Category Archives: People

Les correspondances du botaniste François Crépin (1830–1903)

Par Denis Diagre-Vanderpelen, Meise Botanical Garden

Le Jardin botanique de Meise recèle une quantité extraordinaire de courriers de botanistes et autres scientifiques, professionnels et amateurs, plus ou moins renommés. Comme il s’agit, en général, de lettres envoyées des quatre coins du monde aux chercheurs de cette institution, ces collections offrent un magnifique tableau des réseaux scientifiques des deux derniers siècles. Leur dépouillement offre une magnifique opportunité de saisir la circulation des idées, certes, mais aussi celle des échantillons. On peut ainsi tracer les mouvements des herbiers qui constituèrent longtemps un des piliers du travail des botanistes, et qui conservent un rôle central dans la pratique de la taxinomie et de la nomenclature. Ces dernières constituent des gestes préliminaires et souvent indispensables au déploiement d’autres champs disciplinaires, comme la conservation, la phytogéographie ou l’écologie, par exemple. Source pour le scientifique contemporain, l’herbier, les étiquettes et les courriers qui l’accompagnent en sont également pour l’historien.ne des sciences, qui y glanera une myriade d’informations sur les pratiques scientifiques des siècles passés.

Parmi les collections de lettres que conserve le Jardin botanique de Meise, il en est une qui mérite une attention particulière, ne serait-ce parce qu’elle est, depuis quelques années, abondamment exploitée. Il s’agit des milliers de lettres reçues par François Crépin, floristicien et rhodologue de haute renommée, co-fondateur et administrateur de la Société royale de Botanique de Belgique (fondée en 1862), et, finalement, directeur du Jardin botanique de l’Etat belge de 1876 à 1901.

Auteur d’un Manuel de la Flore de Belgique (1ère édition en 1860) révéré, ses correspondances « entrantes » avec les botanistes belges et des pays limitrophes permettent d’assister, presque au jour le jour, à la genèse de ce fameux ouvrage. On y découvre un homme qui recueille le fruit des collectes d’un réseau de botanistes amateurs, et qui les pilote ici et là, afin de vérifier ses intuitions et de compléter son opus magnum. Ce sont des milliers d’observations et des centaines de listes d’herborisation que cette collection nous donne à voir, dévoilant les interrogations des hommes du temps et certains des grands débats qui l’agitèrent : Espèce indigène ou naturalisée et, dans ce cas, faut-il l’inclure dans une flore nationale ? Station menacée ou hors de danger ? Quels sont les ennemis de la flore indigène (agriculture, industrie, collecte irraisonnée…) ? Quelles mesures faut-il prendre pour conserver les populations de plantes rares ? Quelle est la distribution de telle espèce et depuis quand ?

Par ailleurs, cette remarquable collection de lettres nous permet d’assister à la naissance d’une société scientifique – la Société royale de Botanique de Belgique – et de suivre les tourments et les bonheurs de cette association scientifique… qui comptait une majorité d’amateurs et de profanes dans ses rangs. Comment contenter les professionnels sans décourager les botanistes du dimanche ? Comment offrir un Bulletin à la fois digne d’être échangé avec les sociétés étrangères et propre à satisfaire les attentes du bourgeois-botaniste ? Comment être à la fois creuset scientifique et lieu de sociabilité bourgeoise ? Comment, à partir d’une vocation floristique, étendre ses activités à d’autres champs de la recherche botanique, éventuellement cultivés dans les universités ? Voilà quelques-unes des questions que, à travers ces archives, l’historien.ne peut saisir à bras-le-corps.

Finalement, c’est l’histoire du projet dont François Crépin espérait qu’il assurerait sa réputation de taxinomiste d’élite, que ces papiers éclairent : la monographie des roses… Réunissant, par achat, échange ou collecte personnelle, des milliers d’échantillons du prestigieux genre Rosa en un herbier unique (près de 45.000 feuilles, actuellement conservées au Jardin botanique de Meise), l’homme voulut réaliser une classification complète de ce genre complexe. Entreprise qui avorta, certes, mais les archives que nous savons montrent néanmoins le travail quotidien d’un botaniste de la fin du XIXe siècle, un homme qui défend la taxinomie contre des pratiques scientifiques nouvelles,  qui voit la classification morphologique buter sur la variabilité et l’ancienne hégémonie de cette approche contestée par de jeunes anatomistes… Finalement, ces documents révèlent un homme qui se brise sur la question – cruciale, pour son entreprise – de l’espèce et se convertit au transformisme.

