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THE CAMBRIDGEHISTORY OF

SCIENCE

volume 3

Early Modern Science

Edited by

KATHARINE PARK

LORRAINE DASTON

v

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cambridge university pressCambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo

Cambridge University Press40 West 20th Street, New York, ny 10011-4211, usa

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First published 2006

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(Revised for volume 3)The Cambridge history of science

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Contents: – v. 3. Early modern science / edited by Katharine Park and Lorraine Dastonv. 4. Eighteenth-century science / edited by Roy Porter

v. 5. The modern physical and mathematical sciences / edited by Mary Jo Nyev. 7. The modern social sciences / edited by Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross

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vi

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12

ANATOMY THEATERS, BOTANICALGARDENS, AND NATURAL HISTORY

COLLECTIONS

Paula Findlen

At the end of the sixteenth century, the English lawyer and natural philoso-pher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) began to fantasize about the locations forknowledge. The Gesta Grayorum (1594), a court revel performed before QueenElizabeth I and attributed to Bacon, described an imaginary research facilitycontaining “a most perfect and general library” and “a spacious, wonderfulgarden” filled with wild and cultivated plants and surrounded by a menagerie,aviary, freshwater lake, and saltwater lake. Spaces for living nature were com-plemented by a museum of science, art, and technology – “a goodly hugecabinet” housing artifacts (“whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art orengine has made rare in stuff”), natural oddities (“whatsoever singularity,chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced”), and gems, minerals, andfossils (“whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and maybe kept”). The fourth and final component was a space in which to testnature, “a still-house, so furnished with mills, instruments, furnaces, andvessels as may be a palace fit for a philosopher’s stone.” The totality of thesefacilities, Bacon concluded, would be “a model of the universal nature madeprivate.”1 This statement suggested a new idea of empiricism that privilegedhuman invention and demonstration over pure observation and celebratedthe communal aspects of observing nature over the heroic efforts of thelone observer. Nature had to be reconstructed within a microcosm, creatingan artificial world of knowledge in which scholars prodded, dissected, andexperimented with nature in order to know it better.

Some thirty years later, the continued fantasy of a society organized aroundknowledge led Bacon to write his famous utopia, the New Atlantis (publishedposthumously in 1627), in order to demonstrate how an empirical worldviewcould transform an entire society. The nucleus of Bacon’s utopian society,Bensalem, was a structure called Salomon’s House, the knowledge-making

1 Francis Bacon, Gesta Grayorum, in John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of QueenElizabeth, 3 vols. (London: John Nichols and Son, 1823), 3: 290.

272

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Sites of Anatomy, Botany, and Natural History 273

center of the realm. Surrounded by artificial mines, lakes, a botanical gar-den, and a menagerie, and made of “high towers, . . . great and spacioushouses, . . . [and] certain chambers,” it represented a full elaboration ofscience as an activity that removed nature from nature in order to study itbetter. Bacon’s remarkable array of unique spaces for science mirrored thevariety of possible experiences that one could have of nature, isolating all nat-ural objects and processes. The inhabitants of Bensalem proudly told theirEnglish visitors that, in doing this, they had made natural things “by artgreater much than their nature.”2 They not only knew nature but used theirknowledge to improve upon it. This statement epitomized Bacon’s defini-tion of good science as an invention of the human mind in contemplation ofnature.

Bacon’s fascination with the special sites in which to gain experience ofnature did not emerge ex nihilo. Like many aspects of his natural philosophy,it was based on a keen understanding of developments in European sciencein the preceding half-century. Between the 1530s and the 1590s, anatomytheaters, botanical gardens, and cabinets of curiosities became regular featuresof the pursuit of scientific knowledge.3 All of these structures shared thecommon goal of creating purpose-built spaces in which scholars could usethe best intellectual, instrumental, and manual techniques of science to gainknowledge of the natural world. In effect, they acted in ways similar toBacon’s utopian vision of science; to differing degrees, they removed naturalartifacts from their original locations, placing them inside new spaces for thespecific purpose of studying them in order to improve natural knowledge. Theproliferation of anatomy theaters, botanical gardens, and museums reflectedthe ways in which interpreting nature had become tied to ambitious empiricalprojects of investigating nature in toto, with all the attendant difficulties ofgathering and storing materials, while at the same time encouraging smallerexperiential projects that sought to understand unique aspects of nature bycreating artificial conditions in which to experiment (see Dear, Chapter 4,this volume).

Bacon could not have sketched his famous portrait of Salomon’s House asa teeming beehive of empirical activity without the work of observing naturethat had occurred in the preceding half-century. During the Renaissance, theidea of experiencing nature firsthand had become an increasingly importantpart of medical education (see Cook, Chapter 18, this volume). Physicians,who had opened bodies occasionally throughout the late Middle Ages, rein-vigorated their interest in the manual art of dissection, rubbing elbows withsurgeons whose cutting abilities made them artisans rather than philosophers

2 Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration and New Atlantis, ed. Jerry Weinberger (Wheeling, Ill.: HarlandDavidson, 1980), pp. 72–4.

3 Libraries, observatories, and laboratories also were purpose-built spaces in which knowledge couldbe gained (see Grafton, Chapter 10, and Smith, Chapter 13, this volume).

