The Paper Museum of Cassiano cial Pozzo:a Catalogue RaisonneIII October 2001 the latest two of the five volllllles froll! this series pllblished to date Ivere laullched at a receptiollhosted by the Prillce of Wales at Windsor Castle: Ancient Mosaics and Wallpaintings, by Helen Whitehouse,jromSeries A: Antiqllities alld A rchitectllre, and Fossil Woods and Other Geological Specimens, by Andrew C. Scottalld David Freedberg,from Series B: Natllral History. Henrietta McBurney describes the history of the Paperlvfuse/lm, alld the project to catalogue it.

The idea of cataloguing the Paper Museumwas conceived around fifteen years agowhen two art history scholars visited the

Print Room at Windsor to examine some of theover-looked natural history drawings from the dalPozzo collection. Their points of interest differed,but they shared a concern that these drawingsshould be rescued from obscurity and set in theirproper context - not so much because of theirindividual qualities as drawings (although somewere indeed very fine) but because of their interestand importance as part of a unique earlyseventeenth-century collection. A committee wasformed under the chairmanship of two Fellows ofthe British Academy, Francis Haskell and JenniferMontagu, to oversee the cataloguing andpublishing of an estimated total of7,000 drawings.A series of over thirty volumes was projected,divided as far as possible according to thecategories of objects depicted in the PaperMuseum, and cataloguers were sought amongstspecialists in the different areas. A project base wasset up at Windsor in 1987, with funds for anassistant and a database provided by Olivetti. In2001 the project was affiliated with the WarburgInstitute and an office provided by them for anewly appointed Managing Editor.

The Mllseo cartaceo (or 'museum on paper), asCassiano dal Pozza (1588-1657) described hiscollection to a fellow scholar, was assembled out ofa desire to form a visual encyclopaedia of everybranch of knowledge, an archive of images thatcould be used to improve the study of archaeologyand natural history. The subject-matter of thedrawings covered the surviving remains of ancientcivilisation, including wall-paintings and mosaics,inscriptions, household objects; art and otherobjects connected with the early Christian church;Renaissance architecture and decorative arts; andevery aspect of the natural world, local and exotic,from fossils and fungi to birds and animals. Thesedrawings were commissioned fi-om artists whoeither copied directly from the objects themselvesor from drawings in other collections; some were

acquired as part of earlier sketchbooks, and othersas individual sheets sent to Cassia no by hiscorrespondents from around Europe. The drawingsand prints (of which there was also a large number)were classified by subject matter, mounted inalbums and kept in the library which formed partof the larger museum and art collection housedwithin his small palazzo in Rome.

The dal Pozzo collection was visited by numerousscholars, collectors and men ofletters, both duringCassiano's lifetime and that of his younger brother,Carlo Antonio (1606-89). Amongst Englishvisitors to the dal Pozzo residence were JohnEvelyn, who in 1644 was particularly impressedby the 'choyce designes and drawings' in thecollection; and in 1662, the traveller, PhilipSkippon, who, unusually amongst the accounts ofvisitors, gave us a description not only of thedrawings after the antique, but also of thosedepicting natural history subjects. He noted, forexample, there being 'Among the pictures ... , adolphin brought to the fish-market in ROllle,having one fin on the middle of the back, a pair offins under the gills, a longish snout, wide mouth, aforked tail, and is well armed with sharp teeth', adescription that would seem to fit a drawing ofa conlli10n dolphin which survives in the PaperMuseum. In a letter of 1622 Cassiano hadexpressed the hope that, 'the drawings I amassembling could be used as illustrations towritings'. Although some groups of drawings(most notably those of the citrus fruits, and someof the ornithological subjects) were used inspecialist works (published under other scholars'names), and a few of the drawings after the antiquewere reproduced in antiquarian publications, themajority of the drawings have remainedunpublished until the present day.

