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12 Chapter One have limited the range of Lasanosa’s correspondence and his agents even more than the growing institutional conservativism of the church. Lastanosa’s example might, then, show just how difficult it was to import into northern Aragon information and ideas that were connected with more cosmopolitan commercial cities. Perhaps if he had come from Valencia, with its Mediterranean connections and important medical school, it would have been easier for him. At the same time, there is no indication that he wanted to become another Peiresc or Montmor, much less a Descartes or Hobbes. These were dangerous times for one’s immortal soul, and Lastanosa--like so many others--seemed best content to do all he could to continue the kind of collecting that exemplified the values of Christian humanism. Neither Lastanosa, nor Aragon or 17th-century “Spain,” were intellectually “backward.” But he does not seem to have been committed to supporting the kind of interest in nature--the analytical materialism--that was already recognized as something new and potentially dangerous. Lastanosa is a fascinating figure, and the persons he befriended, supported, and employed deserve further study as well. From seeing him as part of a larger world rather than simply an individual we will understand his world much better. But at the moment I would be surprised if further studies showed him to be moving toward the separation of moral and natural philosophy, which was happening in many discussions elsewhere: he seems to have aimed to keep them together as best he could. In this sense, at least, he stood on the side of classical learning rather than on the side of the study of nature for its own sake. Lastanosa subordinated knowledge to the purposes of art: the study and possible recreation of the moral ends of human nature. That humans are the product of material an inhuman nature alone he may perhaps never have thought possible. Notes 1. For some important early examples, see G. R. De Beer, Sir Hans Sloane and the British Museum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953); Silvio A. Bedini, “The Evolution of Science Museums,” Technology and Culture 6 (1965): 1–29; Barbara J. Balsiger, The Kunst- und Wunderkammer: A Catalogue Raisonee of Collecting in Germany, France, and England, 1565–1750, dissertation, University of Pittsburg (1970); Hugh Honour, The European Vision of America (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1975); Arthur MacGregor, ed., Tradescant’s Rarities: Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum 1683, with a Catalogue of the Surviving Early Collections (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds, The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
Lastanosa as an Example of His Time: Natural History and Medicine 2. For some recent attempts to connect art and science, see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology, German ed. 1993, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995); David Freedberg and Enrico Baldini, The Paper Museum of Cassiano Dal Pozzo, Series B--Natural History (London: Harvey Miller, 1997); Giuseppe Olmi, “Museums on Paper in Emilia- Romagna from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries: From Aldrovandi to Count Sanvitale,” Archives of Natural History 28 (2001): 157–78; Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds, Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 2002); Wolfgang Lefèvre, Jürgen Renn, and Urs Schoepflin, eds, The Power of Images in Early Modern Science (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2003); Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Claudia Swan, Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn II (1565–1629) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 3. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 4. Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 1–41. 5. See esp. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998) 6. Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 7. I am aware of various problems that arise in using the word “discovery”, as in using the word “science,” but for the current purposes of distinguishing between making and finding, I think them suitable. For some considered thoughts about the “production” of scientific knowledge, see for example Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Ofer Gal, Meanest Foundations and Nobler Superstructures: Hooke, Newton and the “Compounding of the Celestiall Motions of the Planetts,” Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht ; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002). 8. Cook, Matters of Exchange, 20–33. 9. Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Workshop Journal, no. 9 (1980): 5–36. 10. G. A. Lindeboom, ed & comp, Het Cabinet Van Jan Swammerdam (1637– 1680) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1980). 11. Also see more generally on Dutch collections Ellinoor Bergvelt and Renée Kistemaker, chief eds, De Wereld Binnen Handbereik: Nederlandse Kunst- en Rariteitenverzamelingen, 1585–1735 (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers/Amsterdams Historisch Museum, 1992). 12. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 13
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