Imperato, Ferrante | First edition of the first museological catalogue to encompass the entire natural world

Imperato, Ferrante

 Dell’historia naturale libri xxvii.  Naples: Costatino Vitale, 1599

Folio (287 x 200 mm). Woodcut device on title, double-page woodcut of Imperato's museum (very slightly frayed at edges), 126 woodcut illustrations of gems, plants, insects, reptiles and sea creatures in text; intermittent pale dampstaining and browning. 18^th-century Italian calf-backed boards; worn with loss.

Scarce first edition.

Describing one of the most celebrated scientific museums of sixteenth-century Europe—and the first museological catalogue to encompass the entire natural world. Among the Italian apothecary collectors who established private museums of natural history, the most notable was Ferrante Imperato, a prosperous Neapolitan pharmacist. Unlike his contemporaries, who left only manuscript accounts of their collections, Imperato published a book about his cabinet in 1599, edited by his son Francesco. The volume features an extraordinary woodcut depicting the museum’s interior—a vaulted room crowded with specimens of animals, minerals, shells, and curiosities suspended from the ceiling. This celebrated image was printed in reverse in the 1672 Venice edition and omitted altogether from the 1695 Latin edition issued at Cologne and Leipzig. The text includes elegant woodcuts, among them three striking depictions of quartz crystal clusters later copied by Boetius de Boodt for his Lapidum et gemmarum historia (1609) and again by Athanasius Kircher in Mundus subterraneus (1665).

A foundational work in stratigraphy and paleontology—anticipating steno’s discoveries by seven decades. Conceived as the first in a projected series that was never completed, Historia naturale stands as both a record of Imperato’s scientific learning and a comprehensive account of his museum. The treatise is divided into twenty-eight books: five devoted to minerals and gems, nine to alchemy, and the remainder to plants and animals. While citing classical authorities such as Theophrastus and Pliny, Imperato firmly rejected the belief in the magical powers of stones. He argued instead that fossils were the petrified remains of marine creatures entombed in sediment and transformed by “lapidifying juices.” His observations on the action of the sea in forming sedimentary deposits led him to articulate—for the first time—the concept of a stratigraphic sequence.

REFERENCES

Adams I-84; Brunet III 431; Hunt 321; Mortimer/Italian 240; Nissen, ZBI 2111; Pritzel 4433; Rooms of wonder, New York, The Grolier Club, 2012, 3 ("the folded woodcut frontispiece […] is the earliest illustration of a Wunderkammer"); Wilson Mineral Collecting, pp. 36-38.

PROVENANCE

Dennis Wheatland (bookplate; Sotheby’s London, 3 December 1998, lot 58)