FINDLEN-2006-Anatomy-theaters-botanical-gardens-and-natural-history-collections-The-Cambridge-History-of-Science-vol.-3

20 Pages·2006·0.67 MB·English

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THE CAMBRIDGE

HISTORY OF

SCIENCE

volume 3

Early Modern Science

Edited by

KATHARINE PARK

LORRAINE DASTON

v

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v. 4. Eighteenth-century science / edited by Roy Porter

v. 5. The modern physical and mathematical sciences / edited by Mary Jo Nye

v. 7. The modern social sciences / edited by Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy Ross

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vi

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12

ANATOMY THEATERS, BOTANICAL
GARDENS, AND NATURAL HISTORY

COLLECTIONS

Paula Findlen

At the end of the sixteenth century, the English lawyer and natural philoso-
pher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) began to fantasize about the locations for
knowledge.TheGestaGrayorum(1594),acourtrevelperformedbeforeQueen
Elizabeth I and attributed to Bacon, described an imaginary research facility
containing “a most perfect and general library” and “a spacious, wonderful
garden” filled with wild and cultivated plants and surrounded by a menagerie,
aviary, freshwater lake, and saltwater lake. Spaces for living nature were com-
plemented by a museum of science, art, and technology – “a goodly huge
cabinet” housing artifacts (“whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or
engine has made rare in stuff”), natural oddities (“whatsoever singularity,
chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced”), and gems, minerals, and
fossils (“whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may
be kept”). The fourth and final component was a space in which to test
nature, “a still-house, so furnished with mills, instruments, furnaces, and
vessels as may be a palace fit for a philosopher’s stone.” The totality of these
facilities, Bacon concluded, would be “a model of the universal nature made
private.”1 This statement suggested a new idea of empiricism that privileged
human invention and demonstration over pure observation and celebrated
the communal aspects of observing nature over the heroic efforts of the
lone observer. Nature had to be reconstructed within a microcosm, creating
an artificial world of knowledge in which scholars prodded, dissected, and
experimented with nature in order to know it better.

Some thirty years later, the continued fantasy of a society organized around

knowledge led Bacon to write his famous utopia, the New Atlantis (published
posthumously in 1627), in order to demonstrate how an empirical worldview
could transform an entire society. The nucleus of Bacon’s utopian society,
Bensalem, was a structure called Salomon’s House, the knowledge-making

1 Francis Bacon, Gesta Grayorum, in John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen

Elizabeth, 3 vols. (London: John Nichols and Son, 1823), 3: 290.

272

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center of the realm. Surrounded by artificial mines, lakes, a botanical gar-
den, and a menagerie, and made of “high towers, . . . great and spacious
houses, . . . [and] certain chambers,” it represented a full elaboration of
science as an activity that removed nature from nature in order to study it
better. Bacon’s remarkable array of unique spaces for science mirrored the
variety of possible experiences that one could have of nature, isolating all nat-
ural objects and processes. The inhabitants of Bensalem proudly told their
English visitors that, in doing this, they had made natural things “by art
greater much than their nature.”2 They not only knew nature but used their
knowledge to improve upon it. This statement epitomized Bacon’s defini-
tion of good science as an invention of the human mind in contemplation of
nature.

Bacon’s fascination with the special sites in which to gain experience of

nature did not emerge ex nihilo. Like many aspects of his natural philosophy,
it was based on a keen understanding of developments in European science
in the preceding half-century. Between the 1530s and the 1590s, anatomy
theaters, botanical gardens, and cabinets of curiosities became regular features
of the pursuit of scientific knowledge.3 All of these structures shared the
common goal of creating purpose-built spaces in which scholars could use
the best intellectual, instrumental, and manual techniques of science to gain
knowledge of the natural world. In effect, they acted in ways similar to
Bacon’s utopian vision of science; to differing degrees, they removed natural
artifacts from their original locations, placing them inside new spaces for the
specificpurposeofstudyingtheminordertoimprovenaturalknowledge.The
proliferation of anatomy theaters, botanical gardens, and museums reflected
the ways in which interpreting nature had become tied to ambitious empirical
projects of investigating nature in toto, with all the attendant difficulties of
gathering and storing materials, while at the same time encouraging smaller
experiential projects that sought to understand unique aspects of nature by
creating artificial conditions in which to experiment (see Dear, Chapter 4,
this volume).

