Geology

‘Aldrovandi, founding father of Geology’.[1]

Musaeum metallicum (Bologna, 1648) was a posthumous publication, edited by Bartolomeo Ambrosini (1588-1657), who changed its original name ‘De fossilibus’ to Musaeum metallicum. As Baucon notes, in the early modern period fossilia was an umbrella term, encompassing underground objects such as minerals, rocks and fossils.[2] Aldrovandi used the term interchangeably with a new term, which he coined in his will of 1603: ‘Giologia’. He was the first to use the term ‘geology’, and regarded ‘Giologia, or de Fossilibus’ as one of the three major branches of natural history (along with ‘Botanologia’ and ‘Zoologia’).[3] As his Musaeum metallicum makes clear, his interests were wide ranging and his text, broken into four books, covered metals, clays, petrified fluids and rocks.[4]

Ulisse Aldrovandi, Musaeum metallicum in libros IIII. Distributum … Bartholomaeus Ambrosinus … labore et studio composuit cum indice copiossimo; Marcus Antonius Bernia in lucem edidit (Bologna, 1648), p. 454, body fossil of a fish.

Aldrovandi was particularly interested in fossils and his Musaeum metallicum contains a host of images of body fossils, including this image of a fish.[5] Baucon suggests that Aldrovandi thought that fossils had an inorganic origin, being formed by fluid within rocks, but he also drew attention to their similarities with animals.[6] Vai and Cavazza argue that while he did indeed understand the process of fossilization he ‘held various positions … preferring, not exclusively, the inorganic one’ – the confusion, they suggest, may have more to do with Ambrosini’s editorial interventions, than Aldrovandi’s true position.[7] As Morello notes, his classification system owed more to George Agricola (1494–1555) than it did to Aristotle.[8]

Ulisse Aldrovandi, Musaeum metallicum in libros IIII. distributum / Bartholomaeus Ambrosinus … labore et studio composuit cum indice copiossimo ; Marcus Antonius Bernia in lucem edidit (Bologna, 1648), p. 730, trace fossil.

Aldrovandi was also interested in trace fossils and the Musaeum metallicum contains some of the first images of such fossils.[9] The above image contains depictions of Gastrochaenolites (above) and Cosmorhaphe (below). Gastrochaenolites, which Aldrovandi called ‘Silicem dactylitem’ and described as a rock ‘pitted here and there by hollows of varying size’, was, he suggested, a result of borings made by ‘Pholads’, which he defined as little animals of the bivalve genus’.[10] Cosmorhaphe, with their characteristic meandering reliefs, were reminiscent of snakes.

This body fossil of the ammonite Ophiomorphites [Stephanoceras bayleanus] was but one of a large collection of fossils and minerals collected by Aldrovandi. As Vai notes, Aldrovandi’s decision to create a new term, ‘geology’ was a recognition that ‘mineralogy’ was too restrictive a term to encompass fossils such as this.[11] His fossil collection was enormous: Sarti notes that by the end of the sixteenth century alone, it held approximately 10,000 geo-paleontological specimens.[12]

Aldrovandi includes a range of objects in different materials in his Musaeum metallicum and one of the most striking of these is this Mixtec mask. We know that he was fascinated by the flora and fauna of the New World and considered travelling there in 1567 to research its natural history. His hopes of a research trip were dashed and instead he learnt of the New World through the eyes (and the objects) of contemporary scholars and collectors. Historians such as Laurencich-Minelli, Keating, Markey and Domenici, have traced the history of this particular mask and in doing so have pointed to the multiple ways Aldrovandi benefited from his scholarly and courtly friendship networks. Laurencich-Minelli has plotted the journey of the mask from the Puebla in New Spain (Mexico), to mid sixteenth-century Bologna. Writing in 1548 the Bolognese chronicler Leandro Alberti (1479–1552) recounts a meeting between Pope Clement VII (Giulio de Medici, 1478–1534), who was then in Bologna, and a Spanish Dominican Domingo de Betanzos, which took place on 3 March 1533.[13] Betanzos had travelled from the Puebla to petition the pope and presented him with a range of gifts, which, as Leandro remarked, included, among other things, ‘a two-finger wide and one-foot long knife made of yellow stone with the handle all covered by turquoises. Then some stone knives as sharp as razors’ as well as ‘some very thick masks adorned with turquoises, through which he said the demons spoke to them’.[14]

Alberti was given some of these presents (including books and the aforementioned knives) and in turn presented them to a fellow humanist in Bologna, Giovanni Filoteo Achillini (1466–1538). Laurencich-Minelli has shown how some of the knives migrated from Achillini’s collection to that of another collector, Antonio Giganti (1535–98). Giganti and Aldrovandi were friends as well as fellow collectors and it seems likely that Giganti gifted them to Aldrovandi for the knives found their way into Aldrovandi’s Museum and his Musaeum metallicum, where he describes one as an ‘Indian stone knife’ and the other as ‘Another kind of stone knife’ from ‘Themistiana Indiae Provincia’ (the Aztec empire).[15] As Laurencich-Minelli notes, ‘Themistian’ was a Latinized form of Tenochtitlan, thus indicating that he knew of the origin of the material.[16]

Aldrovandi acquired the mask via a different route for it seems clear that his Mixtec mask was in fact one of the papal masks which by 1553 had found their way into the Medici collections, and from there into that of Aldrovandi (probably as a gift from Grand Duke Ferdinando I (1549–1609)). Aldrovandi describes it as follows:

