of describing, Chicago 2006.
Olmi, Giuseppe, ‘Farmacopea antica e medicina moderna. La disputa sulla teriaca nel Cinquecento Bolognese’, Physis, 19 (1977), 198–246.
Olmi, Giuseppe, ‘Science-honor metaphor: Italian cabinets of the 16th and 17th- centuries’, 5–16, in: The origins of museums: The cabinet of curiosities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe (O. Impey & A. MacGregor, eds.), Oxford 1985.
Olmi, Giuseppe, L’inventario del mondo. Catalogazione della natura e luoghi del sapere nella prima eta’ moderna, Bologna 1992.
Olmi, Giuseppe, ‘Cappuccini e la scienza nell’eta’ moderna’, 288–329, in: I Cappuccini in Emilia Romagna: Storia di una presenza (G. Pozzi & P. Prodi, eds.), Bologna 2002.
Pagden, Anthony, European encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism, New Haven & London 1993.
Park, Katherine & Lorraine Daston, ‘Unnatural conceptions: the study of monsters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France and England’, Past and present, 92, No. 1 (1981), 20–54.
Peck, Robert McCracken, ‘Preserving nature for study and display’, 11–26, in: Stuffing birds, pressing plants, shaping knowledge: Natural history in North America, 1730–1860 (S. A. Prince, ed.), Philadelphia 2003a.
Peck, Robert McCracken, ‘Alcohol and arsenic, pepper and pitch: Brief histories of preservation techniques’, 27–54, in: Stuffing birds, pressing plants, shaping knowledge: natural history in North America, 1730–1860 (S. A. Prince, ed.), Philadelphia 2003b.
Pliny the Elder, Historia naturalis. In ten volumes, vol. 3, Cambridge, Mass. 1940.
Pona, Giovanni, Index multarum rerum quae in repositorio asservantur, Verona 1601.
Pugliano, Valentina, ‘Ulisse Aldrovandi’s color sensibility: Natural history, language and the lay color practice of Renaissance virtuosi’, Early science and medicine, 20 (2015), 358–396.
Pugliano, Valentina, ‘Pharmacy, testing and the language of truth in Renaissance Italy’, Bulletin of the history of medicine, 91–92 (2017), 233–273.
Pugliano, Valentina, ‘Natural history in the apothecary’s shop’, 44–60, in: Worlds of natural history (H. A. Curry, N. Jardine, J. A. Secord & E. C. Spary, eds.), Cambridge 2018.
Reggiani, Paolo, ‘Un basilisco conservato presso il Museo di Storia Naturale di Venezia’, Bollettino Museo Storia Naturale di Venezia, 62 (2011), 239–244.
Rondelet, Guillaume, Libri de piscibus marinis in quibus verae piscium effigies expressae sunt, Lyon 1554.
Rublack, Ulinka, ‘Matter in the material Renaissance’, Past and present, 219 (2013), 41–85.
Schulze-Hagen, Karl, Frank Steinheimer, Ragnar Kinzelbach & Christoph Gasser, ‘Avian taxidermy in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance’, Journal of ornithology, 144 (2003), 459–478.
Swan, Claudia, ‘Ad vivum, naer het leven, from the life: defining a mode of representation’, Word and image, 11 (1995), 353–372.
Tartaglini, Leone, Opera Nuova nella quale se contiene la natura dil sonno cioe come lhuomo debbe dormire per mantenersi sano con alchuni bellissimi et utilissimi secreti medicinali (M. Brusegan, ed.), Fermo 1996 [orig. 1551].
Tosi, Alessandro, ‘Contrivances of art: the power of images in the early modern culture of curiosity’, 153-175, in: Fakes!? Hoaxes, counterfeits and deception in early modern science (M. Beretta & M. Conforti, eds.), Sagamore Beach, Mass. 2014.
Welch, Evelyn, Art in Renaissance Italy, 1350–1500, Oxford 2000.
Wonders, Karen, Habitat dioramas: Illusions of wilderness in museums of natural history, Uppsala 1993.
Wood, Christopher S., ‘The credulity problem’, 149–204, in: Antiquarianism and intellectual life in Europe and China, 1500–1800 (P. N. Miller & F. Louis, eds.), Ann Arbor 2012.
Yanni, Carla, Nature’s museums: Victorian science and the architecture of display, New York 2000.
Endnotes
Biblioteca Universitaria Bologna (henceforth BUB), MS Aldrovandi 38/ii–iii, fols. 247r–248v. All translations are mine unless otherwise stated.
Olmi 1985; Findlen 1994; Egmond 2010, 2017; Kenseth 1991, cat. nos. 29–39.
Pona 1601, sig. B2v; Dance 1976; Findlen 2002; Daston & Park 1981.
BUB, Aldrovandi MS 136/xv, fol. 186v. One toad is illustrated in Aldrovandi 1640, book 1, 61 (‘Bufo mostrificus cauda anguina’); on the manucodiata, Lawrence 2018.
Quoted in Swan 2005, 231.
Rondelet 1554, 363; Mattioli 1557, 740–741; Gessner 1558, 945; Aldrovandi 1640, 314–320; id. 1599, vol. 2, book 14; id., BUB, MS Aldrovandi 136/xxiv, fols. 105r–109r, ‘De ave manucodiata seu Paradisea’. On the longevity of monsters, see George 1985, 183–185; Findlen 2002, 299.
See the notorious case of the planted fossils that ruined the reputation of Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Würzburg University in 1725 (Cooper 2007, 101–109); Beretta & Conforti 2014.
Niccoli 1990; Daston & Park 1998; Findlen 2002, 299–304.
Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Provveditori Sanità, b. 13, fols. 74v, 144r.