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274 Paula Findlen

of nature.4 They also renewed their interest in the natural material out ofwhich medicines were made, collaborating and occasionally clashing withapothecaries in their efforts to gain practical knowledge of plants.5 Baconwas correct in stating that the initial goals behind the desire for experi-ence were somewhat narrow, reflecting the expanded scope of the physician’scompetency in all realms of medicine. Some university-educated physicianshad become encyclopedists, studying everything and anything related to themicrocosm of man, but it was not yet clear that they had developed a fullappreciation of the need to study nature on its own terms and not just forthe sake of medicine.

The anatomy theater, the botanical garden, and the natural historymuseum were all a direct result of the medical fascination with experiencein the early sixteenth century. All found their nascent formulation duringthe 1530s in European cities that had strong traditions of medical education.Their gradual institutionalization across the sixteenth and early seventeenthcenturies offers an important means for understanding how early modernscholars integrated the study of the material world of nature into their defi-nition of science. Anatomizing, botanizing, and collecting were not a routinepart of natural philosophy in 1500. A century later, studying nature with-out using some of these techniques of investigation was no longer possible.Many of the great naturalists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,from Konrad Gesner in the 1550s to John Ray in the 1690s, constructed anew science of nature based on extensive field research, collecting, and col-lating of specimens. They could not have done these things without definingnew locations for natural inquiry. Thus, the new purpose-built spaces gavethe study of nature a new direction and intensity in addition to offeringdefined locations, both inside and outside universities, in which to observespecimens. They were indeed houses of knowledge.

ANATOMIZING

The idea of creating a special, enclosed space in which to study nature emergedat a very early stage in the realm of human anatomy. During the late Middle

4 On the revival of dissecting practices and their relation to the medical idea of experience, see especiallyVivian Nutton, “Humanistic Surgery,” in The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, ed. AndrewWear, Roger French, and I. M. Lonie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 75–99;Andrea Carlino, Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning, trans. John Tedeschiand Anne C. Tedeschi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Giovanna Ferrari, L’Esperienzadel passato: Alessandro Benedetto filologo e medico umanista (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1996); andAndrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of theAncients (Brookfield: Scolar, 1997).

5 On the botanical idea of experience, see Agnes Arber, Herbals, Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapterin the History of Botany, 1470–1670, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); KarlH. Dannenfeldt, Leonhard Rauwolf: Sixteenth-Century Physician, Botanist, and Traveler (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); Karen Reeds, Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities(New York: Garland, 1991); and Reeds, “Renaissance Humanism and Botany,” Annals of Science, 33(1976), 519–42.

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Ages, occasional dissections of human cadavers had become a standard partof medical education in universities such as those at Bologna, Padua, andMontpellier, where surgery was part of the medical curriculum. The firstdocumented formal dissection of this sort was recorded in Padua in 1341,though it is clear that the practice was considerably older; the Anatomia (1316)of Mondino de’ Liuzzi, professor of medicine at the University of Bologna,was certainly composed on the basis of actual dissections.6 Such practicesaccelerated in the second half of the fifteenth century. The increased circula-tion of ancient and medieval anatomical treatises, which was a direct resultof the invention of printing, and a growing fascination with the postmortemas a means of understanding the causes of disease led medical professors andtheir students to demand more frequent dissections.7

In response to these changes in medical training and practice, a curiousnew structure appeared during the winter months in various European cities:the temporary anatomy theater. Usually built of wood, it was an ephemeralstructure, not unlike a theatrical set, designed to accommodate the occasionaldissection that the early Renaissance university demanded. These temporarytheaters could be built in preexisting spaces – lecture halls or, better yet,churches and public piazzas that were already designed to accommodateaudiences in the hundreds. (Before then, small audiences of students seemsimply to have stood around a table observing the body during a lecture.)The Italian physician Alessandro Benedetti, who taught at Bologna in thelate fifteenth century, provided the earliest and most elaborate descriptionof the new structures in his Anatomice: sive, de historia corporis humani libriquinque (Anatomy: or, Five Books on the History of the Human Body, 1502)when he wrote:

A temporary theater should be built at a large and well-ventilated place,with seats arranged in a circle, as in the Colosseum in Rome and the Arenain Verona, sufficiently large to accommodate a great number of spectatorsin such a manner that the teacher would not be inconvenienced by thecrowd. . . . The corpse has to be put on a table in the center of the theaterin an elevated and clear place easily accessible to the dissector.8

Over the next few decades, temporary theaters became a popular featureof medical instruction. By the 1520s, even less well-known medical faculties,such as those at Pisa and Pavia, supplied a structure in which to dissect,and by the 1540s, the idea of the anatomy theater had been so well inte-grated into medical training that the French physician Charles Estienne

6 Andrea Carlino, “The Book, the Body, the Scalpel,” RES, 16 (1988), 31.7 Katharine Park, “The Criminal and Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy,”

Renaissance Quarterly, 47 (1994), 1–33; Carlino, Books of the Body; and Cunningham, AnatomicalRenaissance.

8 In Arturo Castiglione, “The Origin and Development of the Anatomical Theater to the End ofthe Renaissance,” Ciba Symposia, (3 May 1941), 831. See also Ferrari, L’esperienza del passato, esp.pp. 166–73.

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276 Paula Findlen

(ca. 1505–1564) insisted that anatomy could not be taught properly withouta locus anatomicus, a place in which to anatomize.9 He compared the humanbody to “anything that is exhibited in a theater in order to be viewed.”10 Thestructure of the anatomy theater played an important role in drawing atten-tion to the visual aspects of the new anatomy. It made dissection a theatricaland often highly public event for medical students, physicians, surgeons, anda general public curious about the secrets of the body.

