The Collection of Tommaso de’ Cavalieri as Recorded by Ulisse Aldrovandi in 1577 (BUB, Ms. Aldr. 136/6)

Introduction

The Latin source whose transcription is offered herein describes part of the collection of the famous Roman nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri as it was recorded by Ulisse Aldrovandi in 1577 [1]. The relevance of the text, never fully transcribed before, rests on multiple aspects. Tommaso de’ Cavalieri is best known for his friendship with Michelangelo Buonarroti and for his famous collection of ancient and modern art, including several famous drawings by Michelangelo. Much less known, on the other hand, is the fact that the collection also included several non-European objects. It is for this reason that Ulisse Aldrovandi’s detailed record of these “stranger things” (res peregrinae) is a precious source, able to reveal a poorly known facet of Tommaso de’ Cavalieri’s collecting activities. The text also illuminates Aldrovandi’s scholarly method, including the detailed listing of specimens owned by other collectors and the subsequent process of reworking and indexing of the manuscript record. Moreover, a detailed analysis of the Aldrovandi’s lists provides precious information for scholars interested in early modern collecting of materials from extra-European countries, especially the Americas. Despite its brevity and conciseness, the text greatly contributes our understanding of the global dimension of Italian collecting practices during the Late Renaissance.

Tommaso de’ Cavalieri

The Roman nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri (ca. 1509/10 – 1587) is especially famous due to his intimate friendship with Michelangelo Buonarroti, who dedicated several poems to his young friend, a man of “incomparable beauty” according to Benedetto Varchi. The relationship with Michelangelo strongly contributed to Tommaso’s fame, somehow overshadowing the relevant role he played in Late Renaissance artistic circles [2]. An artist himself, Tommaso was well connected with other famous artists such as Sebastiano del Piombo, Daniele da Volterra, and Marcello Venusti. Since 1548 he held various public offices related with the coordination of architectural works at the Capitol and at Palazzo Senatorio.

Tommaso de’ Cavalieri was also a collector, both of ancient and modern art. In his house in Piazza de’ Cavalieri, he owned a collection of classical antiquities. Between 1532 and 1535, Michelangelo bestowed him several drawings – including The Fall of Phaeton, The Punishment of Tityus, The Rape of Ganymede, The Dream, a Bacchanalia of Putti, and some “divine heads” – which became so famous that Giorgio Vasari explicitly mentioned and praised them in the 1568 edition of the Vite. Tommaso himself wrote to Michelangelo that one of the versions of the Fall of Phaeton had been admired by prestigious visitors such as Pope Clement VII (Giulio de’ Medici) and the cardinal nepote Ippolito de’ Medici. The drawings, later passed to Alessandro Farnese, are today preserved in the United Kingdom, at the Windsor Castle and The British Museum.

A less known aspect of Tommaso’s collecting activity is that he also owned several “stranger things”, that is, artificialia and naturalia mostly proceeding from extra-European lands. It is precisely this part of his collection that, in 1577, called the attention of Ulisse Aldrovandi, who meticulously penned a list of its contents. It is to this record that now we turn our attention.

Ulisse Aldrovandi and the Cavalieri collection

The famous Bolognese polymath Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) was linked to Tommaso de’ Cavalieri by a kinship tie, since Giuliano Griffoni – son of Ulisse’s sister Lucrezia – married Costanza Cavalieri, Tommaso’s niece (Aldrovandi 1599, 656). During his trip to Rome in 1549-50, Ulisse made a catalogue of Tommaso’s collection of Classical sculptures, then included in Delle statue antiche (Aldrovandi 1556, 225-227), published in Lucio Mauro’s Le antichità de la città di Roma (1565).

In 1577, Aldrovandi travelled again to Rome to meet Pope Gregory XIII and ask for his help to settle a controversy on the theriac’s recipe he had with the apothecaries of Bologna. Aldrovandi remained in Rome from March to June 1577, and it was in this period of time that he visited again Tommaso’s house (Fantuzzi 1774, 39-47; Frati 1907, 18-22, 25-26; Tugnoli Pattaro 1981, 153-154) [3]. As he used to do, during this second visit Aldrovandi meticulously recorded a different section of the Cavalieri collection, mainly constituted by natural specimens and artifacts that Aldrovandi called res peregrinae. The original list that Aldrovandi penned in Rome is lost, but several copies are preserved in the manuscript corpus at the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna (BUB). As noticed by Detlef Heikamp (1976, 461-462, n. 19), Aldrovandi also briefly mentioned two Mesoamerican shields “elegantly elaborated and decorated with featherwork” from the Cavalieri collection in the first volume of the Ornithologiae (1599), one of the few books that he was able to publish in his lifetime.

