ARE these images art or are they science? For Federico Cesi, Prince of Acquasparta and founder of the world’s first scientific society, the two were indistinguishable. In the 1620s Cesi and his friends in the Accademia dei Lincei (Academy of Lynxes) strove to document and classify every living thing – a job still nowhere near completion.
The fruits of Cesi’s labours ended up in one of the world’s most wonderful museums – the Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, a fellow Lincean. It housed a vast collection of paintings of antiquities, buildings, objects and natural history specimens. The contents, long since sold off and scattered, are finally…
