Category Archives: Collections

Un tren de gliptodontes, Museo de La Plata, Argentina

Por Irina Podgorny, CONICET/Archivo Histórico del Museo de La Plata, Argentina

[Leer en inglés]

En la segunda mitad del siglo XIX y mucho antes de la manía por los dinosaurios, todo museo que se preciara debía contar con, al menos, una coraza de gliptodonte, un animal extraño, acorazado y de dimensiones gigantescas que, desde 1839 formaba parte del catálogo de los gigantescos mamíferos fósiles procedentes de la América del Sur.

Los primeros en viajar llegaron en la década de 1840 a las colecciones del Royal College of Surgeons de Londres y, a partir de allí, no hubo museo del hemisferio norte o del sur que no deseara o comisionara el envío de semejante portento. En Londres, Richard Owen los llamó Glyptodon, un nombre genérico que remarcaba la forma esculpida de sus dientes, la pieza en la que basó su existencia.

El esqueleto y, sobre todo, su cubierta, no eran fácil de transportar: aunque la coraza apareciera con todas  o casi todas sus piezas, una vez extraída de la tierra, la coraza se partía en cientos de pedazos. Se pagaban caro y los proveedores de especímenes debieron ingeniársela, inventar maneras para que lo que se desarmaba en las pampas se volviera a unir del otro lado del mar o donde fuera que se instalara. Una de las soluciones consistió en concebir el caparazón como una suerte de mosaico pompeyano: numerado en el papel y en cada una de sus piezas, se lo enviaba desarmado para que las placas (tesserae), una vez en el gabinete y con una gran inversión de  tiempo y trabajo, se pudieran recomponer en su forma ideal. Los gliptodontes que hoy vemos son el resultado de la anatomía comparada y de ese trabajo artesanal que combina las prácticas de la carpintería, la herrería y la albañilería.

Sin embargo, una vez montados, pegados con cola y sostenidos por estructura de metal o de madera, la fragilidad del montaje no desaparecía: gracias a la misma, el director del Museo Público de la ciudad de Buenos Aires (entonces capital de provincia y no de la nación), en 1883 apeló a esa característica para argumentar la imposibilidad de mudar las colecciones a otro edificio, a otra ciudad. Los gliptodontes, una vez armados, se hacían sedentarios y servían para negociar espacios, cargos y presupuestos.

A fines del siglo XIX el Museo de La Plata, museo general de la nueva capital de la provincia de Buenos Aires establecida en 1882, a falta de uno, instalaba un tren, una verdadera manifestación de la variedad de los esqueletos acorazados que la provincia podía ofrecer al mundo. Con ello no solo demostraba la riqueza de las pampas: le enrostraba al pequeño y algo vetusto museo de la capital de la Nación- ahora Museo Nacional, las dimensiones que la exhibición de la naturaleza podía adquirir en las nuevas instituciones de la provincia.

Mientras tanto, el gliptodonte llevaba medio siglo de vida como espécimen de museo y poblaba, entero o en pedazos, las salas, las colecciones y los depósitos de los museos de varias decenas de ciudades de todo el mundo. Esta foto y estas palabras son una invitación a revisar las vitrinas más cercanas para constatar su presencia y trazar los caminos del gliptodonte en los museos del mundo.

Para seguir leyendo:

Irina Podgorny, Fossil dealers, the practices of comparative anatomy and British diplomacy in Latin America, 1820–1840

Irina Podgorny, Mercaderes del Pasado: Teodoro Vilardebó, Pedro de Angelis y el comercio de huesos y documentos en el Río de la Plata, 1830–1850

A train of glyptodonts, La Plata Museum, Argentina

By Irina Podgorny, CONICET/Archivo Histórico del Museo de La Plata, Argentina

[Read in Spanish]

In the second half of the 19th century and long before the dinosaur craze, every self-respecting museum had to have at least one glyptodon carapace, a mighty, armoured animal of gigantic dimensions that since 1839 was part of the catalogue of strange and gigantic fossil mammals coming from South America.

