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Ingrid D. Rowland
Visitors to seventeenth-century Rome often hoped to see a living monument among the city’s attractions of art and architecture. That living monument was Father Athanasius Kircher, a German Jesuit who lived and worked in the Order’s Collegio Romano, near the intersection of the Via del Corso and Piazza Venezia. Kircher had first arrived in Rome himself in October of 1633, expecting to continue on to a position in Vienna. He stayed instead, to take a chair as Professor of Mathematics at the Collegio Romano, adapting to Italian life with eager enthusiasm. His position ranked among the most prestigious in the Jesuit world. The Collegio Romano’s stately building, designed by Bartolommeo Ammanati and inaugurated in 1585, had been designed as a showcase for Jesuit learning in all the arts and sciences. Its laboratories had been outfitted under the supervision of Christoph Clavius, head of the commission charged by Pope Gregory XIII to reform the calendar, a task that Clavius and his team completed in 1581. At the same time, Pope Gregory also sponsored construction of the massive new building, with classrooms, laboratories, a library, and living space for more than a hundred Jesuits. The long-lived Clavius served for nearly thirty years in the chair of mathematics, followed over the next half century by a succession of prominent natural philosophers, including Orazio Grassi, Christoph Scheiner, and Christoph Grienberger. Professors of mathematics in the seventeenth century were also responsible for teaching astronomy, and this was an area in which Clavius, Grassi, Scheiner and Grienberger excelled; the last three, indeed, are best known now for their battles with another professor of mathematics, Galileo Galilei (whose first invitation to lecture in Rome had been extended, ironically, by Christoph Clavius). Galileo was still very much on the minds of Rome’s Jesuits in October of 1633. Four months earlier, in June, the Holy Office of the Inquisition had sentenced the Tuscan astronomer to imprisonment for life, commuted, at about the time of Kircher’s arrival, to house arrest. The young German’s lack of connection to that battle must have worked strongly in favor of his appointment to the chair of mathematics, where, in fact, he replaced Scheiner, whose animosity to Galileo was legendary. Kircher’s combination of mild manner and formidable mind promised to give the Order, and its practice of natural philosophy, a less polemical public face at a particularly sensitive moment. If Kircher avoided polemic, it was not for lack of courage. Bitter experience had shown him what hatred, especially religious hatred, could drive human beings to do to one another. Born Catholic in a largely Protestant region of Germany (in 1601 or 1602), he experienced the conflicts between Catholic and Protestant that would come to be known as the Thirty Years’ War, moving constantly around Germany, from Fulda to Paderborn, to Mainz, to Würzburg. He escaped Würzburg for Avignon in 1631, just before the Swedish troops of King Gustavus Adolphus swept into the city; Kircher claimed to have foreseen their assault in a dream. In France he met the antiquarian Claude-Nicolas Fabri di Peiresc, who commended him to the attention of Cardinal Francesco Barberini, nephew of the reigning pope, Urban VIII, himself intimately involved with the trial of Galileo. Together, Peiresc and Cardinal Barberini engineered the appointment in Rome. Barberini was less interested in Kircher’s astronomical expertise than in his Egyptian studies; thus the Rector of the Collegio Romano understood from the outset that the new Professor of Mathematics would also devote his energies to other disciplines. It was the range of those other disciplines that would soon transform Athanasius Kircher into a Roman monument in his own right. By 1636, Kircher had dutifully produced his first work on Egyptology: Prodromus Coptus (Rome, 1636) the first book to argue, correctly, that Coptic, the liturgical language of Egyptian Christians, would provide the key to understanding ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. In 1637, after three years at the Collegio Romano, he accepted a new appointment: as father confessor to the young Catholic convert Friedrich, Landgrave of Hessen and Darmstadt, bound for Malta in the company of his tutor, Lucas Holste, who complained that the Jesuit was too diffident and socially awkward to win the Landgrave’s respect. Father Athanasius did, however, win the respect of the island’s Inquisitor, Fabio Chigi, with whom he struck up a close and lasting friendship. By 1638, however Father Kircher was back at the Collegio Romano, burdened down by notes and specimens: “giants’ bones” from Messina (really, as he knew, limestone stalactites), ostrich eggs from Malta, pumice from Etna and Stromboli, fossils. In his travels to and from Malta he had seen both Stromboli and Etna erupt (he claimed to have climbed three hundred cubits