Bacon could not have sketched his famous portrait of Salomon’s House as

a teeming beehive of empirical activity without the work of observing nature
that had occurred in the preceding half-century. During the Renaissance, the
idea of experiencing nature firsthand had become an increasingly important
part of medical education (see Cook, Chapter 18, this volume). Physicians,
who had opened bodies occasionally throughout the late Middle Ages, rein-
vigorated their interest in the manual art of dissection, rubbing elbows with
surgeons whose cutting abilities made them artisans rather than philosophers

2 Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration and New Atlantis, ed. Jerry Weinberger (Wheeling, Ill.: Harland

Davidson, 1980), pp. 72–4.

3 Libraries, observatories, and laboratories also were purpose-built spaces in which knowledge could

be gained (see Grafton, Chapter 10, and Smith, Chapter 13, this volume).

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Paula Findlen

of nature.4 They also renewed their interest in the natural material out of
which medicines were made, collaborating and occasionally clashing with
apothecaries in their efforts to gain practical knowledge of plants.5 Bacon
was correct in stating that the initial goals behind the desire for experi-
ence were somewhat narrow, reflecting the expanded scope of the physician’s
competency in all realms of medicine. Some university-educated physicians
had become encyclopedists, studying everything and anything related to the
microcosm of man, but it was not yet clear that they had developed a full
appreciation of the need to study nature on its own terms and not just for
the sake of medicine.

The anatomy theater, the botanical garden, and the natural history

museum were all a direct result of the medical fascination with experience
in the early sixteenth century. All found their nascent formulation during
the 1530s in European cities that had strong traditions of medical education.
Their gradual institutionalization across the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries offers an important means for understanding how early modern
scholars integrated the study of the material world of nature into their defi-
nition of science. Anatomizing, botanizing, and collecting were not a routine
part of natural philosophy in 1500. A century later, studying nature with-
out using some of these techniques of investigation was no longer possible.
Many of the great naturalists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
from Konrad Gesner in the 1550s to John Ray in the 1690s, constructed a
new science of nature based on extensive field research, collecting, and col-
lating of specimens. They could not have done these things without defining
new locations for natural inquiry. Thus, the new purpose-built spaces gave
the study of nature a new direction and intensity in addition to offering
defined locations, both inside and outside universities, in which to observe
specimens. They were indeed houses of knowledge.

ANATOMIZING

Theideaofcreatingaspecial,enclosedspaceinwhichtostudynatureemerged
at a very early stage in the realm of human anatomy. During the late Middle

4 On the revival of dissecting practices and their relation to the medical idea of experience, see especially

VivianNutton,“HumanisticSurgery,”inTheMedicalRenaissanceoftheSixteenthCentury,ed.Andrew
Wear, Roger French, and I. M. Lonie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 75–99;
Andrea Carlino, Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning, trans. John Tedeschi
and Anne C. Tedeschi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Giovanna Ferrari, L’Esperienza
del passato: Alessandro Benedetto filologo e medico umanista (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1996); and
Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the
Ancients (Brookfield: Scolar, 1997).

5 On the botanical idea of experience, see Agnes Arber, Herbals, Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter

in the History of Botany, 1470–1670, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Karl
H. Dannenfeldt, Leonhard Rauwolf: Sixteenth-Century Physician, Botanist, and Traveler (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); Karen Reeds, Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities
(New York: Garland, 1991); and Reeds, “Renaissance Humanism and Botany,” Annals of Science, 33
(1976), 519–42.

