Museo Cospiano annesso a quello del famoso Ulisse Aldrovandi e donato alla sua Patria dall’illustrissimo Signor Ferdinando Cospi...

Museo Cospiano annesso a quello del famoso Ulisse Aldrovandi e donato alla sua Patria dall’illustrissimo Signor Ferdinando Cospi...
Bologna, Giacomo Monti, 1677
Folio (320 x 208 mm), pp [xxiv, including engraved portrait] 532, title in red and black with large woodcut vignette, woodcut portrait of the dedicatee Ferdinand III of Tuscany, engraved portrait of Cospi, double-page engraved plate of the interior of the museum, c. 100 woodcuts in text, and woodcut tailpiece depicting the sarcophagus of Cospi, contemporary calf gilt, rebacked with elaborate gilt spine in compartments,red morocco label, a fine crisp copy. £5,500
First edition of this catalogue of the Cospi collection, which incorporated the collection of the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi.
The catalogue is divided into five sections, the first two of which are devoted to natural history specimens, and especially teratological wonders from all three kingdoms of nature (a cat with two bodies to one head, a rock that resembles a piece of bacon). The third section is devoted to artifacts of various sorts, such as scientific instruments, magnetic toys, clock, maps, weapons and firearms, vases, games (including Dante’s chessboard), Eskimo sealskin clothing, asbestos cloth, a chastity belt, etc. There is an extensive collection of exotic vases, including Islamic and pre-Columbian material. The fourth section describes the numismatic collections. The final section is devoted to idolatry, with statuettes and other representations of classical, Egyptian, and pre-Columbian deities. It ends with a catalogue of the art collection of Cospi, which was housed in a separate gallery.
The Cospi collection was amalgamated with the Aldrovandi collection in 1657 in the Palazzo Pubblico in Bologna, and in 1667 it was formally donated to the city ‘per servitio publico’. Lorenzo Legati, professor of Greek at the University of Bologna, was commissioned to prepare the catalogue.
‘The Cospi museum also reveals characteristics typical of its time, which can be analysed by means of the 1677 catalogue. The encyclopaedic quality is evident from the early pages of the introduction to the reader: Cospi’s collection consists of “peculiar manufactures of Art” and “curious works of Nature”... It is interesting to note that the natural-history section in the museum is organized in such a way as to exclude systematically all normality. Evidently, the fundamental aim of Cospi’s museum was to provoke astonishment and wonder rather than analytically to reconstruct the whole natural world. This theory is borne out by the presence of only very few ordinary objects. In fact, he did not consider such things worth collecting unless they were either monstrous or had some bizarre peculiarity - the fly enclosed in amber, for example. The descriptions of individual pieces in the catalogue also shows how outdated the natural-history section of this collection was at this stage. There emerges clearly a feeling of nostalgia for a world full of portentous creatures and phenomena which had not yet been sifted out by a scientific rationality’ (Giuseppe Olmi in The origins of museums, Impey and MacGregor eds).
Cobres I p 100 n. 4; Murray I p 89; Nissen ZBI 2421: NUC: DLC WU DNLM MnU NCornIC