The Greeks terms this type of work Asarotos [mosaic floor], so called, as some people think, because the remains of dinner used to swept off such pavement; but for our discussion, lithostrota, which by our people are usually called tessellated works, that is, constructed from various shells and bits of stone, or rather pebbles of different colour, is more suitable, as was stated a little earlier. But it is amazing that in the Indian Histories Gomara recalls that masks were certainly made by Indians from wood, then decorated with pebbles of diverse colours in such a way that they rival tessellated work very beautifully. For which reasons we show an image of this mask for the pleasure of the reader.[17]

Aldrovandi was clearly more interested in the mask’s construction and materials than in any ritual use. As Keating and Markey note, his reference to the La historia de las Indias (Zaragoza, 1552) of Francisco López de Gómara (1511–64), whose text was translated into Italian in 1556 and dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo (1519–74), but which Aldrovandi had had access to prior to publication, is a further indication that he was aware of the Mexican provenance of the item.[18] The mask is now part of the collections of the Pigorini Museum in Rome.

TEXT: Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library.

Sources

Baucon, Andrea, ‘Italy, the Cradle of Ichnology: the legacy of Aldrovandi and Leonardo’, Studi. Trent. Sci. Nat. Acta. Geol., 83 (2008), 15–29.

Domenici, Davide, ‘Missionary gift records of Mexican objects in early modern Italy’, in Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey (eds), The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492–1750 (Cambridge, 2017), pp 86–102.

Keating, Jessica and Li Markey, ‘’Indian’ objects in Medici and Austrian-Habsburg inventories. A case study of the sixteenth-century term’, Journal of the History of Collecting, 23, no. 2 (2011), 283–300.

Laurencich-Minelli, Laura, ‘From the New World to Bologna, 1533. A gift for Pope Clement VII and Bolognese collections of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, Journal of the History of Collections, 24, no. 2 (2012), 145–158.

Mason, Peter and José Pardo-Tomás, ‘Bringing it back from Mexico. Eleven paintings of trees in I cinque libri delle plante of Pier’Antoinio Michiel (1510–1576), ‘Journal of the History of Collections, 32, no. 2 (2020), 225–237.

Morello, Nicoletta, ‘Agricola and the birth of the mineralogical sciences in Italy in the sixteenth century’, Geological Society of America. Special Paper 411 (2006), 23–30.

Sarti, Carlo, ‘The geology collections in Aldrovandi’s Museum’, in Vai, Gian Battista, and William Cavazza (eds), Four centuries of the word Geology. Ulisse Aldrovandi 1603 in Bologna (Bologna, 2003), pp 153–167.

Vai, Gian Battista, and William Cavazza, ‘Ulisse Aldrovandi and the origin of geology and science’, Geological Society of America. Special paper,411 (2006), 43–63.

Vai, Gian Battista, ‘Aldrovandi’s Will: introducing the term ‘Geology’ in 1603’, in Vai, Gian Battista, and William Cavazza (eds), Four centuries of the word Geology. Ulisse Aldrovandi 1603 in Bologna (Bologna, 2003), pp 65–110.

[1] Baucon, Andrea, ‘Italy, the Cradle of Ichnology: the legacy of Aldrovandi and Leonardo’, Studi. Trent. Sci. Nat. Acta. Geol., 83 (2008), 19.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Vai, Gian Battista, ‘Aldrovandi’s Will: introducing the term ‘Geology’ in 1603’, in Vai, Gian Battista, and William Cavazza (eds), Four centuries of the word Geology. Ulisse Aldrovandi 1603 in Bologna (Bologna, 2003), p. 70.

[4] On this see Baucon, ‘Italy, the Cradle of Ichnology’, 15–29.

[5] Ibid., 19.

[6] Ibid., 20.

[7] See Vai, Gian Battista, and William Cavazza, ‘Ulisse Aldrovandi and the origin of geology and science’, Geological Society of America. Special paper,411 (2006), 54-5; and Vai, Gian Battista, ‘Aldrovandi’s Will’, p. 95.

[8] Morello, Nicoletta, ‘Agricola and the birth of the mineralogical sciences in Italy in the sixteenth century’, Geological Society of America. Special Paper 411 (2006), 23–30.

[9] Baucon, ‘Italy, the Cradle of Ichnology’, 22.

[10] Ibid., 23.

[11] Vai, ‘Aldrovandi’s Will’, p. 73.

[12] Sarti, Carlo, ‘The geology collections in Aldrovandi’s Museum’, in Vai, Gian Battista, and William Cavazza (eds), Four centuries of the word Geology. Ulisse Aldrovandi 1603 in Bologna (Bologna, 2003), p. 157.

[13] On this see Domenici, Davide, ‘Missionary gift records of Mexican objects in early modern Italy’, in Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey (eds), The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492–1750 (Cambridge, 2017), pp 89–90.

[14] Laurencich-Minelli, Laura, ‘From the New World to Bologna, 1533. A gift for Pope Clement VII and Bolognese collections of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, Journal of the History of Collections, 24, no. 2 (2012), 146.

[15] Ulisse Aldrovandi, Musaeum metallicum in libros IIII. distributum / Bartholomaeus Ambrosinus … labore et studio composuit cum indice copiossimo ; Marcus Antonius Bernia in lucem edidit (Bologna, 1648), pp 156–7.

[16] Laurencich-Minelli, Laura, ‘From the New World to Bologna, 1533’, 156, fn 16.

[17] Keating, Jessica and Li Markey, ‘’Indian’ objects in Medici and Austrian-Habsburg inventories. A case study of the sixteenth-century term’, Journal of the History of Collecting, 23, no. 2 (2011), 291–2.

[18] Ibid., 292 and Laurencich-Minelli, Laura, ‘From the New World to Bologna, 1533’, 152.