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Ages, occasional dissections of human cadavers had become a standard part
of medical education in universities such as those at Bologna, Padua, and
Montpellier, where surgery was part of the medical curriculum. The first
documented formal dissection of this sort was recorded in Padua in 1341,
though it is clear that the practice was considerably older; the Anatomia (1316)
of Mondino de’ Liuzzi, professor of medicine at the University of Bologna,
was certainly composed on the basis of actual dissections.6 Such practices
accelerated in the second half of the fifteenth century. The increased circula-
tion of ancient and medieval anatomical treatises, which was a direct result
of the invention of printing, and a growing fascination with the postmortem
as a means of understanding the causes of disease led medical professors and
their students to demand more frequent dissections.7

In response to these changes in medical training and practice, a curious

new structure appeared during the winter months in various European cities:
the temporary anatomy theater. Usually built of wood, it was an ephemeral
structure, not unlike a theatrical set, designed to accommodate the occasional
dissection that the early Renaissance university demanded. These temporary
theaters could be built in preexisting spaces – lecture halls or, better yet,
churches and public piazzas that were already designed to accommodate
audiences in the hundreds. (Before then, small audiences of students seem
simply to have stood around a table observing the body during a lecture.)
The Italian physician Alessandro Benedetti, who taught at Bologna in the
late fifteenth century, provided the earliest and most elaborate description
of the new structures in his Anatomice: sive, de historia corporis humani libri
quinque (Anatomy: or, Five Books on the History of the Human Body, 1502)
when he wrote:

A temporary theater should be built at a large and well-ventilated place,
with seats arranged in a circle, as in the Colosseum in Rome and the Arena
in Verona, sufficiently large to accommodate a great number of spectators
in such a manner that the teacher would not be inconvenienced by the
crowd. . . . The corpse has to be put on a table in the center of the theater
in an elevated and clear place easily accessible to the dissector.8

Over the next few decades, temporary theaters became a popular feature

of medical instruction. By the 1520s, even less well-known medical faculties,
such as those at Pisa and Pavia, supplied a structure in which to dissect,
and by the 1540s, the idea of the anatomy theater had been so well inte-
grated into medical training that the French physician Charles Estienne

6 Andrea Carlino, “The Book, the Body, the Scalpel,” RES, 16 (1988), 31.
7 Katharine Park, “The Criminal and Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy,”

Renaissance Quarterly, 47 (1994), 1–33; Carlino, Books of the Body; and Cunningham, Anatomical
Renaissance.

8 In Arturo Castiglione, “The Origin and Development of the Anatomical Theater to the End of

the Renaissance,” Ciba Symposia, (3 May 1941), 831. See also Ferrari, L’esperienza del passato, esp.
pp. 166–73.

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(ca. 1505–1564) insisted that anatomy could not be taught properly without
a locus anatomicus, a place in which to anatomize.9 He compared the human
body to “anything that is exhibited in a theater in order to be viewed.”10 The
structure of the anatomy theater played an important role in drawing atten-
tion to the visual aspects of the new anatomy. It made dissection a theatrical
and often highly public event for medical students, physicians, surgeons, and
a general public curious about the secrets of the body.

Accounts of actual dissections correspond remarkably well to ideal descrip-

tions of the anatomy theater. The famous Flemish anatomist Andreas
Vesalius (1514–1564), who performed numerous dissections throughout
Europe between the 1530s and 1543, usually worked in temporary wooden
theaters. His controversial anatomy lectures in Bologna, in the winter of 1540,
occurred in a temporary wooden amphitheater erected in the church of San
Francesco. The German medical student Baldasar Heseler, who attended the
lectures, described the building as holding almost two hundred spectators –
medical students, university professors, and the general public – on four
wooden benches.11 Vesalius exploited contemporary theatrical techniques,
diminishing the distance between the lecturer and the audience by allow-
ing the audience to handle the organs as he removed them from the body.
He emphasized the resulting shared experience: “[S]urely, lords, he said, you
can learn only little from a mere demonstration, if you yourselves have not
handled the objects with your hands.”12 Dissections in the Dutch anatomy
theatersoftheseventeenthcenturycontinuedthetraditionbegunbyVesalius,
passing body parts among the spectators in the highest rows in order to offer
everyone a tactile and immediate visual experience of the body.13