The first one arrived in the collections of the Royal College of Surgeons in London in the 1840s, and from then on there was no museum in the northern or southern hemisphere that did not wish and commission such a wonder. In London, Richard Owen called them Glyptodont, a generic name that emphasized the sculpted shape of their teeth, the element on which he based their existence.

The skeleton, and above all its shell, were not easy to transport: even if the carapace appeared with all or almost all its pieces, once extracted from the ground, it could break into hundreds of fragments. They were expensive, and the dealers of natural history specimens had to find a way to make what was disassembled in the pampas come together again on the other side of the ocean, or wherever it was installed. One of the solutions consisted in conceiving the carapace as a sort of Pompeian mosaic: numbered on paper and in each of its pieces, it was sent disassembled so that the plates (tesserae), once in the cabinet and with a great investment of time and work, could be recomposed in their ideal form. The glyptodonts we see today are the result of comparative anatomy and of the craftsmanship that combines the practices of carpentry, blacksmithing, and masonry.

However, once assembled, glued, and supported by a metal or wooden structure, the fragility of the assembly did not disappear. Thanks to this, in 1883, the director of the Public Museum of the city of Buenos Aires (then the capital of the province and not of the nation) invoked this fact to argue the impossibility of moving the collections to another building or another city. The glyptodonts, once armed, became sedentary and served to negotiate spaces, positions, and budgets.

At the end of the 19th century, the Museo de La Plata, the main museum of the new capital of the province of Buenos Aires established in 1882, for the lack of one installed a train, a true manifestation of the variety of armoured skeletons that the province could offer to the world. By doing so, it not only demonstrated the richness of the pampas: it showed the small and somewhat old-fashioned museum in the capital of the nation – now Museo Nacional – the dimensions that the exhibition of nature could acquire in the new institutions of the province.

Meanwhile, the glyptodont had been living for half a century as a museum specimen and populated, whole or in pieces, the halls, collections, and deposits of museums in dozens of cities around the world. This photo and these words are an invitation to review the nearest showcases to verify its presence and trace the paths of the glyptodont in world museums.

To read more:

Irina Podgorny, Fossil dealers, the practices of comparative anatomy and British diplomacy in Latin America, 1820–1840

Irina Podgorny, Mercaderes del Pasado: Teodoro Vilardebó, Pedro de Angelis y el comercio de huesos y documentos en el Río de la Plata, 1830–1850

Salvador’s Cabinet of Curiosities

By Neus Ibáñez, Museu Ciencies Naturals Barcelona (Institut Botanic de Barcelona), Spain

The Salvador family was a well-known family of apothecaries from Barcelona who developed their work around naturalism between the 17th and 19th centuries. They collected samples in the Iberian Peninsula and in the Balearic Islands while keeping correspondence and exchanging books and objects with important European naturalists of the time, such as Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, James Petiver, Herman Booerhave, and the Jussieu brothers.

Salvador cabinet exhibition in Botanical Institute of Barcelona

As a result of the intense work of various generations, the Salvador family created a scientific cabinet in the back room of their old pharmacy in Barcelona. It comprised a magnificent library, herbarium, handwritten documents, collections of molluscs, fossils, drugs, and several pieces of vegetables and stuffed animals.

In the 19th century, the cabinet was moved to the family’s villa (masia) in the Penedès district where it remained unnoticed until Pius Font i Quer found it in 1923. Following this discovery, the efforts of the Botanical Institute of Barcelona (IBB) focused on moving the collection to its premises, which occurred between 1938 and 1945. Nevertheless, parts of the cabinet had still been lost.

In 2013, during the preparation of the exhibition Salvadoriana, the Exhibition Department of the Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona found a part of the collection that was unknown until then. In the summer of 2013, the City Council of Barcelona purchased and moved it to the IBB facilities to reunite the newly discovered items with the rest of the collection.

In 2014, the collection was catalogued, all the materials were reviewed and restored, and preventive conservation measures were carried out. That same year, both Catalan and Spanish Governments granted the entire Salvador Collection the highest level of protection (“Heritage of Cultural Interest”). Finally, the history of the Cabinet and the family that assembled it was shown in the Salvadoriana temporary exhibition that took place from 2014 to 2016 at the IBB, where the Cabinet can be visited nowadays.

