Biography

Caroline Duroselle-Melish is the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Early Modern Books and Print, and Associate Librarian for Collection Care and Development, at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. She has also held various positions in academic and independent research libraries. Her work and research lay at the intersection of the print and book worlds in early modern Europe. Her articles concern the world of print, books, and late Renaissance Italian science, with a focus on the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi. She recently completed an article manuscript on the woodcuts of Mesoamerican artifacts in Aldrovandi’s Musaeum Metallicum.

Project Summary

This project has two goals: First, to deepen our understanding of the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi’s visual work and collection. Second, to use his rich collection of woodblocks to provide a path towards the study of such artifacts more generally. In addition to their artistic qualities, print matrices can contribute to better understanding their printed impressions as well as their makers’ intentions, the practicalities of printing, and their role in the creation and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Aldrovandi (1522-1605) is well known for his museum, which housed natural specimens, artifacts, and drawings, and for his extensive library. Both collections served as the foundation for his natural history encyclopedia, an ambitious publishing project of twelve volumes with thousands of heavily illustrated pages. Although Aldrovandi started work on it in the 1580s, he only had a chance to oversee the publication of the first four volumes before his death in 1605. Successive editors responsible for publishing the posthumous volumes worked with the naturalist’s manuscripts and woodblocks, which he had left in various stages of completion. This project is concerned with the latter, around 2,000 extant matrices now housed in the Museo di Palazzo Poggi and the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna. Aldrovandi’s woodblocks form an exceptional visual archive on multiple fronts. The wealth of primary sources surrounding their creation represents a unique corpus of extant documents. Few other collections benefit from such interpretative material. The research presented here will shed light on the prominent role these matrices came to play in the naturalist’s visual project and to further our understanding of Renaissance woodblock production.