In the decades following the publication of Vesalius’s De humani corporis

fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body, 1543), dissections became a more
regular feature of Renaissance medical education. In October 1554, Felix
Platter, a young medical student from Basel, described his enthusiasm for
Guillaume Rondelet’s anatomies at Montpellier, many of which occurred in
the new quarters built to accommodate the current passion for anatomy: “I
never miss[ed] the dissections of men and animals that took place in the

9 E. Ashworth Underwood, “The Early Teaching of Anatomy at Padua, with Special Reference to

a Model of the Padua Anatomical Theatre,” Annals of Science, 19 (1963), 1–26, at p. 7. The most
comprehensive account of the rise of the anatomy theater remains Gottfried Richter, Das anatomische
Theater (Berlin: Ebering, 1936).

10 Charles Estienne, De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres (Paris: S. Colinaeum, 1545), quoted

in Giovanna Ferrari, “Public Anatomy Lessons and the Carnival: The Anatomy Theater of Bologna,”
Past and Present, 117 (1987), 50–106, at p. 85.

11 Baldasar Heseler, Andreas Vesalius’ First Public Anatomy at Bologna, 1540, ed. Ruben Eriksson

(Uppsala: Almquist and Wiksells, 1959), p. 85.

12 Ibid., p. 291. I have modified the translation slightly. The standard biography of Vesalius remains

Charles D. O’Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 1514–1564 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1964).

13 Jan C. C. Rupp, “Michel Foucault, Body Politics and the Rise and Expansion of Modern Anatomy,”

Journal of Historical Sociology, 5 (1992), 31–60, at p. 47.

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Table 12.1. Anatomy Theaters

1556
Montpellier
1617
Paris

1557
London
1619
Amsterdam

1588
Ferrara
1623
Oxford

1589
Basel
1642
Rotterdam

1593
Leiden
1643
Copenhagen

1594
Padua
1654
Groningen

1595
Bologna
1662
Uppsala

1614
Delft

College. . . .”14 Platter surely observed these things in the wooden dissecting
room built between 1554 and 1556. Like the dissecting rooms of the Company
of Barber-Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians in London, used to
instruct medical practitioners outside the orbit of the university, the Mont-
pellier theater represented an early stage in the evolution of the anatomy
theater from a temporary to a permanent structure.

By the 1590s, the anatomy theater had achieved a new level of legitimacy

in the university training of physicians. During this period, all of the leading
medical faculties in Europe built permanent anatomy theaters (Table 12.1). By
1595, a stone theater had replaced the earlier wooden one in Montpellier.15 In
1589, Platter, by then a distinguished professor of medicine at the University
of Basel, persuaded his institution to buy a building with a plot of land so
that the newly appointed professor of anatomy and botany, Caspar Bauhin
(1560–1624), and his students might dissect in the winter and botanize in the
summer all in one place. The statutes describing Bauhin’s position underscore
its close relationship to the new buildings of science. “He should teach not so
much by precepts, but more by ocular demonstrations,” the medical faculty
of Basel declared.16 Unfortunately, such high sentiments were not backed up
in perpetuity by the university. By the 1620s, after the generation of physicians
who had installed the theater and garden retired, the facility had fallen into
disrepair.

In the ancient university towns of Italy, however, principally Padua and

Bologna,anewcommitmenttotheplaceofanatomyinmedicaleducationled
to the building of anatomical theaters that exist to this day. The young English
medical student William Harvey (1578–1657), who came from London, where
an early dissecting theater had been built not by a university but by the

14 Felix Platter, Beloved Son Felix: The Journal of Felix, Platter, a Medical Student at Montpellier in the

Sixteenth Century, trans. Se´an Jennett (London: Frederick Muller, 1961), p. 88.