Sources aux usages multiples, autorisant une multitude de questionnements, constituant une véritable « carotte » dans l’épaisseur de l’histoire des sciences, les correspondances de François Crépin mobilisent les chercheurs du Jardin botanique de Meise depuis des années, maintenant. C’est la raison pour laquelle elles ont été mises à l’honneur dans une exposition grand public, hébergée sur Europeana, et également pour laquelle plusieurs milliers de lettres conservées dans notre institution ont déjà été décrites dans le catalogue de notre bibliothèque, et scannées.

The Salvador collection in Barcelona

By José Pardo-Tomás, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científica, Spain

When we think about the Salvador collection some aspects stand out. The first one is that it’s a collection that has been in the hands of the same family since its foundation – in the first half of the 17th century – until it was acquired and converted into a scientific heritage of Barcelona’s city, already in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this long process, the collection went through different stages, through some transformations and resignifications, that accompanied the interests and aspirations of the heir responsible for it at the moment. In this sense, we can divide this history in three phases: the first, of formation and consolidation of the cabinet; the second, the reconfiguration of the cabinet as a museum in 19th century and, finally, the resurgence of the cabinet as a heritage asset in 21st century.

The accidental premature death of José Salvador (the last active member of the dynasty) in 1855 brought some time after to the closure of the museum at Barcelona. Around 1870, the cabinet and all its contents (furniture, library, naturalia and artificialia pieces) were moved to one of the many countryside properties of the family. Nothing was heard about the cabinet until 1923 when two curators of the Barcelona Museum of Natural Sciences established contact with the owners. But the negotiations for trying to recover the scientific collections for the public failed.

In 1938, in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, Republican Catalan Government issued a decree by which Salvador collection had to be incorporated into the public heritage and deposited in the Botanical Institute of Barcelona, which had been created four years earlier, as a dependence of the Barcelona Museum of Natural Sciences. At the end of 1945, the Barcelona City Council acquired the Salvador legacy and allowed for some dissemination of the existence of the collection, mainly of the herbarium, the most highly valued piece by the botanists of the Institute. But the constant funding problems during the Franco’s dictatorship and a large part of the democratic transition period, together with certain weaknesses in the institutional insertion of the Botanical Institute considerably delayed a proper cataloguing of the collection and a museum project to bring the collection to the public.

Until the end of the 20th century, only a few scholars had accessed the collection and documents of the Salvador family. Some effort to popularize the history of the cabinet and searching for funding and institutional support in order to return it to the public in a way that would ensure its proper conservation and use was made but with scarce success. Based on the new agreement between the CSIC (Spanish Scientific Research Council) and the Barcelona City Council, it was decided to erect a new building for the Botanical Institute, inaugurated in 2003. Here, finally Salvador Collection had to have its own space in the best conditions of conservation and, at the same time, open to viewing by the public. Finally, in the Spring of 2014 opened the exhibition Salvadoriana: the cabinet of curiosities of Barcelona, which remained open until May 2016 in the large room adjacent to the Salvador Room in the Botanical Institute, where the restored cabinet was exhibited and is still exhibited today.

Salvadoriana was born as a project which gave its first step cataloguing and restoring the pieces of the collection. In fact, all the pieces (more than 15,000 items) were restored using the most appropriate technical and scientific criteria: respect for the original, minimum intervention, compatibility of added materials, reversibility of the treatments and graphic documentation of the entire process. Hundreds of pieces were dry-cleaned and permanently wrapped, complete specimens were restored and the contents of the drawers of the original cabinets were cleaned and mounted. Furthermore, the polychrome doors of the original cabinets were restored, together with the material from the most recent find.