Cassia no was born near Turin into a family whichhad held distinguished posts in the administrationof the Dukes of Savoy. However, most of hisupbringing was in Pisa, where his father's cousin,Carlo Antonio dal Pozzo, who was Archbishop of

The project was officiallyadopted as an AcademyResearch Project in 1989.In 1997 a grant was madeby the Academy for thesalary of a full-timeassistant to the project.based in the Royal Library,Windsor Castle. This granthas been renewed eachyear, and will end in Spring2003.

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the city and minister to Ferdinand I de' Medici,Grand Duke of Tuscany, took charge of hiseducation, made him a knight of the military orderof S.Stefano, and conferred various legacies onhim. Cassiano qualified as a lawyer in the family

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tradition, being appointed a judge in Siena by theage of twenty. However, in 1611, he decided togive up his legal career in order to pursue hiscultural interests and he moved to Rome where hespent the greater part of his adult life, becomingone of the foremost patrons of art and scholarshipof his time. He held a number of appointments in

the household of Cardinal Francesco Barberini,nephew to Pope Urban VIII, positions that gavehim the income and opportunity to pursue hisown interests. In 1625 and 1626 he accompaniedCardinal Barberini on diplomatic missions toFrance and Spain, the only visits abroad he evermade. During these travels he kept diariesrecording the collections he saw and the people hemet; amongst the latter were the artist Rubens, andthe antiquarian Nicolas-Claude, Fabri de Peiresc.Peiresc became an in,portant member of the circleof intellectuals from all over Europe with whomCassia no corresponded throughout much of hislife, exchanging letters, documents, drawings,antiquities, dead and sometimes even live animals.In 1622 Cassia no was made a member of Europe'sfirst modern scientific society, the Accademia deiLincei; his contact with Federico Cesi, its founder,and the other members of the society, whichincluded Galileo, had a formative influence on hisown approach to the study of the natural world.After Cesi's death in 1630, Cassiano acquired alarge number of the society's drawings, books andscientific instruments for his own collection.

When Cassiano died in 1657, his younger brotherinherited the Paper Museum and continued to addto it until his death. In 1703, the Paper Museum,together with its accompanying library, was sold bythe dal Pozzo heirs to the Albani Pope, ClementIX.The major part of it (then amounting to around200 folio albums) was bought from his nephew,Cardinal Alessandro Albani, by George II I in 1762,since which time it has been in the Royal Library.Parts of the Paper Museum have, however, beenseparated from the main corpus during its history:111 the eighteenth century sections of thearchitectural and antiquarian drawings, most ofwhich are now in the British Museum and the SirJohn Soane's Museum; in the nineteenth centurymany of the prints, the majority of which are nowin the British Library; and in the twentieth centuryaround 750 folios of natural history subjects,together with a handful of drawings after theantique, groups which have been widely dispersedon the art market. When the decision was made tocatalogue the drawings, however, it was agreed thatas many of the dispersed drawings as possible, alongwith those remaining in the Royal Library, shouldbe included so that the scope and extent ofCassiano's original enterprise be reflected fully.The importance of the Paper Museum un-doubtedly lies in the whole rather than the parts;however, certain groups and individual drawingsare of great significance for archaeologists, scientistsand historians of art and architecture. Many of

the drawings of antiquities, for example, providerecords of the state of preservation of a particularpiece of sculpture or bas-relief before laterrestoration. A set of plans and elevations constitutesthe only record of the scaffolding designed in 1631for the erection of Bernini's Baldacchino in StPeter's, Rome.

Although the process of cataloguing this vast anddiverse group of drawings has inevitably presentedproblems, many unimagined at the outset, it hasalso brought with it unexpected discoveries andchallenges. The task of reconstructing the PaperMuseum is made particularly difficult not only bythe fact that over a third of the known contents isdispersed amongst different collections, someabroad, but also because significant items whichwe know to have been in it are as yet unlocated,and may indeed be lost altogether. The task oflooking for them (they sometimes masquerade aseighteenth- or even nineteenth-century drawings)continues parallel to the task of cataloguing whatis already known. All this may mean that acataloguer has to assimilate new drawings into hisor her volume at any stage during the writing ofit. For example, a 'lost' drawing of an ancientRoman mosaic of sea monsters from Bevagnaappeared on the art market during the last stages ofproducing Ancienl Mosaics and Wallpainlings, toolate for it to be incorporated in its rightful place inthe catalogue with the other drawings of mosaics;it therefore appears in a section called 'Lostdrawings' (together with two other drawingsdocumented but unlocated) at the end of the