15 Thomas Platter, Journal of a Younger Brother: The Life of Thomas Platter as a Medical Student at

Montpellier at the Close of the Sixteenth Century, trans. Se´an Jennett (London: Frederick Muller,
1963), p. 36: “There is a special dissecting room in the College, built of dressed stone in the form
of an amphitheatre (Theatrum anatomicum) and designed to allow the greatest possible number of
persons to see the operations.”

16 Reeds, Botany, pp. 95, 111 (quotation), 116, 130.

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medical corporations of the city, who wished to train physicians and surgeons,
learned to dissect by observing the work of his professor, Girolamo Fabrici (ca.
1533–1619), who designed and promoted Padua’s elliptical anatomy theater
(Figure 12.1).17 Fabrici shared the sentiments of his colleagues in Bologna,
who argued in 1595 that they wanted to dissect “without having to erect a
new theater every year and tear it down after the dissection was completed.”18

They built a rectangular dissecting room, imitating the idea but not the form
of the Paduan theater, because they felt that a rectangular room offered a
more open use of space, in contrast with the cramped experience of standing
in the tight wooden pews of the Paduan theater that spiraled upward to the
heavens.

The success of Padua’s model traveled not only to the neighboring city of

Bologna but north to the new Dutch university of Leiden (founded 1575),
whose faculty pioneered many of the new approaches to medicine and natu-
ral philosophy in the seventeenth century. Another student of Fabrici, Pieter
Paaw, conceived the idea of a splendid anatomy theater for his university after
becoming professor of anatomy in 1589. His theater, like many of the Dutch
dissecting theaters, was built in a former church (which had been vacated
by Catholics after the wars of religion) that also held the university library.19

In contrast with their Italian counterparts, the Dutch theaters engaged more
actively with the religious connotations of dissection as an art that inquired
into the secrets of life through the observation of death. Paaw decorated
the theater with articulated skeletons of humans and animals on which he
placed Latin mottos conveying the transience of human life and moralizing
the deaths of many of the criminals whose bodies ended up on the dissect-
ing table and whose skeletons populated the theater. His successors quickly
transformed the Leiden theater into a cabinet of curiosities, filling it with
Chinese scrolls, porcelain teapots, Egyptian idols, and exotic plants.20 Such
decorations fulfilled the idea of the anatomy theater as a civic institution not
simply for the use of medical professors and students but more generally a
public site in which to display the curiosities of nature and art.

17 Jerome Bylebyl, “The School of Padua: Humanistic Medicine in the Sixteenth Century,” in

Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Charles Webster and Margaret Pelling
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 335–70; Andrew Cunningham, “Fabricius and
the ‘Aristotle Project’ in Anatomical Teaching and Research at Padua,” in The Medical Renaissance of
the Sixteenth Century, ed. Andrew Wear, Roger French, and Ian Lonie (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1985), pp. 195–222; and Roger French, William Harvey’s Natural Philosophy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 59–68.

18 Castiglione, “Origin,” p. 842. On the Bologna theater, see Ferrari, “Public Anatomy.”
19 Th. H. Lunsingh Scheurleer, “Un amphith´eˆatre d’anatomie moralis´e,” in Leiden University in the

Seventeenth Century, ed. Th. H. Lunsingh Scheurleer and G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1975), pp. 217–77. The Delft anatomy theater built by the surgeons’ guild was in the
former convent of St. Mary Magdalene.

20 William Schupbach, “Some Cabinets of Curiosities in European Academic Institutions,” in The

Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed.
Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 170–1.