into the seething crater of the latter), and experienced a devastating earthquake in the waters off Calabria. In Naples, he explored the crater of Vesuvius and felt the earth tremble with the power of subterranean fire. By the time he returned to Rome, he had added geology [tradurre: ‘scienze della Terra’] to his list of passionate interests. The Collegio Romano would remain Kircher’s home for the rest of his life. His own room, light and spacious, began to look increasingly like a Wunderkammer. Together with the Collegio’s laboratories and the splendid collection of instruments that had first been established by Christoph Clavius, this personal collection provided the essential background to his research and an increasing schedule of public presentations; Kircher may have been diffident in person, but in front of an audience he was a masterful showman. When the Jesuits celebrated their hundredth anniversary in 1640, he impressed the delegates with a lecture on Noah’s Ark, using a magic lantern to project his illustrations and basing his calculations for the Ark’s dimensions, in part, on Galileo’s research into floating bodies. Kircher’s list of publications began to grow as quickly as his reputation: Magnes (Rome, 1641), his comprehensive treatment of magnetism; Lingua Aegyptiaca Restituta (Rome, 1642), his Coptic-Arabic-Latin dictionary; and Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (Rome, 1646), his treatise on optics. In 1646, the Order released Father Kircher from further teaching duties so that he could to devote himself entirely to writing and research. He also spent a certain amount of time escorting visitors, like the English traveler John Evelyn, who came to visit the Collegio Romano in 1644 and left a report of the experience in his diary. According to Evelyn, a visit to Athanasius Kircher included a tour of the Jesuit’s personal collections, followed by a trip to the laboratories of the Collegio Romano to observe some experiments in action. By the time John Evelyn saw Kircher’s collection in the Collegio Romano, it had taken over a second room, but that, too, soon proved inadequate. In 1651, when the secretary of the Roman Senate, Antonio Donnini, donated his collection of antiquities to the Society of Jesus, the bequest provided the order with a perfect excuse to create a museum on the Collegio’s premises. Athanasius Kircher seemed the natural candidate for the museum’s first curator. In his own way, with disarming cleverness, Father Athanasius carried out the Jesuit mission to teach, to proclaim the Gospel, and, in the words of Ignatius Loyola, “to comfort souls”. When the Jubilee Year of 1650 drew a huge crowd of pilgrims to Rome, both Catholic and Protestant, Kircher produced yet another book for the occasion, Obeliscus Pamphilius (Rome, 1650), dedicated to Pope Innocent X Pamphili, elected in 1644. Innocent’s special provisions for the Jubilee included moving an ancient Egyptian obelisk from the outskirts of Rome to the central Piazza Navona, where he had ordered Gianlorenzo Bernini to create a fountain as its new pedestal. Athanasius Kircher had acted as Bernini’s consultant in restoring the obelisk’s damaged hieroglyphs and exerted considerable influence on the fountain’s final design; Obeliscus Pamphilius also provided a complete “translation” of the obelisk’s hieroglyphic inscriptions. Bernini did not complete the Fountain of the Four Rivers until the Jubilee was over; like the museum of the Collegio Romano, it was inaugurated in 1651. In this same year, as it happened, Pope Innocent appointed Kircher’s old friend from Malta, Fabio Chigi, cardinal and Secretary of State. The importance of the new Museum in the Collegio Romano can be judged from its location on the piano nobile of the building’s most public entrance, set among the Collegio’s classrooms and next to the library. The museum’s vaulted ceiling and its walls were elaborately decorated in frescoes (unfortunately, no trace of them survives). There was only one problem with the project; just behind the Collegio Romano, the huge church of Sant’Ignazio was rising under the supervision of Father Orazio Grassi, Galileo’s former adversary, now more active as an architect than as a natural philosopher. Eventually, the apse of the church and its supporting structures would encroach on the space within the Collegio Romano, but in 1651 that moment still seemed to belong to the distant future. Most museums in the mid-seventeenth century belonged either to heads of state or to wealthy private individuals like Alfonso Donnini. The state collections, especially, combined political messages with pure delight in curiosities. The Medici in Florence maintained a collection of Etruscan antiquities to suggest that the distinctiveness of Tuscany and its culture extended back to remote antiquity. The antique statues gathered in the Belvedere of the Vatican commemorated the triumph of Christianity over the ancient Roman Empire. Although the Collegio Romano’s Museum belonged to a