Accounts of actual dissections correspond remarkably well to ideal descrip-tions of the anatomy theater. The famous Flemish anatomist AndreasVesalius (1514–1564), who performed numerous dissections throughoutEurope between the 1530s and 1543, usually worked in temporary woodentheaters. His controversial anatomy lectures in Bologna, in the winter of 1540,occurred in a temporary wooden amphitheater erected in the church of SanFrancesco. The German medical student Baldasar Heseler, who attended thelectures, described the building as holding almost two hundred spectators –medical students, university professors, and the general public – on fourwooden benches.11 Vesalius exploited contemporary theatrical techniques,diminishing the distance between the lecturer and the audience by allow-ing the audience to handle the organs as he removed them from the body.He emphasized the resulting shared experience: “[S]urely, lords, he said, youcan learn only little from a mere demonstration, if you yourselves have nothandled the objects with your hands.”12 Dissections in the Dutch anatomytheaters of the seventeenth century continued the tradition begun by Vesalius,passing body parts among the spectators in the highest rows in order to offereveryone a tactile and immediate visual experience of the body.13

In the decades following the publication of Vesalius’s De humani corporisfabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body, 1543), dissections became a moreregular feature of Renaissance medical education. In October 1554, FelixPlatter, a young medical student from Basel, described his enthusiasm forGuillaume Rondelet’s anatomies at Montpellier, many of which occurred inthe new quarters built to accommodate the current passion for anatomy: “Inever miss[ed] the dissections of men and animals that took place in the

9 E. Ashworth Underwood, “The Early Teaching of Anatomy at Padua, with Special Reference toa Model of the Padua Anatomical Theatre,” Annals of Science, 19 (1963), 1–26, at p. 7. The mostcomprehensive account of the rise of the anatomy theater remains Gottfried Richter, Das anatomischeTheater (Berlin: Ebering, 1936).

10 Charles Estienne, De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres (Paris: S. Colinaeum, 1545), quotedin Giovanna Ferrari, “Public Anatomy Lessons and the Carnival: The Anatomy Theater of Bologna,”Past and Present, 117 (1987), 50–106, at p. 85.

11 Baldasar Heseler, Andreas Vesalius’ First Public Anatomy at Bologna, 1540, ed. Ruben Eriksson(Uppsala: Almquist and Wiksells, 1959), p. 85.

12 Ibid., p. 291. I have modified the translation slightly. The standard biography of Vesalius remainsCharles D. O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514–1564 (Berkeley: University of California Press,1964).

13 Jan C. C. Rupp, “Michel Foucault, Body Politics and the Rise and Expansion of Modern Anatomy,”Journal of Historical Sociology, 5 (1992), 31–60, at p. 47.

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Table 12.1. Anatomy Theaters

1556 Montpellier 1617 Paris1557 London 1619 Amsterdam1588 Ferrara 1623 Oxford1589 Basel 1642 Rotterdam1593 Leiden 1643 Copenhagen1594 Padua 1654 Groningen1595 Bologna 1662 Uppsala1614 Delft

College. . . .”14 Platter surely observed these things in the wooden dissectingroom built between 1554 and 1556. Like the dissecting rooms of the Companyof Barber-Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians in London, used toinstruct medical practitioners outside the orbit of the university, the Mont-pellier theater represented an early stage in the evolution of the anatomytheater from a temporary to a permanent structure.

By the 1590s, the anatomy theater had achieved a new level of legitimacyin the university training of physicians. During this period, all of the leadingmedical faculties in Europe built permanent anatomy theaters (Table 12.1). By1595, a stone theater had replaced the earlier wooden one in Montpellier.15 In1589, Platter, by then a distinguished professor of medicine at the Universityof Basel, persuaded his institution to buy a building with a plot of land sothat the newly appointed professor of anatomy and botany, Caspar Bauhin(1560–1624), and his students might dissect in the winter and botanize in thesummer all in one place. The statutes describing Bauhin’s position underscoreits close relationship to the new buildings of science. “He should teach not somuch by precepts, but more by ocular demonstrations,” the medical facultyof Basel declared.16 Unfortunately, such high sentiments were not backed upin perpetuity by the university. By the 1620s, after the generation of physicianswho had installed the theater and garden retired, the facility had fallen intodisrepair.

In the ancient university towns of Italy, however, principally Padua andBologna, a new commitment to the place of anatomy in medical education ledto the building of anatomical theaters that exist to this day. The young Englishmedical student William Harvey (1578–1657), who came from London, wherean early dissecting theater had been built not by a university but by the

14 Felix Platter, Beloved Son Felix: The Journal of Felix, Platter, a Medical Student at Montpellier in theSixteenth Century, trans. Sean Jennett (London: Frederick Muller, 1961), p. 88.

15 Thomas Platter, Journal of a Younger Brother: The Life of Thomas Platter as a Medical Student atMontpellier at the Close of the Sixteenth Century, trans. Sean Jennett (London: Frederick Muller,1963), p. 36: “There is a special dissecting room in the College, built of dressed stone in the formof an amphitheatre (Theatrum anatomicum) and designed to allow the greatest possible number ofpersons to see the operations.”

16 Reeds, Botany, pp. 95, 111 (quotation), 116, 130.

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278 Paula Findlen

medical corporations of the city, who wished to train physicians and surgeons,learned to dissect by observing the work of his professor, Girolamo Fabrici (ca.1533–1619), who designed and promoted Padua’s elliptical anatomy theater(Figure 12.1).17 Fabrici shared the sentiments of his colleagues in Bologna,who argued in 1595 that they wanted to dissect “without having to erect anew theater every year and tear it down after the dissection was completed.”18

They built a rectangular dissecting room, imitating the idea but not the formof the Paduan theater, because they felt that a rectangular room offered amore open use of space, in contrast with the cramped experience of standingin the tight wooden pews of the Paduan theater that spiraled upward to theheavens.