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Figure 12.1. The Padua anatomy theater designed by Hieronymus Fabricius, 1595.
InGiacomoFilippoTomasini,GymnasiumPatavinum(Udine:NicolausSchirattus,
1654). Reproduced by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

As Leiden became the center of medical education in Northern Europe,

it soon surpassed Padua as the model to emulate. Protestant anatomists in
Germany, England, and the Netherlands contributed to the proliferation
of dissecting theaters in universities, colleges of physicians, and surgeons’
guilds. The appearance of anatomy theaters in medical corporations further
underscores the practical appeal of anatomy not only as an important fea-
ture of university medical education but also as an activity that defined the

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professional lives of physicians and surgeons in the early modern period. The
great anatomists of Scandinavia, such as Olaus Rudbeck (1630–1702), who
identified the lymphatic vessels and designed Uppsala’s anatomy theater in
the Gustavianum in 1662 after studying in Leiden in 1653–4, participated
in the Protestant exaltation of the pious physician who saw the dissecting
theater as a religious temple.21 What Harvey called the “ocular testimony” of
the body emanated distinctively from the anatomy theater by the middle of
the seventeenth century.22 But it was a kind of experience that continued to
have highly symbolic and metaphysical associations.

BOTANIZING

With the exception of surgeon’s theaters, which had a more narrowly profes-
sional function, most anatomy theaters appeared in tandem with university
botanical gardens. Although the botanical garden did not precede the perma-
nent anatomy theater, it more quickly became part of the institutional culture
of science in Renaissance Europe. Private botanical gardens flourished in the
early sixteenth century not only as “physick gardens” filled with medicinal
plants but also as pleasure gardens of the nobility and urban elite. By the
1530s, medical professors and their students botanized regularly during sum-
mer vacations. The city of Ferrara, an early center for the revival of natural
history, had a ducal garden that university professors and students used for
study.23

A steady stream of published herbals in the 1530s and 1540s, all lamenting

the imperfection of botanical knowledge, made it clear how much remained
to be known about plants. Yet the profusion of nature made it difficult to see
all but the tiniest fraction of the plant world. One solution to this problem
lay in the creation of public botanical gardens, associated primarily with
universities and occasionally with princely courts, that functioned as living
repositories of nature. On 29 June 1545, the Republic of Venice authorized
the foundation of a botanical garden at the University of Padua so that
“scholars and other gentlemen can come to the garden at all hours in the
summer, retiring in the shade with their books to discuss plants learnedly, and
investigating their nature peripatetically while walking.”24 The Grand Duke

21 Gunnar Eriksson, The Atlantic Vision: Olaus Rudbeck and Baroque Science (Canton, Mass.: Science

History Publications, 1994), pp. 1, 2, 10; and Karin Johannisson, A Life of Learning: Uppsala University
during Five Centuries (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 1989), pp. 31–2. For the Danish equivalent,
see V. Maar, “The Domus Anatomica at the Time of Thomas Bartholinus,” Janus, 21 (1916), 339–49.

22 Andrew Wear, “William Harvey and the ‘Way of Anatomists,’” History of Science, 21 (1983), 223–49,

at p. 230.

23 Vivian Nutton, “The Rise of Medical Humanism: Ferrara, 1464–1555,” Renaissance Studies, 11 (1997),

2–19, at p. 18.

24 Marco Guazzo, Historie . . . di tutti i fatti degni di memoria nel mondo (Venice: Gabriele Giolito,

1546), quoted in Margherita Azzi Visentini, L’Orto botanico di Padova e il giardino del Rinascimento
(Milan: Edizioni il Polifilo, 1984), p. 37.

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of Tuscany, Cosimo I, concluded negotiations for a garden at the University
of Pisa in July, founding another at the convent of San Marco in Florence
in December.25 By 1555, the Spanish royal physician Andr´es Laguna felt that
he could use the precedent of Italy as an argument for persuading Philip II
to fund a royal physic garden at Aranjuez. “All the princes and universities
of Italy take pride in having many excellent gardens, adorned with all kinds
of plants found throughout the world,” he wrote in his translation of the
ancient Greek physician Dioscorides’ De materia medica, “and so it is most
proper that Your Majesty provide and order that we have at least one in Spain,
sustained with royal stipends.”26

By the end of the sixteenth century, most universities with strong medical

faculties promoting this early modern program of learning, and a number of
cities with strong colleges of physicians, had botanical gardens (Table 12.2).27

