![]() New concepts of cognition and the construction of visual reality in Conrad Gessner‘s Historia animalium By discussing the dissemination of certain animal motifs, it is possible to discern the importance of the intermediary role that Abraham Ortelius must have played. Almost all of these artists had direct contact with Ortelius and it is argued that it was Ortelius who brought the artists in contact with each others‘ work. For that reason, this article examines visual sources in depth and it addresses drawn, painted, and printed animal series by artists working in or around Antwerp. However, to be able to understand more fully the central role Ortelius played, it does not suffice to focus solely on his written correspondence and the contributions made by natural historians and artists in his album amicorum. Thus he was in the perfect position to act as a mediator between natural historians on one hand and artists on the other. As a businessman dealing in prints and drawings, among other things, and a collector himself, he had a large artistic network as well. The humanist circles that he frequented in Antwerp must have brought him in contact with natural historians, as his extant correspondence and album amicorum indicate. In this article the renowned cartographer and humanist Abraham Ortelius is presented – for the first time – as an intermediary between natural historians and Antwerp artists engaged in animal series. This article considers some of the reasons for this discrepancy advancing the thesis that behind Clusius‘ disinterest in these individuals lay different natural historical interests and a different conception of exotic nature.Ībraham Ortelius as intermediary for the Antwerp animal trailblazers Despite Clusius‘ renowned generosity and openness to exchanges with tradesmen and empirically-educated naturalists in continental Europe, his direct interactions with apothecaries from the Veneto, and indeed from the Italian peninsula, seem to have been very limited. This is an introduction to the world of artisanal contacts of the Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius (1526–1609) within the context of Venice and the Veneto. Plateau was the most-cited of all of Clusius‘ Correspondents, and by taking a closer look at the contributions that this plant-lover made to the knowledge of the famous botanist, we gain an interesting insight in the crucial exchange of knowledge, information, seeds and plant specimens between scholars and amateurs during the late 16th century. He also commissioned, forwarded and made original drawings of plants, some of which are here recognized for the first time. He was an accurate observer of plants, who contributed much to the knowledge of Clusius and brought many new species to his attention. Plateau – here newly identified as a treasurer for the Catholic Church and a magistrate in his local Tournai – owned a impressive garden with more than 450 species of plants: two surviving manuscript catalogues give a detailed impression of his diverse collection of garden plants. Some one hundred letters must have been exchanged between the two plant-lovers. In an era before natural history was professionalized, the humanist ideal of correspondence helped foster and sustain the community of Renaissance natural history.įor a period of nearly twenty-five years the famous botanist Carolus Clusius (1526–1609) was in close contact with the long-neglected Jacques Plateau († 1608) from Tournai in the southern Netherlands. The correspondence of late Renaissance naturalists reveals that this ideal served as a regulative fiction: though often violated in practice, it nonetheless shaped naturalists‘ expectations about how to write letters and how their correspondents should respond. In treatises on letter-writing they discussed the rhetoric of correspondence, analyzed the distinct kinds of letters, and developed the ideal that correspondence was a sincere, conversational exchange among distant friends. Humanist scholars from Desiderius Erasmus to Justus Lipsius took correspondence seriously. Humanist correspondence manuals and the late Renaissance community of naturalists ![]() Themenschwerpunkt 2: Physics and Dialectical Materialismįlorike Egmond / Esther van Gelder / Nicolas Robin Gastherausgeber: Esther van Gelder / Nicolas Robin Practice, Expertise and Identity in Clusius‘ World Themenschwerpunkt 1: Flowers of Passion and Distinction.
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