These three volumes catalogue the extensive corpus of mycological
drawings in the Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo. Executed mostly
in watercolour between 1625 and 1630 and depicting fungi native to
Umbria and the environs of Rome, they constitute the first
sustained attempt to survey all the larger fungi of a region,
recording in detail the stages of their growth. Laden with notes on
colour, smell, taste, weight, season and the locality in which the
specimens had been found, the almost six hundred folios were
commissioned by Federico Cesi (1585-1630), founder of Europe's
first scientific academy, the Accademia dei Lincei. They were
acquired by Cassiano dal Pozzo after Cesi's death and were greatly
admired by those who saw them in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Thought to have been lost until their rediscovery in
1979 in the library of the Institut de France in Paris, the
drawings are also remarkable for their pioneering use of the
microscope, a novel instrument given to Cesi in 1624 by Galileo and
used throughout the pages of these manuscripts to enhance the
direct observation of nature. Also included are drawings of fungi
commissioned by Cassiano and his brother Carlo Antonio dal Pozzo
now in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, and an early set of
copies of the Cesi originals in the library of the Royal Botanic
Gardens at Kew. Each drawing is reproduced in colour with
accompanying text, and two introductory essays discuss the
scientific investigations and collecting activities of Cesi and
Cassiano and the importance of these drawings in the history of
science and art. David Pegler retired in 1998 as Head of Mycology
at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. His taxonomic research has
specialized in tropical and temperate Basidiomycetes, for which he
received a Science Research Council individual merit promotion, and
he has published 16 books and over 300 scientific papers. He is a
Fellow of the Linnean Society, London, of the Norwegian Academy of
Science and Letters, and Centenary Fellow of the British
Mycological Society. He has held visiting professorships at the
Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, Lodz, Poland, the Instituto do
Botanica, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the University of Jilin, China.
David Freedberg is Professor in the History of Art at Columbia
University, New York, and Director of the Italian Academy for
Advanced Studies. He has written extensively on the art and culture
of the seventeenth century, including the intersection of art and
science in the age of Galileo, most notably in The Eye of the Lynx
(Chicago, 2002).
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