These gardens, filled with New World plants as well as European varietals,
claimed to contain the natural world in microcosm. Sunflowers from Peru,
tulips from the Levant, and corn, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, and hundreds
of other plants from the “Indies” transformed the botanical garden into
another Eden, filled not only with the medicinal herbs of the ancient Near
East that had been described in Greek and Roman pharmacopeias but also
with the wonders of a newly discovered nature that came from the Americas.28

Reflecting on the significance of the garden, Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605),
professor of natural historyandfounder of Bologna’sbotanical gardenin 1568,
wrote: “These public and private gardens, with the lectures [that accompany
them], are the reason that natural things are elucidated, joined together with
the New World that we are still discovering.”29

Botanical gardens served several important functions. Physicians occasion-

ally described them as public repositories of medicines in an age of plague,
though one wonders how realistic it was to expect a single garden to halt a
pandemic. More importantly, they were sites in which a new kind of medical

25 Lionella Scazzosi, “Alle radici dei musei naturalistici all’aperto: Orti botanici, giardini, zoologici,

parchi e riserve naturali,” in Stanze della meraviglia: I musei della natura tra storia e progetto, ed.
Luca Basso Peressut (Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna, 1997), pp. 91–3.
See also Fabio Garbari, Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, and Alessandro Tosi, Giardino dei semplici: L’Orto
botanico di Pisa dal XVI al XIX secolo (Pisa: Cassa di Risparmio di Pisa, 1991); Alessandro Minelli, ed.,
The Botanical Garden of Padua, 1545–1995 (Venice: Marsilio, 1995); and Else M. Terwen-Dionisius,
“Date and Design of the Botanical Garden of Padua,” Journal of Garden History, 14 (1994), 213–35.

26 Andr´es Laguna, Pedacio Diosc´orides Anazarbeo acerca de la materia medicinal y de los venonos mort´ıferos

[1555], quoted in Jos´e M. L´opez Pi˜nero, “The Pomar Codex (ca. 1590): Plants and Animals of the
Old World and from the Hernandez Expedition to America,” Nuncius, 7 (1992), 35–52, at p. 38.

27 Andrew Cunningham, “The Culture of Gardens,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. Nicholas

Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
pp. 38–56.

28 John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanical Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise (New Haven,

Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981).

29 Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna, Aldrovandi, MS 70, fol. 62r. See Antonio Baldacci, “Ulisse

Aldrovandi e l’orto botanico di Bologna,” in Intorno alla vita e alle opere di Ulisse Aldrovandi
(Bologna: L. Beltrami, 1907), pp. 161–72.

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Paula Findlen

Table 12.2. Botanical Gardens

1545
Padua
1589
Basel

1545
Pisa
1593
Montpellier

1545
Florence
1597
Heidelberg

1550s
Aranjuez
1623
Oxford

1563
Rome
1638
Messina

1567
Valencia
1641
Paris

1568
Bologna
1650s
Uppsala

1568
Kassell
1670s
Edinburgh

1577
Leiden
1673
Chelsea

1580
Leipzig

professor, the professor of botany (or “medicinal simples,” as it was often
called), demonstrated the nature and virtues of plants to students. Finally,
they became botanical research facilities in which scholars who sought to
understand the plant as a natural rather than medical object did their ear-
liest work on morphology and classification. The Italian physician Andrea
Cesalpino (1519–1603) wrote his fundamental De plantis (1583) while teach-
ing at the University of Pisa in proximity to its well-stocked garden. Bauhin,
the great Swiss naturalist, traveled to the Padua and Bologna gardens in
1577–8 before becoming a teacher of botany in Basel. He wrote his Pinax
theatri botanici (Index of a Botanical Theater, 1623), one of the earliest works
to attempt a comprehensive cross-referencing of plant names and to refine
plant classification, as the culmination of decades of work with plants in
European botanical gardens.30

The public botanical garden exhibited key institutional characteristics that

distinguished it from the private noble garden. Stern rules specified appro-
priate garden behavior, warning visitors that they could look at and smell
but not pick or trample plants or attempt to take home branches, flowers,
seeds, bulbs, and roots without the express permission of the custodian.31

Botanical professors readily exchanged plants with other learned botanists,
physicians, and apothecaries in order to keep their gardens full and varied
and to please princely patrons and overseas merchants, who were the other
important source of new plants. The goal, in all instances, was to maintain
and improve the diversity and utility of nature that the garden revealed.

