This essay focuses on the 16th-century Bolognese naturalist and collector Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) and his enormous image collection of naturalia. Do these images present a specifically... Show moreThis essay focuses on the 16th-century Bolognese naturalist and collector Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) and his enormous image collection of naturalia. Do these images present a specifically Bolognese form of visual natural science, and was his visual format of truthfulness new at the time? Did local visual culture leave clear marks on Aldrovandi’s image collection? Show less
is article discusses experimentation in the context of sixteenth-century natu- ral history, or natural science as I prefer to call it here. It uses predominantly textual sources, many of them... Show moreis article discusses experimentation in the context of sixteenth-century natu- ral history, or natural science as I prefer to call it here. It uses predominantly textual sources, many of them manuscript letters, from di erent European countries, mainly Italy, the Low Countries, France and Germany-Austria. e focus is on the practice of experimentation and its documentation, partly because I proceed from the assumption that the investigation of living nature did not necessarily entail the same type of experimentation as contempo- rary alchemy, pharmacy, or medicine, although all these domains of knowledge and their practitioners overlapped. e subject matter to some extent imposed its own rules. e rst part of this essay analyses experimentation in the garden, which often combined practical purposes with research ones. e second and third parts discuss experimentation with both plants and animals that originated in more general questions or led to more wide-ranging conclusions about natural phenomena. e nal section discusses the links with natural philosophy in these di erent types of experimentation in natural science, and addresses the possible implications for the concept of experimentation itself in the period shortly before the ”new science” of the seventeenth century. Show less
Conrad Gessner’s Historia animalium is a compilation of information from a variety of sources: friends, correspondents, books, broadsides, drawings, as well as his own experience. The recent... Show moreConrad Gessner’s Historia animalium is a compilation of information from a variety of sources: friends, correspondents, books, broadsides, drawings, as well as his own experience. The recent discovery of a cache of drawings at Amsterdam originally belonging to Gessner has added a new dimension for research into the role of images in Gessner’s study of nature. In this paper, we examine the drawings that were the basis of the images in the volume of fishes. We uncovered several cases where there were multiple copies of the same drawing of a fish (rather than multiple drawings of the same fish), which problematizes the notion of unique “original” copies and their copies. While we still know very little about the actual mechanism of, or people involved in, commissioning or generating copies of drawings, their very existence suggests that the images functioned as an important medium in the circulation of knowledge in the early modern period. Show less
