ARE these images art or are they science? For Federico Cesi, Prince of Acquasparta and founder of the world’s first scientific society, the two were indistinguishable. In the 1620s Cesi and his friends in the Accademia dei Lincei (Academy of Lynxes) strove to document and classify every living thing – a job still nowhere near completion.
The fruits of Cesi’s labours ended up in one of the world’s most wonderful museums – the Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, a fellow Lincean. It housed a vast collection of paintings of antiquities, buildings, objects and natural history specimens. The contents, long since sold off and scattered, are finally being reunited in a mammoth publishing project spanning 34 volumes. The latest three are filled with Cesi’s fungi (The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, Series B, Part II, Harvey Miller Publishers).
Cesi and his friends made the first systematic survey of fungi, from the big and obvious to the tiniest and hardly recognisable, such as the downy threads springing from pellets of peacock dung. All were painted with unprecedented precision.
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If fungi had no flowers or seeds, how did they reproduce? It was a puzzle that prompted Cesi to pioneer a new sort of natural history. He and his friends noted the obvious – colours, smells, and whether they were edible or deadly. Then they recorded habitat and fruiting season, closely tracking the growth and development of fruiting bodies. In his search for sex organs, Cesi probed, dissected and sliced, examining the interior of his fungi under a microscope. Not just any microscope, but one given to him by the most famous of all Linceans, Galileo Galilei. The plates in these volumes are dotted with close-up drawings of details seen through the microscope, pre-dating Robert Hooke’s Micrographia by 40 years.