As the botanical garden became an important scientific research facility,

one of the pressing questions concerned how it organized knowledge. The
initial design of the Paduan garden, for example, emphasized an aesthetic and
highly symbolic arrangement of plants on the outer edges of the garden and a

30 Reeds, Botany, pp. 110–30; and Scott Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an

Anthropology of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 135–42.

31 The 1601 Leiden regulations appear in F. W. T. Hunger, Charles de l’Escluse, 2 vols. (The Hague:

Martinus Nijhoff, 1927), 1: 249. For a similar set of regulations for Padua, see Minelli, Botanical
Garden, p. 48.

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more practical arrangement of those in the interior.32 In the case of the former,
the design of the garden outweighed any practical considerations of how to
provide a plot of land in which plants could grow best; in the case of the lat-
ter, function won out over form, making long, rectangular flower beds a key
feature of the botanical garden (Figure 12.2). Initially, the first-century Greek
physician Dioscorides’ De materia medica, the standard botanical textbook at
most universities, defined which specimens should appear in the garden. Yet
ancient botanical classifications could not contain all the Northern European,
American, and Asian plants that were not indigenous to the ancient Mediter-
ranean and thus were not described by Dioscorides. New ways of thinking
about nature affected the structure of the garden itself. Increasingly, the most
practical solution was to organize the garden as a microcosm of the world,
dividing it geographically on the grounds that any alternative organization
might be rendered problematic by the appearance of a new specimen.

By the 1590s, botanical gardens emphasized these practical configurations.

The Leiden garden, founded in 1577, underwent a complete reorganization
underthedirectorshipofCarolusClusiusandespeciallyPieterPaaw.33 Clusius
simplified the design, creating four quadrants to represent the four continents
(Europe, Asia, Africa, and America), each divided into sixteen beds. He orga-
nized plants by species rather than by medicinal use, reflecting the changing
status of botany as a field worthy of independent study rather than a branch
of medicine. The Montpellier Jardin du Roi, a royal garden founded just
beyond the city walls by the professor of anatomy and botany Pierre Richer
de Belleval, also favored a basic geometric design, clustering plants accord-
ing to their natural habitats.34 Such models indicate the direction of most
seventeenth-century botanical gardens, whose creators increasingly viewed
plants in scientific and commercial rather than symbolic terms, unlike the
initial creators of the Italian Renaissance gardens. The botanical garden, like
the anatomy theater, had become a standard means for experiencing and
understanding nature.

COLLECTING

Visitors to the botanical gardens of Padua, Pisa, and Leiden in the 1590s and
early 1600s discovered, to their delight, that the natural history museum, or
“cabinet of curiosities” as it was commonly called at the time, had become an
important feature of the garden. In his 1591 description of the Paduan garden,
Girolamo Porro discussed the research facilities then under construction at
Padua in a manner that strongly anticipated Bacon’s ideal of a truly integrated

32 Andrea Ubrizsy Savoia, “The Botanical Garden in Guilandino’s Day,” in Minelli, Botanical Garden,

pp. 173, 181; and Terwen-Dionisius, “Date and Design,” p. 220.

33 Hunger, Charles de l’Escluse, 1: 217–49; and W. K. H. Karstens and H. Kleibrink, De Leidse Hortus,

een Botanische Erfenis (Zwolle: Uitgeverij Waanders, 1982).

34 Reeds, Botany, pp. 80–90.

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Figure 12.2. The botanical gar-

den at the University of Leiden.

Jacques de Ghein II, 1601.

Reproduced
by
permission

of the Nationaal Herbarium

Nederland, Leiden.

284

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