religious order rather than a dynasty, it presented its own series of messages, carefully spelled out through a series of images and inscriptions. The choice of these decorations and the placement of the museum’s artifacts must have been largely left to Father Kircher, who would use the same images and inscriptions over and over again in his books. Those choices could never have been implemented, however, without approval by the Order, whose members were encouraged, in the words of their founder, Saint Ignatius, “to think as one.” On occasion, in fact, the museum’s imagery clearly reflects Jesuit teaching rather than Kircher’s personal convictions. Thus the vaults of its five bays present images of what Aristotle and his followers regarded as the four terrestrial elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and the celestial element, quintessence, whereas Kircher himself believed that the entire universe was made of the same matter as the earth. The order’s educational curriculum, the Ratio Studiorum, prescribed that teaching in natural philosophy should adhere to the precepts of Aristotle, and hence the museum, the public face of the Society’s work on natural philosophy, necessarily reflected the same point of view. Visitors who looked up into the five vaults of the museum’s long gallery saw, in sequence, a salamander engulfed in flames (fire); eight winds blowing a flying fish suspended within a pergola (air); Aquarius pouring out rivers from a jar (water); a “pretty young girl”, nude, with a cornucopia (earth), and, in the museum’s innermost bay, the Zodiac (quintessence). The museum itself, in other words, created a miniature universe, the universe of the Society of Jesus, as filtered through the mind of Athanasius Kircher. By the mid-seventeenth century, that universe was huge and diverse. Jesuit missions were scattered throughout the world, from Rome to Mexico and China; as Kircher liked to note, at any time of day or night, the sun was shining somewhere on a Jesuit house. The Museum of the Collegio Romano demonstrated this same global reach in its displays: Chinese slippers, African oliphants (elaborately carved elephant tusks), a giant armadillo from Argentina that hung suspended from the ceiling. Kircher claimed that the name of God could be spelled with four letters in each of the world’s languages; despite the orthographic acrobatics it took to obtain formulations like Italian “Idio” and English “Godd”, and the difference between alphabetic letters and the writing systems of China and Japan, his real point was to prove that beneath the vast range of the world’s curious customs, the human race was one. Hence an inscription in the museum’s first bay declared, in Chaldaean with a Latin translation: “There is no Kingdom, no republic, no place or province in which the name of God cannot be found written with four letters, right to the ultimate fibers of the soul and the limbs of the human body”. If the human perception of God was the same everywhere, then so was the human capacity to hear the message of Christian salvation; thus the museum proved the potentially universal benefit of the Jesuits’ mission, and justified its universal reach. That mission covered not only the farthest realms of the earth, but also forged a link with the realm of heaven. The first vault of the museum contained a second inscription that proclaimed, in Arabic and Latin: “Whoever knows the chain that connects the lower to the upper world shall know the mysteries of nature and shall act as a worker of wonders” . The language of the inscription evoked magic, with its mention of binding chains, mysteries, and wonder-workers; so did its accompanying image, the salamander, which, according to legend, could emerge from flame unscathed. Kircher certainly played upon the evocative power of these magical associations, in his books as well as on the museum’s walls, but he prided himself on achieving his own wonders by exploiting what we would now call scientific principles. His works on magnetism, Magnes of 1641 and Magneticum Naturae Regnum of 1666, describe magnetic force as a binding chain that links worlds together, and certainly magnetism is one of the chains and “mysteries of nature” implied in the museum’s inscription. Yet the supreme magnetism in Kircher’s world system is always the magnetism of love: the love that binds iron to magnet, heart to heart, and God to Creation: “just as the human heart is visibly captured by the urgings of an inundation of love without visible chains, so too this stone, captured by its love for its desired iron is penetrated by the ties of an invisible embrace, so that they cannot be separated from one another except by force.” Thus the mysterious images of the binding chain and the salamander can (and should) also be interpreted as images of Christ, forever linking heaven to earth and forever victorious over the forces of death and Hell. The museum’s remaining images and inscriptions reinforce the same set of messages: that upper and