Glass jars with medicines

What is worth highlighting in this collection is its herbarium, the oldest known in Spain, consisting of samples collected in the 17th and 18th centuries. A total of 4,917 specimens have survived to this day, and these are mainly plants collected by Joan Salvador and his father, Jaume. They were collected in Catalonia, the rest of the Iberian Peninsula, Europe, the Salvador family’s botanical garden in Sant Joan Despí, and other botanical gardens around Europe. There is even an odd American plant grown in these gardens. The collectors carefully wrote down the origins of all specimens, and this precision regarding the geographic location allows the scientific use of the Salvador’s herbarium up to the present time.

The importance of the Salvador collection lies in the fact that, unlike most contemporary European collections, it was not dismantled piece by piece, destroyed by traumatic events, or subsumed by larger royal or university collections. Even more outstanding is that the collection has come down to us accompanied by a library, documents, letters, furniture, and specimens’ labels, all preserved in their original format.

To know more

Visit the Botanical Garden of Barcelona (JBB). For security reasons and to ensure proper preservation, the collection must be observed through the security glass protecting it. The visit is included in the entrance ticket.

Listen to a podcast. Produced in 2016 with the aim of bringing together in a single document all the work carried out in order to adapt the Cabinet material and have it inventoried for the Salvadoriana exhibition.

Read the Manual Salvador. A compilation of all the work carried out on the Salvador collection published in 2019 within the collection Manuals del Museu.

Visit the digital exhibition. Published in April 2020 on the platform Museu Obert it presents all the specimens and the main fields of each object in a very visual way.

Bibliograhy

Bolòs, A. 1946. El Herbario Salvador. Collectanea Botanica (Barcelona) 1: 1–8. Digital.CSIC

Bolòs, A. 1947. Plantas montserratinas de Juan Salvador. Collectanea Botanica (Barcelona) 1: 323–329. Digital.CSIC

Romo, A. M. 1995. Un herbario prelinneano en el Institut Botànic de Barcelona: el herbario Salvador. Boletín AHIM 0: 4–5. Digital.CSIC

Ibáñez. N. 2006. Estudis sobre cinc herbaris històrics de l’Institut Botànic de Barcelona. Doctoral thesis. Universitat de Barcelona. Digital.CSIC

Camarasa, J. M. & Ibáñez, N. 2007. Joan Salvador and James Petiver: a scientific correspondence (1706–1714) in time of war. Archives of Natural History 34 (1): 140–173. Digital.CSIC

Camarasa, J. M. & Ibáñez, N. 2012. Joan Salvador and James Petiver: the last years (1715–1718) of their scientific correspondence. Archives of Natural History 39 (2): 191–216. Digital.CSIC

Ibáñez, N. 2014. Inauguració de l’exposició Salvadoriana. Collectanea Botanica (Barcelona) 33: 9. Digital.CSIC

Pérez, M., Muñoz, O., Hervás, N., Ibáñez, N., Aurell-Garrido, J. & Garcia-Franquesa, E. 2015. El Gabinete de Historia Natural Salvador: intervenciones de conservación preventiva y curativa e inventario preliminar. Boletín de la Real Sociedad Española de Historia Natural 2: 87–99. Digital.CSIC

Gavioli, L. 2016. Reunir totes les plantes de Catalunya: adquisició de 5 herbaris de l’Institut Botànic de Barcelona a través de les cartes de Pius Font i Quer. Master thesis. Història de la Ciència: Ciència, Història i Societat. Digital.CSIC

Nualart, N. & Ibáñez, N. 2016. Las colecciones históricas del Herbario BC (Instituto Botánico de Barcelona). Boletín de la Asociación de Herbarios Iberico-Macaronésicos 17 : 10–18. Digital.CSIC

Ibáñez, N., Camarasa, J.M. & Garcia-Franquesa, E. (coord.) 2019. El gabinet Salvador: Un tresor científic recuperat / El gabinete Salvador: un tesoro científico recuperado. Manuals del Museu 2. Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona, Barcelona, 303 pp. Digital.CSIC