The success of Padua’s model traveled not only to the neighboring city ofBologna but north to the new Dutch university of Leiden (founded 1575),whose faculty pioneered many of the new approaches to medicine and natu-ral philosophy in the seventeenth century. Another student of Fabrici, PieterPaaw, conceived the idea of a splendid anatomy theater for his university afterbecoming professor of anatomy in 1589. His theater, like many of the Dutchdissecting theaters, was built in a former church (which had been vacatedby Catholics after the wars of religion) that also held the university library.19

In contrast with their Italian counterparts, the Dutch theaters engaged moreactively with the religious connotations of dissection as an art that inquiredinto the secrets of life through the observation of death. Paaw decoratedthe theater with articulated skeletons of humans and animals on which heplaced Latin mottos conveying the transience of human life and moralizingthe deaths of many of the criminals whose bodies ended up on the dissect-ing table and whose skeletons populated the theater. His successors quicklytransformed the Leiden theater into a cabinet of curiosities, filling it withChinese scrolls, porcelain teapots, Egyptian idols, and exotic plants.20 Suchdecorations fulfilled the idea of the anatomy theater as a civic institution notsimply for the use of medical professors and students but more generally apublic site in which to display the curiosities of nature and art.

17 Jerome Bylebyl, “The School of Padua: Humanistic Medicine in the Sixteenth Century,” inHealth, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Charles Webster and Margaret Pelling(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 335–70; Andrew Cunningham, “Fabricius andthe ‘Aristotle Project’ in Anatomical Teaching and Research at Padua,” in The Medical Renaissance ofthe Sixteenth Century, ed. Andrew Wear, Roger French, and Ian Lonie (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1985), pp. 195–222; and Roger French, William Harvey’s Natural Philosophy (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 59–68.

18 Castiglione, “Origin,” p. 842. On the Bologna theater, see Ferrari, “Public Anatomy.”19 Th. H. Lunsingh Scheurleer, “Un amphitheatre d’anatomie moralise,” in Leiden University in the

Seventeenth Century, ed. Th. H. Lunsingh Scheurleer and G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden:E. J. Brill, 1975), pp. 217–77. The Delft anatomy theater built by the surgeons’ guild was in theformer convent of St. Mary Magdalene.

20 William Schupbach, “Some Cabinets of Curiosities in European Academic Institutions,” in TheOrigins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed.Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 170–1.

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Figure 12.1. The Padua anatomy theater designed by Hieronymus Fabricius, 1595.In Giacomo Filippo Tomasini, Gymnasium Patavinum (Udine: Nicolaus Schirattus,1654). Reproduced by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

As Leiden became the center of medical education in Northern Europe,it soon surpassed Padua as the model to emulate. Protestant anatomists inGermany, England, and the Netherlands contributed to the proliferationof dissecting theaters in universities, colleges of physicians, and surgeons’guilds. The appearance of anatomy theaters in medical corporations furtherunderscores the practical appeal of anatomy not only as an important fea-ture of university medical education but also as an activity that defined the

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280 Paula Findlen

professional lives of physicians and surgeons in the early modern period. Thegreat anatomists of Scandinavia, such as Olaus Rudbeck (1630–1702), whoidentified the lymphatic vessels and designed Uppsala’s anatomy theater inthe Gustavianum in 1662 after studying in Leiden in 1653–4, participatedin the Protestant exaltation of the pious physician who saw the dissectingtheater as a religious temple.21 What Harvey called the “ocular testimony” ofthe body emanated distinctively from the anatomy theater by the middle ofthe seventeenth century.22 But it was a kind of experience that continued tohave highly symbolic and metaphysical associations.

BOTANIZING

With the exception of surgeon’s theaters, which had a more narrowly profes-sional function, most anatomy theaters appeared in tandem with universitybotanical gardens. Although the botanical garden did not precede the perma-nent anatomy theater, it more quickly became part of the institutional cultureof science in Renaissance Europe. Private botanical gardens flourished in theearly sixteenth century not only as “physick gardens” filled with medicinalplants but also as pleasure gardens of the nobility and urban elite. By the1530s, medical professors and their students botanized regularly during sum-mer vacations. The city of Ferrara, an early center for the revival of naturalhistory, had a ducal garden that university professors and students used forstudy.23

A steady stream of published herbals in the 1530s and 1540s, all lamentingthe imperfection of botanical knowledge, made it clear how much remainedto be known about plants. Yet the profusion of nature made it difficult to seeall but the tiniest fraction of the plant world. One solution to this problemlay in the creation of public botanical gardens, associated primarily withuniversities and occasionally with princely courts, that functioned as livingrepositories of nature. On 29 June 1545, the Republic of Venice authorizedthe foundation of a botanical garden at the University of Padua so that“scholars and other gentlemen can come to the garden at all hours in thesummer, retiring in the shade with their books to discuss plants learnedly, andinvestigating their nature peripatetically while walking.”24 The Grand Duke

21 Gunnar Eriksson, The Atlantic Vision: Olaus Rudbeck and Baroque Science (Canton, Mass.: ScienceHistory Publications, 1994), pp. 1, 2, 10; and Karin Johannisson, A Life of Learning: Uppsala Universityduring Five Centuries (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 1989), pp. 31–2. For the Danish equivalent,see V. Maar, “The Domus Anatomica at the Time of Thomas Bartholinus,” Janus, 21 (1916), 339–49.