The existence of one version of Aldrovandi’s manuscript description of the Cavalieri collection (in BUB, Ms. Aldr. 143/3) was first noticed by Giuseppe Olmi, who provided interesting observations on its contents (Olmi 1992, 239, n. 64). Anna Bedon briefly mentioned the same list in a more recent publication, erroneously attributing it to 1549 (Bedon 2019, 147 n. 9). However, a search in the Aldrovandian manuscript corpus revealed that it contains three different versions of the list, as well as several references to it in alphabetic indexes. The earliest copy of the lost list is found in the sixth volume of the Observationes (BUB, Ms. Aldr. 136/6), which contains materials dated between 1571 and 1578, suggesting that this “clean copy” was done soon after the Roman trip. The list is split in two parts, both contained in the section titled Itinerarium, seu rerum in itinere fiorentino, romano et tyburtino collectarum catalogus (cc. 83r-123v), where the contents of various collections visited during the trip to Rome and Florence were recorded [4]. A first list of the Cavalieri collection (cc. 97r-100v) includes sixty-four synthetic entries, while a second list (cc. 120r-123v) describes in more detail twenty-seven objects which (with one exception; see entry n. [19]) were already recorded on the previous one. The text – written by one the scribes working in Aldrovandi’s workshop – was then corrected by at least two different persons, one of them Ulisse Aldrovandi himself. Several objects listed in Ms. Aldr. 136/6 were also recorded on paper slips glued in BUB, Ms. Aldr. 145.1, which is an alphabetic index of the Observationes.

The lists from Ms. Aldr. 136/6 were then copied again in the Peregrinarum rerum catalogi (BUB, Ms. Aldr. 143). In its third volume, within a section titled Romae catalogus, the Cavalieri items were now recorded incorporating the corrections done on Ms. 136/6 and with slight changes in the entries’ order and subdivisions (Ms. Aldr. 143/3, cc. 143v-145v, 154r-154v, 156v-159v).

Between 1581 and 1584, some of the entries from Ms. 136/6 were again copied, but with substantial differences in wording, in the Admirandorum naturae et artis historia (BUB, Ms. Aldr. 34/2, cc. 405v-408r, 413v-417r). On Ms. Aldr. 136/6, the entries that were selected to be copied in Admirandorum were marked, by Aldrovandi himself, with a tick on the left side of the page. Nevertheless, the Admirandorum also contains some items not ticked on Ms. Aldr. 136/6, maybe due to simple errors by the copyist.

Finally, some of the objects from the Cavalieri collection were also recorded on paper slips glued in alphabetical order to the pages of the Pandechion epistemonicon (Ms. Aldr. 105), accompanied by cross-references to their location in Ms. Aldr. 136/6 and, at times, by bibliographic notes (e.g., entry [13]).

The collection

The lists penned in 1577 by Ulisse Aldrovandi provide precious information on the heterogeneity of the Cavalieri collection. Unfortunately – and differently from the earlier description of classical statues – they contain no hints on its spatial organization and modes of display. We know that the sculptures were exhibited in two gardens and three rooms at the ground floor (Bedon 2019, 142), and it is reasonable to assume that more fragile items like modern artworks and res peregrinae were displayed in other areas of the palace. That said, it is unclear whether they were physically and typologically separate from the rest of the collection or whether, more likely, their description as a separate unit by Aldrovandi was an effect of the natural historian’s scholarly interests.

The lists contain a total of sixty-four entries. Since some of them record objects in the plural, their total should amount to about seventy. A precise cultural and/or geographic attribution of each object is often hampered by the conciseness of most entries, as well as by the usage of labels such as “Indian”, a notoriously ambiguous term in early modern inventories (Keating and Markey 2001). However, some tentative attributions can provide a general idea of the content of the collection. The quantitative balance between naturalia and artificialia is almost perfectly even. Approximately 2/3 of the naturalia are not attributable to a specific region (even if four of them are labelled as “Indian”); among those which can be reasonably attributed to specific regions (with different degrees of certainty), the great majority are from the Americas. Among the artificialia, less than 1/5 are non-attributable (three of them described as “Indian), while half of the attributable ones are from the Americas, with the rest almost equally split between Asia and Europe (both ancient and modern). These rough figures clearly show that most of the collection (or, better said, of the part selected by Aldrovandi) was composed of “stranger things”, with European or Western objects representing less than 1/6 of the total. Among the res peregrinae, the American ones were clearly predominant, amounting to 1/3 of the total. Among the non-American ones, only two are explicitly described as Chinese [43] [5] and “Turkish” [44].