Brusegan 1996; Garzoni 1587, 746. A list of items traded by Tartaglini features among Aldrovandi’s papers (BUB, MS Aldrovandi 136/v, fols. 190v–204r, ‘Venetiis, apud Leonem circulatorem de piscibus’). On charlatans and secrets, see Gentilcore 2006, Eamon 1996.
These are depicted in Aldrovandi 1640, 315–316 (‘Draco ex Raia effictus’, ‘Draco alter ex Raia exsiccata concinnatus’), and in Ceruti & Chiocco 1656, 234. Aldrovandi’s tailed toads had also been supplied by Tartaglini (Forti 1914, 35, n. 2).
Pliny 1940, Book 8, chap. 33; Belon 1554, sig. 133r. For a comprehensive discussion of the Plinian basilisk and its Renaissance reception, including theories of its generation and its iconography, see Aldrovandi 1640, 361–376.
Katritzky 2007, 93–96; Gessner 1558, 545. While these counterfeits were entirely of animal origin, later specimens often contained supporting wood inserts and limbs made of hardened textiles and paper (see item MSNVE-16723 in Venice’s Natural History Museum; Reggiani 2011).
Forti 1914, 27–28. Although mounted specimens were becoming common by the 16th century’s end, and stuffed birds especially were fashioned in poses suggesting behaviours either observed in life or described by the ancients, the habit of infusing the object with a visible narrative would not become standard before the habitat dioramas of the 18th and 19th centuries, which dramatised nature for a wider lay audience. See Ross 2019; Wonders 1993; Yanni 2000, 27–30.
On the legibility of nature, see Daston 2004.
Pugliano 2012, 253–264; Larsen 1996, 358, 364. Cheap methylated ethanol, sometimes with added glycerine, is still the most common preservative for wet specimens (Davis 2018, 151; Peck 2003b).
Ceruti & Chiocco 1622, 668–669. Before the 18th century, specimens rarely lasted more than a few decades (Peck 2003a). On intermediaries, see Pugliano 2018, 45–49; Schulze-Hagen et al. 2003. On Tartaglini, see Fulcheri to Aldrovandi, 28 June 1566, BUB, MS Aldrovandi 38/iii, fol. 100r.
This method appears not to have been practised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Davis 2018, 154). See also Rijks, this volume.
According to Wilma George’s examination of the perishable zoological content of 17th-century European cabinets, Italian collections contained the fewest animals, generally mammals and fish (George 1985, 180; Peck 2003b, 36–38).
Aldrovandi to Luigi Zenobi, 17 April 1595, BUB, MS Aldrovandi 21/iv, fol. 89v. In Aldrovandi’s carefully organised collection of watercolours, the main volume devoted to sea creatures and reptiles also includes images for the authentic draco aethiopicus, for a charlatan’s flying dragon, and for a footed serpent encountered in the Bolognese countryside, which are inserted organically among depictions of rays, skates and roughsharks (see BUB, Fondo Aldrovandi, Tavole 4, vol. 1). See also Rietveld’s essay, this volume.
Mattioli 1557, 501–502; Egmond 2010, 25–44.
Aldrovandi to Zenobi, 17 April 1595, BUB, MS Aldrovandi 21/iv, fols. 87v, 89v.
Lugli 1990.
Welch 2000, 37–38, 79; Rublack 2013, 43. For a similar humanist appreciation of the manufacturing virtuosity and imagination behind antiquarian forgeries, Mitchell 1960, 458–460; Wood 2012, 150–152.
Tartaglini to Aldrovandi, 28 November 1571–26 January 1576, BUB, Aldrovandi MS 38/ii–iii, fols. 246r–248r. Tartaglini also exchanged items with Calzolari, and supplied the Venetian garden of Pietrantonio Michiel with plants (Forti 1914, 35, n. 1).
Calzolari to Aldrovandi, 16 December 1571, in: Cermenati 1910, 125; Fenari, January to December 1571, BUB, Aldrovandi MS 38/ii–iii, fols. 4r–13r; Olmi 1992; Swan 1995.
Tartaglini, 22 December 1571, BUB, Aldrovandi MS 38/ii–iii, fol. 247.
BUB, Aldrovandi MS 97, fols. 512v–513r: ‘De Terra Lemnia seu terra sigillata’; Belon 1554, Book 1, chs. 22–23, 28. Olmi 1977, 205.
Mackenney 1987, 16–18; Pugliano 2017, 255–256. See also Dümpelmann, this volume.
On substitution, see Boumediene & Pugliano 2019.
Cardano 1663, vol. 3, 340–342.
BUB, MS Aldrovandi 21/iv, fols. 87r–v. A rather unhelpful engraving of the Cavalier Del Cornetto’s hydra can be found in Aldrovandi 1640, 387.
BUB, MS Aldrovandi 21/iv, fol. 89v.
Mattioli 1557, 501–502; Aldrovandi 1640, 314.
BUB, Aldrovandi MS 136/xxvii, fol. 252v; Olmi 2002.
Ashworth 1991, 126. See also Tarp, this volume.
Ogilvie 2006, 209–210; Jaffé 1992; id. 1988, 11.
Quoted in Findlen 2002, 308.
For a gallery of north Italian specimens, see Forti 1928. Aldrovandi, for instance, divided animals into solid-hoofed, cloven-hoofed and clawed. Gessner organised fish according to the order, colour and texture of scales and fins (George 1985, 186; Enenkel & Smith 2014).
It was only in 1600 that Aldrovandi himself received a supposedly “true” dragon, mummified, to compare against Belon’s description and his own counterfeits (Aldrovandi 1640, 421–422).
Jones 1990, 13; Wood 2012, 171, 180–181; Nagel & Wood 2010, 29–34, 251–274.
Mitchell 1960, 478, paraphrased in Wood 2012, 157.