volume (Figure 1). In the case of the volume in thenatural history series to be devoted to Mamlllals,Fishes and other Fanna, only nine drawings ofmammals have been located, although we knowfrom George Ill's inventory that there was analbum containing twenty-five folios of drawings of'Quadrupeds'. Some of the missing subjects,however, are known from Philip Skippon'saccount, allowing the authors of the catalogue toattempt a reconstruction of what 1T1ight originallyhave been contained in the zoological section ofthe Paper Museum. One of the nine drawingslocated, a view of a badger with details of its pawand ear, has only recently emerged in a privatecollection (Figure 2).

Figllre 2. BadJiC' with details ojPal" alld ear. Watercolollr byVillcell':-o Leollardi (fl. 1620-46).Pri"atc Collectioll, Britaill.

There is a problem inherent in the cataloguing ofworks of art depicting scientific subject matter,resulting in the need to combine expertise fromvery different disciplines. In the case of theantiquarian drawings, specialists of epigraphy orof ancient Roman household objects may notbe familiar with the techniques and conventionsof Italian draughtsmen of the Baroque period,whereas without such specialist knowledge the arthistorian is hard pressed to identify and evaluatethe subject-matter depicted (Figure 3). With thenatural history drawings, the different disciplinesmay be even more alien. The preparation of FossilWoods and olher Geological Specimens was held upfor several years by the fact that variouspalaeontologists, who were shown the albumscontaining over a hundred monochrome drawingsof fossil wood specimens, felt unable, in the

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absence of the actual specimens, tocomment. A breakthrough was made onlywhen a palaeobotanist was found who,taking his clue from the names of the fossilsites in Umbria inscribed on a few of thedrawings, persuaded the project that a briefvisit to these localities might provide atleast some of the missing information. Asa result of his fieldwork (during whichhe found several specimens uncannilysimilar to those depicted in the drawings[Figure 4]) and his discussions with theItaLan palaeontologists working on thesites, he was able to identifY the wholerange of fossil preservation observed anddepicted by the early seventeenth-centuryItalian scientists. Equally crucial to thestudy was the art historian involved, one ofvery few able to elucidate the abbreviatedLatin inscriptions on the drawings.

Alongside work on the catalogue ra1sonne, anumber of related activities have taken place. In1989 a conference entitled 'Cassiano dal Pozzo's

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Paper Museum' was convened jointly by theBritish Museum and the Warburg Institute, theproceedings of which were published by Olivetti.Two exhibitions on the Paper Museum have beenheld: one in the British Museum in 1992, whichincluded a small selection of three-dimensionalobjects - the subjects of some of the drawings -and one in the National Gallery of Scotland in1997, this one limited to drawings from the RoyalCollection. Catalogues to accompany each ofthese exhibitions, published by Olivetti and theNational Gallery of Scotland respectively, wereproduced. A further exhibition is planned for thenew Queen's Gallery, London, with possibleshowings in Italy. This exhibition, again, will bemade up entirely of items from the RoyalCollection, including a significant number ofdrawings shown for the first time, and with agreater emphasis on the different categories ofprints which must once have formed part of thePaper Museum; the accompanying catalogue willbe published by the Royal Collection. While mostof the cataloguing energy must of necessity gointo the catalogue raisonne, the publication ofexhibition catalogues aimed at a n1.ore generalaudience will, it is hoped, bring the maincataloguing enterprise to a wider audience, andmay even have the happy consequence of bringingpreviously unrecognised drawings to ourknowledge.

Henrietta McBurney is Deputy Curator of thePrint Room at the Royal Library, Windsor Castleand Assistant General Editor of the CassianoCatalogue Raisonne.

Images from the Royal Library, Windsor reproduced by courtesyof the Royal Collection © 2002, Her Majesty The Queen.