2 From Private to Public Natural Collections and Museums

About this book

In his excellent preface, Beretta discusses the idea that the emergence of natural history as an independent discipline `was closely connected to the possession and domination of nature, rather than its contemplation'... Thus it was the passion for collecting natural-history artefacts from the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century that drove the establishment of the discipline ... From a natural historian's viewpoint, these papers are far removed from the more familiar accounts of how collections, collectors and specimens contributed to our knowledge of the natural world, as they also address the largely unexplored subject of how the collections affected their collectors ... well produced with many relevant illustrations. -Nature

Contents

Contents:
The Museum of Alexandria: Myth and Model, Giovanni di Pasquale

Natural Collections in the Spanish Renaissance, Susana Gomez Lopez

Wunderkammer vs. Museum? Natural History and Collecting during the Renaissance, Alessandro Tosi

Pierre Pomet's Parisian Cabinet: Revisiting the Invisible and the Visible in Early Modern Collections, E. C. Spary

Uses and Publics of the Anatomical Model Collections of La Specola, Florence, and the Josephinum, Vienna, around 1800, Anna Maerker

Taste, Order and Aesthetics in Eighteenth-Century Mineral Collections, Jonathan Simon

Collected, Analyzed, Displayed: Lavoisier and Minerals , Marco Beretta

Owning and Collecting Natural Objects in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Samuel J.M.M. Alberti

The Swedish Museum of Natural History and the "Linnaean Tradition, " Jenny Beckman

Do Collections Make the Collector? Charles Darwin in Context, Janet Browne

The Museum of the Geological Survey of Portugal the Role of the "Bilobites" Collection in a 19th-century Palaeoichnological Controversy, Ana Carneiro

Re-Humanizing a Sleeping Beauty, A Historian's Vision of Natural History Collections, Christoph Meinel

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