Letter: Fine but costly art

From Toshi Knell

Thank you for publishing the beautiful pictures of fungi and whetting our imaginations with “downy threads springing from pellets of peacock dung”, from the Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo (1 July, p 52).

Your announcement that the contents of “one of the world’s most wonderful museums…long since sold off and scattered, are finally being reunited” is true only if one can afford the price of these volumes, categorised by the publishers as “fine art”. The project falls squarely in the art connoisseur world, and as for them being available to look at on the internet, a very stingy world it is (see http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/pozzo/default.htm)

If, however, the project were treated like, say, the massive collection of Picture Australia (www.pictureaustralia.org), many works in the British Library (www.bl.uk) or material in the collections of the US National Institutes of Health (see, for example, the National Library of Medicine site, “Islamic Medical Manuscripts” – www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/arabic/arabichome.html – which show art and science being considered indistinguishable hundreds of years before Federico Cesi’s time) – that would indeed, be something to announce.

As for these pictures being art or science, why can’t they be as they gloriously are: both?

Nowra, New South Wales, Australia