Y ya que hemos incluido varias entradas relativas a coleccionismo en la época moderna, no podíamos dejar de referirnos a la obra pionera en el tema, algo antigua, pero que sigue conservando toda su frescura y su validez. Se trata del estudio de Paula Findlen sobre los gabinetes de curiosidades en la Italia de los siglos XVI y XVII, cuyos ejemplos más destacados fueran los de Aldrovandi y Kircher.
In 1500 few Europeans considered nature an object worthy of study, yet within fifty years the first museums of natural history had appeared, chiefly in Italy. Vast collections of natural curiosities - including living human dwarves, "toad-stones", and unicorn horns - were gathered by Italian patricians as a means of knowing their world. The museums built around these collections became the center of a scientific culture that over the next century and a half served as a microcosm of Italian society and as the crossroads where the old and new sciences met. In Possessing Nature, Paula Findlen vividly recreates the lost world of late Renaissance and Baroque Italian museums and demonstrates its significance in the history of science and culture. Based on exhaustive research into natural histories, letters, travel journals, memoirs, and pleas for patronage, Findlen describes collections and collectors great and small, beginning with Ulisse Aldrovandi, professor of natural history at the University of Bologna. Aldrovandi, whose museum was known as the "eighth wonder" of the world, was a great popularizer of collecting among the upper classes. From the universities, Findlen traces the spread of natural history in the seventeenth century to other learned sectors of society: religious orders, scientific societies, and princely courts. There was, as Findlen shows, no separation between scientific culture and general political culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. The community of these early naturalists was, in many ways, a mirror of the humanist "republic of letters". Archival documents point to the currying of patrons and the hierarchical nature of the scientific professions, characteristicscommon to the larger world around them. Examining anew the society and accomplishments of the first collectors of nature, Findlen argues that the accepted distinction between the "old" Aristotelian, text-based science and the "new" empirical science during the period is false. Rather, natural history as a discipline blurred the border between the ancients and the moderns, between collecting in order to recover ancient wisdom and collecting in order to develop new scholarship. In this way, as in others, the Scientific Revolution grew from the constant mediation between the old form of knowledge and the new. Possessing Nature is a unique cross-disciplinary study. Not only does its detailed description of the earliest natural history collections make an important contribution to museum studies and cultural history, but by placing these museums in a continuum of scientific inquiry, it also adds to our understanding of the history of science. Nos interesa especialmente el capítulo II, Searching of Paradigms, del que ofrecemos a continuación un pequeño extracto.
Los naturalistas siguieron muchas trayectorias durante este período, de lo tradicional a lo esotérico y experimental. Wonderencompassedtheemotionthatconfrontation withtheunexpectedaroused, experiencedefined (54) theknowledgegainedfromtherepetition of suchencounters. Aldrovandi perseguía el conocimiento total, Kircher se encaminaba a las formas más antiguas y exóticas de conocimento. Los naturalistas de los siglos XVI y XVII reverenciaban la autoridad e integraban sus especulaciones filosóficas en el marco cristiano. En contraste con sus predecesores medievales, percibían la enciclopedia del conocimiento como algo infinitamente permeable, abierta a múltiples influencias. Veían la naturaleza como un texto, y leer el libro de la naturaleza fue una de las actividades primarias de los naturalistas altomodernos. El coleccionismo era una actividad que contribuía (55) a la reactivación y a la redefinición de la metáfora del libro (56).
Kircher no era ni un católico ni un jesuita típico. Las propensiones exóticas y especulativas de su época fueron especialmente cultivadas en su persona, y él fue rápido en articular su visión. El éxito de su museo, como centro de una actividad misionera y de una cultura científica que cruzaba las barreras geográficas y confesionales, le convertiría en el alma y el corazón de la Europa barroca. Incluso los creadores de la nueva filosofía experimental, como los miembros de la Academia del Cimento o de la Royal Society, que encontraban su filosofía pasada de moda, no podían ignorarle (80). El resultado fue una deliciosa y heterodoxa producción intelectual, una cornucopia de ideas e información. La investigación del mundo natural le proporcionaba una demostración tangible de las afinidades ocultas entre los objetos y sus propiedades (81).
Indice.
Part I. Locating the Museum. 1. A world of wonders in one closet shut. 2. Searching for Paradigms. 3. Sites of Knowledge.
Part II. Laboratories of Nature. 4. Pilgrimages of Science. 5. Fare Esperienza. 6. Museums of Medicine.
Part III. Economices of Exchange. 7. Inventing the Collector. 8. Patrons, Brokers and Strategies.
Epilogue: The Old and the New.
Datos de la obra: Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature. Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, University of California Press, 1994. Ilustraciones: Dragón de 1572. Biblioteca de la Universidad de Bolonia, Ulises Aldrovandi, Tavoli di Animali, y Museum de Ferrante Imperato.