22 Andrew Wear, “William Harvey and the ‘Way of Anatomists,’” History of Science, 21 (1983), 223–49,at p. 230.

23 Vivian Nutton, “The Rise of Medical Humanism: Ferrara, 1464–1555,” Renaissance Studies, 11 (1997),2–19, at p. 18.

24 Marco Guazzo, Historie . . . di tutti i fatti degni di memoria nel mondo (Venice: Gabriele Giolito,1546), quoted in Margherita Azzi Visentini, L’Orto botanico di Padova e il giardino del Rinascimento(Milan: Edizioni il Polifilo, 1984), p. 37.

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of Tuscany, Cosimo I, concluded negotiations for a garden at the Universityof Pisa in July, founding another at the convent of San Marco in Florencein December.25 By 1555, the Spanish royal physician Andres Laguna felt thathe could use the precedent of Italy as an argument for persuading Philip IIto fund a royal physic garden at Aranjuez. “All the princes and universitiesof Italy take pride in having many excellent gardens, adorned with all kindsof plants found throughout the world,” he wrote in his translation of theancient Greek physician Dioscorides’ De materia medica, “and so it is mostproper that Your Majesty provide and order that we have at least one in Spain,sustained with royal stipends.”26

By the end of the sixteenth century, most universities with strong medicalfaculties promoting this early modern program of learning, and a number ofcities with strong colleges of physicians, had botanical gardens (Table 12.2).27

These gardens, filled with New World plants as well as European varietals,claimed to contain the natural world in microcosm. Sunflowers from Peru,tulips from the Levant, and corn, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, and hundredsof other plants from the “Indies” transformed the botanical garden intoanother Eden, filled not only with the medicinal herbs of the ancient NearEast that had been described in Greek and Roman pharmacopeias but alsowith the wonders of a newly discovered nature that came from the Americas.28

Reflecting on the significance of the garden, Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605),professor of natural history and founder of Bologna’s botanical garden in 1568,wrote: “These public and private gardens, with the lectures [that accompanythem], are the reason that natural things are elucidated, joined together withthe New World that we are still discovering.”29

Botanical gardens served several important functions. Physicians occasion-ally described them as public repositories of medicines in an age of plague,though one wonders how realistic it was to expect a single garden to halt apandemic. More importantly, they were sites in which a new kind of medical

25 Lionella Scazzosi, “Alle radici dei musei naturalistici all’aperto: Orti botanici, giardini, zoologici,parchi e riserve naturali,” in Stanze della meraviglia: I musei della natura tra storia e progetto, ed.Luca Basso Peressut (Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna, 1997), pp. 91–3.See also Fabio Garbari, Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, and Alessandro Tosi, Giardino dei semplici: L’Ortobotanico di Pisa dal XVI al XIX secolo (Pisa: Cassa di Risparmio di Pisa, 1991); Alessandro Minelli, ed.,The Botanical Garden of Padua, 1545–1995 (Venice: Marsilio, 1995); and Else M. Terwen-Dionisius,“Date and Design of the Botanical Garden of Padua,” Journal of Garden History, 14 (1994), 213–35.

26 Andres Laguna, Pedacio Dioscorides Anazarbeo acerca de la materia medicinal y de los venonos mortıferos[1555], quoted in Jose M. Lopez Pinero, “The Pomar Codex (ca. 1590): Plants and Animals of theOld World and from the Hernandez Expedition to America,” Nuncius, 7 (1992), 35–52, at p. 38.

27 Andrew Cunningham, “The Culture of Gardens,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. NicholasJardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),pp. 38–56.

28 John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanical Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise (New Haven,Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981).

29 Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna, Aldrovandi, MS 70, fol. 62r. See Antonio Baldacci, “UlisseAldrovandi e l’orto botanico di Bologna,” in Intorno alla vita e alle opere di Ulisse Aldrovandi(Bologna: L. Beltrami, 1907), pp. 161–72.

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282 Paula Findlen

Table 12.2. Botanical Gardens

1545 Padua 1589 Basel1545 Pisa 1593 Montpellier1545 Florence 1597 Heidelberg1550s Aranjuez 1623 Oxford1563 Rome 1638 Messina1567 Valencia 1641 Paris1568 Bologna 1650s Uppsala1568 Kassell 1670s Edinburgh1577 Leiden 1673 Chelsea1580 Leipzig

professor, the professor of botany (or “medicinal simples,” as it was oftencalled), demonstrated the nature and virtues of plants to students. Finally,they became botanical research facilities in which scholars who sought tounderstand the plant as a natural rather than medical object did their ear-liest work on morphology and classification. The Italian physician AndreaCesalpino (1519–1603) wrote his fundamental De plantis (1583) while teach-ing at the University of Pisa in proximity to its well-stocked garden. Bauhin,the great Swiss naturalist, traveled to the Padua and Bologna gardens in1577–8 before becoming a teacher of botany in Basel. He wrote his Pinaxtheatri botanici (Index of a Botanical Theater, 1623), one of the earliest worksto attempt a comprehensive cross-referencing of plant names and to refineplant classification, as the culmination of decades of work with plants inEuropean botanical gardens.30

The public botanical garden exhibited key institutional characteristics thatdistinguished it from the private noble garden. Stern rules specified appro-priate garden behavior, warning visitors that they could look at and smellbut not pick or trample plants or attempt to take home branches, flowers,seeds, bulbs, and roots without the express permission of the custodian.31

Botanical professors readily exchanged plants with other learned botanists,physicians, and apothecaries in order to keep their gardens full and variedand to please princely patrons and overseas merchants, who were the otherimportant source of new plants. The goal, in all instances, was to maintainand improve the diversity and utility of nature that the garden revealed.