This long and often winding road to get here poses several challenges. There is still much work to be done in the museography for exhibit the collection to different public maybe in different spaces (both virtual or real). As well as there is still much work to be done in the field of the and scientific and historical research. The documents of the family archive, a large part of the correspondence, the evolution of the family’s business and its relation to scientific practices, the visitors to the cabinet before and after its conversion in Museo Salvador between 1830 and 1870, the connection of the Salvador cabinet of curiosities with the collections of the Barcelona Museum of Natural Sciences, etc. Above all, when thinking about the participation of different kinds of natural history collections in a “regional” or “provincial” city as Barcelona, putting together with other European case studies in a project such as SciCoMove.

Collections of the “Cesare Lombroso” Museum of Criminal Anthropology

By Cristina Cilli, University of Turin, Italy

Cesare Lombroso positivism was expressed as extreme attention to statistics, the accumulation of documentary evidences, and application of the scientific method to existing disciplines or those he helped establish, with special attention to deviance: psychiatry, criminal anthropology, sociology of the genius, the madman and the criminal, (presumed) paranormal phenomena.

The Main Room of the Museum

The Museum today houses important collections concerning the study of crime and criminals, of insanity and the insane. Lombroso collected a rich series of objects made in prison and in the insane asylum. In addition, he collected an extensive documentation of the physiognomy of criminals and the insane, inspired by a widespread European tradition.

The museum displays numerous human remains collected and studied by Lombroso and his students, including a rich collection of more than 700 skulls: murders skull “presents the maximum of criminal traits”, i.e. “narrow forehead, enormous frontal sinuses, orbits, mandible and zygomata, asymmetry of the face, of the nose, of the orbits…”. To finalize the theorem, the fossa identified on the skull of the “brigand Villella” was proof of the fact that cranial anomalies reflect cerebral anomalies and primitive biological traits. The collection of comparative anatomy tends to show the presence of the brigand Villella’s cranial anomaly in mammals evolutionarily distant from man.

Death masks: 30 wax death masks reproducing the faces of criminals who died in prison were given to Lombroso by Lorenzo Tenchini, professor of Anatomy at the University of Parma. The masks were made in the 1880s and 90s as a personal gallery of anatomical, physiognomic and anthropometric aspects typical of criminals. Other 30 death masks are in plaster.

Giuseppe Villella’s Skull Room and showcases with clothes made by insane person

Material evidence: for Lombroso the material evidence of crime consisted not only of “things” but also of “signs.” The material evidence tells something, or a lot, about the criminal man. Illuminating the crime scene, it demonstrates the modus operandi and motives of the criminal, also providing indications about the criminal’s full or partial liability to punishment. The Museum houses more then 350 material evidences like knifes, daggers, picklocks, blunt objects, ropes, etc…

Lombroso views tattoos as an indicator of criminality, which he would later closely relate to “atavism”: it would be this regression toward primitive biological forms that drives criminals to indelibly engrave designs, symbols and writings on their bodies. Tattoos collection is composed by drawings on paper (about 150), pieces of skins, photographs (about 100) represent one of the richest and most important collection of the second half of the 19th century.

Collection of artistic manufacturing made by insane people (outsider art or “art brut”). Lombroso was interested in the artistic expressions of mentally disabled persons: if the rather mad person preserves the appearance of genius, albeit deprived of substance, the lunatic will connect us to the substance, albeit formally inadequate substance, of genius: drawings on paper (more than 200), furniture, pipes, sculptures in wood, object in paper, clothes, etc.

The collection of more than 80 water pitchers, engraved with writing and drawings by prisoners in Turin’s “Le Nuove” Prison represents a unique collection of all the world as well as the clay sculptures. The model of the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia (USA) and 6 models of cells coming from several European prisons complete the collection concerning the places of imprisonment.

Finally the historical Archive of the Museum preserves a fund of over than 6000 photographs, about 1900 Lombroso’s professional and personal letters, documentations of his activities of research, more than 500 writings from insane people and prisoners. The majority of this documentation is digitalized.