It is difficult to state whether this predominance of American items was really a feature of the Cavalieri collection or whether it was instead a product of Aldrovandi’s keen interest in American things. Among the naturalia, for example, American specimens like toucans (a beak and a whole specimen [1, 49]), a Reversus piscis [11], an iguana [14], a squash [25], a sunflower [65], and several greenstones whose names (Lapis ad dolorem iliacum, Lapis renalis) refer to their purported medicinal properties [3, 40, 41], all match similar specimens extensively treated in the Aldrovandian corpus of texts and images. However, the lists attest that some of these specimens were later sent by Tommaso to Ulisse (a greenstone and the beak of a toucan, see entries [40] and [49]), suggesting that the 1577 visit to Cavalieri’s house could have further fueled Aldrovandi’s interest in American things. Especially meaningful is the case of the Reversus piscis recorded in entry [11]. As first noticed by Giuseppe Olmi, this is clearly a specimen of the famous Reversus piscis aculeatus which is also illustrated in a painting in the Aldrovandi collection (BUB, Tavole di animali, IV, 121). As witnessed by an inscription on it, the painting was given by Tommaso de’ Cavalieri to Aldrovandi, probably together with a “twin” one depicting a Reversus Indicus aliis anguilli formis (BUB, Tavole di animali, IV, 122). Copies of the two paintings, done in Bologna, were given by Aldrovandi to Francesco I de’ Medici and probably also to the Bolognese jurist Antonio Giganti, in whose 1586 inventory we read about “2 pesci dipinti in carta del Mondo nuovo, uno detto pesce roversico, si potriano chiamar pesci pescatori, poiché l’uno con le spine ond’è armato infilza i pesci, et l’altro li piglia con una sacca c’ha in capo, la qual stende, spinge et ritira et gli huomini si servono di detti pesci in mare, come de bracchi et sparvieri in terra” (see Laurencich Minelli 1984, 240; Tosi 1989, 224; Olmi 1992, 238-239; Mason 2023, 110-115; Azzolini 2024). Among the non-American naturalia (or those not securely attributable to that region), it is worth mentioning a unicorn horn (i.e., a narwhale tusk) [6], a couple of sawfish rostra [8, 9], the tail of a hippo [21], and a sea turtle shell [29], together with a host of minerals.

Even considering Aldrovandi’s potential role in the selection of objects to be recorded, the number of American specimens is surprising, especially when we consider Mesoamerican artifacts. A wooden drum [10], an obsidian blade [13], a mosaic-covered skull [15], an alabaster vessel [16], feather mosaics with Christian imagery [18], an obsidian mirror [23], a cup made with a dried gourd [25], two feathered shields [26], a wooden sword [27], greenstone “idols” [30], agricultural tools [31], and a pyrite mirror [42] constituted one of the richest and more varied Italian collection of Indigenous Mesoamerican artifacts in the 16th century, only comparable to the Bolognese collection of Antonio Giganti (Laurencich Minelli 1984), which was almost completely inherited by Aldrovandi himself (Domenici 2022a; Domenici in preparation a) [6]. Entry [25] attests that Tommaso de’ Cavalieri sent to Ulisse the dried gourd, further informing on the flow of specimens between their collections.