As the botanical garden became an important scientific research facility,one of the pressing questions concerned how it organized knowledge. Theinitial design of the Paduan garden, for example, emphasized an aesthetic andhighly symbolic arrangement of plants on the outer edges of the garden and a

30 Reeds, Botany, pp. 110–30; and Scott Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards anAnthropology of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 135–42.

31 The 1601 Leiden regulations appear in F. W. T. Hunger, Charles de l’Escluse, 2 vols. (The Hague:Martinus Nijhoff, 1927), 1: 249. For a similar set of regulations for Padua, see Minelli, BotanicalGarden, p. 48.

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more practical arrangement of those in the interior.32 In the case of the former,the design of the garden outweighed any practical considerations of how toprovide a plot of land in which plants could grow best; in the case of the lat-ter, function won out over form, making long, rectangular flower beds a keyfeature of the botanical garden (Figure 12.2). Initially, the first-century Greekphysician Dioscorides’ De materia medica, the standard botanical textbook atmost universities, defined which specimens should appear in the garden. Yetancient botanical classifications could not contain all the Northern European,American, and Asian plants that were not indigenous to the ancient Mediter-ranean and thus were not described by Dioscorides. New ways of thinkingabout nature affected the structure of the garden itself. Increasingly, the mostpractical solution was to organize the garden as a microcosm of the world,dividing it geographically on the grounds that any alternative organizationmight be rendered problematic by the appearance of a new specimen.

By the 1590s, botanical gardens emphasized these practical configurations.The Leiden garden, founded in 1577, underwent a complete reorganizationunder the directorship of Carolus Clusius and especially Pieter Paaw.33 Clusiussimplified the design, creating four quadrants to represent the four continents(Europe, Asia, Africa, and America), each divided into sixteen beds. He orga-nized plants by species rather than by medicinal use, reflecting the changingstatus of botany as a field worthy of independent study rather than a branchof medicine. The Montpellier Jardin du Roi, a royal garden founded justbeyond the city walls by the professor of anatomy and botany Pierre Richerde Belleval, also favored a basic geometric design, clustering plants accord-ing to their natural habitats.34 Such models indicate the direction of mostseventeenth-century botanical gardens, whose creators increasingly viewedplants in scientific and commercial rather than symbolic terms, unlike theinitial creators of the Italian Renaissance gardens. The botanical garden, likethe anatomy theater, had become a standard means for experiencing andunderstanding nature.

COLLECTING

Visitors to the botanical gardens of Padua, Pisa, and Leiden in the 1590s andearly 1600s discovered, to their delight, that the natural history museum, or“cabinet of curiosities” as it was commonly called at the time, had become animportant feature of the garden. In his 1591 description of the Paduan garden,Girolamo Porro discussed the research facilities then under construction atPadua in a manner that strongly anticipated Bacon’s ideal of a truly integrated

32 Andrea Ubrizsy Savoia, “The Botanical Garden in Guilandino’s Day,” in Minelli, Botanical Garden,pp. 173, 181; and Terwen-Dionisius, “Date and Design,” p. 220.

33 Hunger, Charles de l’Escluse, 1: 217–49; and W. K. H. Karstens and H. Kleibrink, De Leidse Hortus,een Botanische Erfenis (Zwolle: Uitgeverij Waanders, 1982).

34 Reeds, Botany, pp. 80–90.

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facility for science. He described a series of rooms built on the edge of thegarden. Some would be “employed for various medicinal operations as wellas . . . foundries, distilleries, and so on.” Subsequent rooms displayed minerals,marine life, stuffed terrestrial animals, and birds. Porro remarked, “This richand varied array of things will form a wonderful and beautiful museum forthe delight and education of scholars of this rare profession.”35

As we have already seen, many university gardens were part of a researchand teaching complex that housed an anatomy theater and various scientificcollections accumulated by the medical faculty. In 1595, the University ofPisa added a distillery and foundry to its garden so that scholars might testnature in the laboratory – a reminder that the materials and tools of alchemycould also be useful in the realm of natural history. A gallery to house nat-ural objects followed shortly thereafter, as also occurred at the University ofPisa, where the cabinet of curiosities occupied the upper floor of a galleryat the entrance to the garden.36 The interrelationship among these differ-ent ways of examining nature suggests that it was experience of the materialworld in general that early modern scholars sought, above and beyond anysingle way of understanding nature. The animal skins, stuffed anteater, andNile crocodile adorning the Leiden anatomy theater made it a cabinet ofcuriosities when dissections were not under way.37 For similar reasons, itoften made sense to hire a single individual who would hold the profes-sorships of both anatomy and botany on the presumption that the winterskill of dissection translated smoothly into the summer skill of botanicaldemonstration.38

Yet subjecting nature to art, as Bacon put it, was by no means a uniformprocess. If an artificial nature was made in a microcosm, it was renderedartificial in many different ways to address diverse questions of knowledge.The anatomy theater, for example, celebrated the normative body. Vesaliushad recommended that one choose male bodies that were as “normal aspossible” for public dissections, contrasting them with private dissectionsin which “any body” was potentially interesting for understanding disease.Although he and a number of his contemporaries delighted in the study of

35 Girolamo Porro, L’Horto de i semplici di Padova [1592]. I have used the translation in Vittorio DalPiaz and Maurizio Rippa Bonati, “The Design and Form of the Paduan Horto Medicinale,” inMinelli, Botanical Garden, pp. 42–3.

36 Lionella Scazzosi, “Alle radici dei musei naturalistici all’aperto,” in Peressut, ed., Stanze della merav-iglia, p. 102. See Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, “Il giardino dei semplici dello studio pisano: Collezionismo,scienza e immagine tra Cinque e Seicento,” in Livorno e Pisa: Due citta e un territorio nella politicadei Medici (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi e Pacini, 1980), pp. 514–26; and Tongiorgi Tomasi, “Inventari dellagalleria e attivita iconografica dell’orto dei semplici dello Studio pisano tra Cinque e Seicento,”Annali dell’Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, 4 (1979), 21–7.

37 Jan C. C. Rupp, “Matters of Life and Death: The Social and Cultural Conditions of the Rise ofAnatomical Theatres, with Special Reference to Seventeenth Century Holland,” History of Science,28 (1990), 272.

38 This was certainly the case in Montpellier, Valencia, Basel, Leiden, and Uppsala. In part, the decisionrested on the number of overall chairs in the medical faculty. Universities such as those at Bologna,Padua, and Pisa, with larger faculties, could afford to be more specialized in their appointments.

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286 Paula Findlen

human diversity, they used the anatomy theater primarily to create that mostartificial of humans – the typical male – a Greek statue peeled open like anonion and accompanied by a normative female who was defined exclusivelyby her reproductive organs.39 By contrast, the botanical garden claimed to bea universal portrait of nature – an artificial paradise divested of much of itssymbolic meaning as it strove to accommodate the ever-increasing number ofplants. The cabinet of curiosities subscribed to neither of these paradigms ofwhat an artificial nature might be. It offered a highly idiosyncratic imageof nature. At times, collectors presented their cabinets as a true microcosm ofthe world and, at times, described them as selective accumulations of objects.Overwhelmingly, however, collectors followed a philosophy best articulatedby the sixteenth-century Milanese physician Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576),who emphasized the subtlety and variety of nature. By bringing together allthe strange, beautiful, and costly things of the world, the cabinet becamea room of wonder in ways that the anatomy theater and botanical gardencould never be.40

In the late sixteenth century, collecting became an important means ofunderstanding nature.41 In contrast with anatomy theaters and botanicalgardens, which were institutional sites funded by civic governments andmunicipal corporations, the museum (the modern institution that emergedfrom the cabinet) arose primarily because of the efforts of individual physi-cians and naturalists who advocated an empirical approach to nature thatmade natural objects as important as books in the search for knowledge.Physicians’ records are replete with accounts of collections such as the oneThomas Platter saw as a student in Montpellier in 1596 in the home of therecently deceased chancellor of the Faculty of Medicine, the distinguishedphysician Laurent Joubert. Platter noted exotic animals such as the pelican,chameleon, crocodile, and the fabled remora, but also “some remarkablefreaks”: an eight-footed pig, a two-headed goat, and large stones ejectedfrom the bodies of Joubert’s patients. On the ground floor was a whale’sskeleton.42 The overwhelming fascination with the wonders of nature typi-fied the Renaissance collection.43

39 Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica [1543], in O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius, p. 343; and NancySiraisi, “Vesalius and Human Diversity in ‘De humani corporis fabrica,’” Journal of the Warburg andCourtauld Institutes, 57 (1994), 60–88.

40 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: ZoneBooks, 1998).

41 Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier (London: Polity, 1990); Antoine Schnapper, La geant, la licorne, la tulipe: Collections francaisesau XVIIe siecle, vol. I: Histoire et histoire naturelle (Paris: Flammarion, 1988); Giuseppe Olmi,L’Inventario del mondo: Catalogazione della natura e luoghi del sapere nella prima eta moderna(Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and ScientificCulture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Horst Bredekamp,The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton, N.J.: MarkusWeiner, 1995).

42 Thomas Platter, Journal, pp. 105–8.43 On the subject of wonder, see Joy Kenseth, ed., The Age of the Marvelous (Hanover, N.H.: Hood

Museum of Art, 1991); and Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature.

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The majority of collectors of natural objects were physicians, apothecaries,and natural philosophers, though virtually anyone with some education,some experience of travel, or some access to the networks by which scholarsroutinely traded objects could lay claim to being a collector (see Moran,Chapter 11, this volume). Quite typically, the scholars who played a prominentrole in advocating for anatomy theaters and botanical gardens, and whotaught in these settings, owned private collections. The Bologna physicianAldrovandi is a case in point. By the 1560s, Aldrovandi was well known as acollector of natural objects. In the next few decades, his home became one ofthe important research centers for natural history. Through a wide networkof friends, colleagues, and patrons, he transformed his private collection intosuch an important public resource that in 1603, two years before his death,he persuaded the Senate of Bologna to maintain it as a civic museum.44

Aldrovandi’s museum became the first public science museum when itopened in 1617, preceding even the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, whichopened with a 1683 bequest by Elias Ashmole, an avid alchemist, experi-menter, and member of the early Royal Society. Visitors to anatomy theaters,botanical gardens, private collections, and princely treasuries were alreadyaccustomed to looking at curiosities as part of observing nature. They exam-ined fossils in the Vatican mineralogical collection in Rome, wondered at theHoly Roman Emperor Rudolf II’s collection of New World fauna in Prague,traipsed through the royal gardener John Tradescant’s museum in Lambeth,and gazed at the Nile crocodiles that hung on the walls and ceilings of theapothecary Ferrante Imperato’s famous museum in Naples, as shown in awoodcut from his Dell’historia naturale (Natural History, 1599) (Figure 12.3).Museums forced scholars to think of nature as a group of objects whosematerial specificity mattered very much in understanding them. Rather thancontemplating nature as an abstract universal, collectors reveled in its partic-ularities.45 Such things were the facts born of experience.