Several of the Mesoamerican artifacts in the Cavalieri collection ([13, 15, 16, 18, 27, 31]) match those mentioned in the Descrittone dell’India occidentale, an anonymous and undated Italian printed text which could have been printed in Venice around 1564-1579 (Domenici 2017a). The text describes the arrival in Italy of a priest – most probably a Dominican friar which I tentatively identified with Juan de Córdova – who brought a rich gift of Mesoamerican artifacts. Only one of these objects is today extant, namely a Mixtec notched human femur employed as a musical instrument now held at the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome. In the 17th century it was in the possession of Cardinal Flavio Chigi, who also owned other objects listed in the Descrittione (Domenici 2016, 2023). The whereabouts of all the other objects listed in the Descrittione are unknown, but the lists commented herein clearly show that large part of them entered the Cavalieri collection a few years before Aldrovandi’s visit. This suggests that the richness of Mesoamerican artifacts in Cavalieri’s house was, at least in part, the consequence of the fact that Tommaso had somehow access to the Dominican circulation sphere of Mesoamerican objects, whose impact on early modern Italian collecting I have been exploring in recent years (Domenici 2017b, 2021, in press, in preparation a). Among the objects deriving from that sphere, an especially interesting one is a Mixtec mosaic-covered human skull [15]. Both the Descrittione dell’India occidentale and Aldrovandi’s list record that it originally belonged to the same individual of the abovementioned femur, an “Indian king” which was defeated and sacrificed by the king of Tututepec, a Mixtec kingdom on the coast of Oaxaca. What is unique of Aldrovandi’s record is that it adds further information on a previously unknown military conflict occurred in AD 1350 and that it even provides the specific identity of the defeated warrior as the king of Tlaxiaco, another famous Mixtec kingdom. Also surprising is the fact that Aldrovandi was able to record Indigenous toponyms (that he misunderstood as anthroponyms) not attested elsewhere in early modern European sources, like the Mixtec Uucu Zzaa (i.e., Yucu Dzaa, whose Nahuatl name is Tututepec) and the Nahuatl Taxiaco (i.e., Tlaxiaco). This body of information, explicitly attributed to “Indian paintings” and that Aldrovandi must have somehow learnt in Cavalieri’s house, is of outmost relevance for Mesoamerican studies, as discussed at length elsewhere (Domenici in preparation b). It is unclear whether all the pre-Hispanic and colonial Mesoamerican objects in the Cavalieri collection had a same provenance, but this is quite unlikely, suggesting that Tommaso could have drawn from different sources.

The only other extra-European region that seems to be represented by more than one artifact is the Far East: besides the abovementioned “papyrus booklet” [43] explicitly attributed to China, also Chinese or East Asian could be the tortoise-shell bowl [39], the silk textile with painted or embroidered images of birds and plants [46], and a gong [38]. Probably Asian, but difficult to identify with more precision, is the “palm hand fan” [2]. Rather perplexing is the “Turkish papyrus inscribed with spells” [44] where the term “Turkish” seems to be a general reference to the Ottoman world, since papyrus was not commonly used in the properly Turkish area of the empire. Finally, among the European (or Western) artifacts, both ancient and modern objects can be recognized. Classical objects could be the mosaics [28, 32], a tintinnabulum [37], and a Sardian stone with the portrait of Augustus [56], while among the modern ones one could count at least the tripartite ring which is described in detail in a fascinating entry where it is associated with the Christian Trinity [59].

In this introduction we refrained from using the term exotica to define the objects catalogued by Aldrovandi. Even if it could seem an acceptable synonym of the label res peregrinae employed by the Bolognese scholar, the term is too loaded with a clearcut, dichotomic, and ultimately fallacious opposition between “the West” and “the Rest” to properly account for the deeply entangled nature of the “four parts” of the early modern world (Gruzinski 2004; Russo 2023). Much to the contrary, Aldrovandi’s lists provide us with a precious record of a collection kept in a Roman noble mansion where classical sculptures and Michelangelo’s drawings coexisted with objects like the mosaic-covered skull of a sacrificed Mixtec king, a Chinese booklet, a Christian feather mosaic from Mexico, the colorful beak of an American toucan, and the white tail of an African hippo. They are powerful witnesses of the global scale attained by material culture circulation spheres in early modern times, as well as of the complexity and heterogeneity of Italian collecting practices during the Late Renaissance.

The transcription

In the following I offer a transcription of the two lists in Ms. 136/6, which – in addition to being the earliest – functioned as “master lists” for all the other occurrences in the Aldrovandian manuscript corpus. To facilitate comparisons, the two lists are presented in a table where the entries recording a same object are paired on a same line. In each column, where the text of a specific section of the manuscript is transcribed, page numbers are written in bold. A sequential numbering of the objects, in square brackets, has been added in the leftmost column. The transcription accepts the corrections penned on Ms. 136/6, explicitly recording in a footnote only those that can have some specific interest, either for lexical reasons or because they provide hints on the working methods employed in the Aldrovandi workshop. Otherwise, minor copying errors and small differences in spelling or wording with other manuscripts are not noted. When the lists copied in other manuscripts of the Aldrovandian corpus contain additional interesting information, this is offered in the footnotes. The ticks marking the items to be copied in Ms. Aldr. 34/2 are rendered with an asterisk.

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