The particulars that collectors found most appealing often had a directconnection with the commercial value of nature in the early modern period.It is not surprising that apothecaries such as Imperato played a prominent rolein collecting culture. They collected nature to make a living from it. Exoticcollectibles, such as true balsam from the East and New World cinnamon,which Columbus identified in 1492 as a potentially valuable commodity forhis Spanish patrons to export back to Europe, were also important ingre-dients in the early modern pharmacopeia; apothecaries displayed them inrooms above their shops on the ground floor as a means of further reassur-ing customers that their medicines derived from a profound knowledge ofthe natural world. The expansion of collecting activities occurred in direct

44 Findlen, Possessing Nature, pp. 24–31; and Cristiana Scappini and Maria Pia Torricelli, Lo StudioAldrovandi in Palazzo Pubblico (1617–1742), ed. Sandra Tugnoli Pattaro (Bologna: CooperativaLibraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna, 1993).

45 Lorraine J. Daston, “The Factual Sensibility,” Isis, 79 (1988), 452–70; and Daston, “Baconian Facts,Academic Civility, and the Prehistory of Objectivity,” Annals of Scholarship, 8 (1991), 337–63.

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288 Paula Findlen

Figure 12.3. Ferrante Imperato’s natural history museum in late sixteenth-centuryNaples. In Ferrante Imperato, Dell’historia naturale (Naples: Constantino Vitali,1599). Reproduced by permission of the Rare Books Division, The New York PublicLibrary, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

proportion to the proliferation of new trade networks between Europe andthe Americas, in conjunction with the old trading routes that linked Europeto the Levant (see Harris, Chapter 16, this volume). Although collectorsrarely bought and sold specimens, preferring to exchange objects in kind,they nonetheless had a fairly precise understanding of the value of differentparts of nature in a world shaped by commerce and trade.

With the rise of scientific academies in seventeenth-century Europe, themuseum became part of the new institutional culture of science. In 1681,the naturalist Nehemiah Grew published a catalogue of the Royal Societyof London’s repository, begun shortly after its founding in 1660, in whichhe stated that the Society collected “not only Things strange and rare, butthe most known and common amongst us.”46 Such an approach signaleda new goal for collecting, which soon came to emphasize the importanceof collecting the whole of nature rather than its most unusual and rarestelements. The Academie Royale des Sciences in Paris also emphasized the

46 Nehemiah Grew, Musaeum Regalis Societatis, or a Catalogue & Description of the Natural and ArtificialRarities Belonging to the Royal Society and Preserved at Gresham College (London: W. Rawlins, 1681),preface. See Arthur MacGregor, “The Cabinet of Curiosities in Seventeenth Century Britain,”and Michael Hunter, “The Cabinet Institutionalized: The Royal Society’s ‘Repository’ and ItsBackground,” both in MacGregor and Impey, eds., Origins of Museums, pp. 147–58, 159–68.

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desirability of collecting all parts of nature, signaling a new interest in theordinary aspects of what it meant to experience nature, from the lowliestfrond to the largest mammal.

In the ensuing century, as scientific academies appeared throughoutEurope, the idea of the science museum grew in stature so that it was no longera “cabinet of curiosities” but a series of repositories that housed instruments,such as telescopes, microscopes, air-pumps, barometers, and ultimately themachines of experimental physics, as well as artifacts. Each of these instru-ments furthered the idea of an artificial nature by making the scientificinstrument a location in which to put nature to the test in ways that couldnot be done in nature (see Bennett, Chapter 27, this volume). Academiessuch as the Royal Society of London, which became famous for its reposi-tory of natural objects as well as its instruments, explicitly referred to theircommunity as the realization of Salomon’s House. By the early eighteenthcentury, it was commonly assumed that the purpose-built spaces for scien-tific inquiry that best resembled those described in the New Atlantis couldbe found in the rooms of such institutions as the Academie Royale des Sci-ences in Paris and the Instituto delle Scienze in Bologna. For a time, theacademy, more than the university, became the place in which to coordinateall of the different ideas about building a house of knowledge.47

Bacon’s ideal of a multidimensional research facility provided an impor-tant foundation upon which later generations could build by insisting thatscientific training and work needed to occur in locations suited to the spe-cific ends of science. It provided a philosophy that unified the disparateand often ad hoc activities that emerged in Renaissance spaces for naturalinquiry. If understanding nature was a kind of art, then all of the ways inwhich nature could be rendered artificial became important in developing acomplete understanding of the natural world. This was a lesson that exper-imental philosophers such as Robert Boyle (1627–1691) and Robert Hooke(1635–1702), two of the leading members of the early Royal Society, thor-oughly absorbed in their quest to explore the less visible aspects of natureinside the machines, rooms, and repositories that made their communityscientific.

47 Paula Findlen, “Building the House of Knowledge: The Structures of Thought in Late RenaissanceEurope,” in Tore Frangsmyr, ed., The Structure of Knowledge: Classifications of Science and Learn-ing since the Renaissance (Berkeley: Office for History of Science and Technology, University ofCalifornia, 2001), pp. 5–51.

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