lower worlds are indissolubly linked, and that the seeker after knowledge will discover both an intense personal joy and the power to work wonders. These decorative elements drew from a world that was not only geographically vast, but also timeless. Kircher was convinced that the ancient Egyptians already knew what he described as “the mysteries of divinity and the laws of Nature”, and endeavored to prove the lasting profundity of their insights through his own studies of Egyptian civilization. At the same time, he was also passionately interested in the revelations of modern technological advances like telescope and microscope. The museum’s collection faithfully reflected both these preoccupations: it was filled with ancient artifacts and modern machines, and with ingenious combinations of the two, from the ancient Roman bust he outfitted with a brass speaking tube and nicknamed “the Delphic Oracle” to the miniature obelisks he constructed out of wood and painted with the names of important visitors spelled out in Egyptian hieroglyphs. For all its otherworldly concerns, indeed, the museum of the Collegio Romano also revealed its curator’s conscious efforts to maintain a secure position in the social life of seventeenth-century Rome. Beneath the vault with the steadfast salamander, a series of portrait busts commemorated the museum’s most illustrious visitors: Popes Innocent X, Alexander VII, and Clement X, Cardinal Barberini, Queen Christina of Sweden, ambassadors, cardinals, and a host of lesser luminaries. Then came the obelisks, with their painted inscriptions; only now, centuries later, can we see that the spire dedicated to Pope Clement X once bore the name of Queen Christina, and only after Champollion’s definitive decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs with the help of the Rosetta Stone can Kircher’s inscriptions be exposed once and for all as pure fiction. But what seventeenth-century visitor could resist seeing contemporary names immortalized in ancient pictographs? Father Kircher also demonstrated a princely talent for spotting superb works of contemporary art; the paintings he gathered for the Collegio Romano included works by masters like Guido Reni and Dosso Dossi, but he guided his decisions less by famous names than by his own refined taste. A trip through the museum meant contemplating sublime works of imagination, but it also meant making a guided tour of human eccentricity, manifested in trinkets, amulets, and an extensive collection of shoes, gathered from around the world or cast in plaster from ancient statues. Only the caprices of nature could compare with the strangeness of the world’s peoples: the horn of a narwhal, the saw of a sawfish, the stuffed armadillo, who looked all the odder because his lips curled in the process of desiccation (remarkably, these specimens still exist). A sculpted head by the medieval master Nicola Pisano is remarkable for its artistry, especially considering that it is carved from a meteorite, heavy as lead but hard as iron. A set of little soapstone statues inscribed in strange alphabets are probably intended to represent Gnostic talismans from the last days of ancient Egypt, but the elaborate underpants clothing one of them may suggest that the whole lot is a seventeenth-century forgery (and one wonders what Kircher’s role was in their production). As John Evelyn reported, however, the museum was also a place to perform experiments. Many of its displays were active (we might now say interactive) rather than static. Some were good-humored, like the Delphic Oracle who addressed visitors by name as they entered the gallery. Some were designed to produce what Kircher called “wonderment for idiots”, as when he projected images of souls in Purgatory or a visitor’s face distorted by a trick mirror, or launched hot-air balloons in the shape of dragons with “The Wrath of God” (IRA DEI) emblazoned on their bellies (he was also an inveterate practical joker). But most of his machines, at least as Kircher saw them, were meant to turn visitors’ minds away from superstition and credulity and towards experimentation, study, and the use of reason. He used a magician’s tricks to show that the greatest magician was nature herself. And yet there was always something magical about Athanasius Kircher’s museum. The decorations of its four remaining bays were as evocative of chains and secret wisdom as the first. The second bay, representing air, had two inscriptions flanking its central image of a flying fish suspended in a pergola and buffeted by winds. One of these mottoes was written in Syriac: “Wisdom is an inexhaustible treasure, and whoever comes upon her is blessed, for he will wear a divine face beneath his human form, a friend to God and man” . The other, in Greek, came from an Egyptian source: “There is a heaven above and a heaven below; all things are above and below; know this and prosper” . The third bay, where Aquarius poured out rivers from his jar to represent the element of water, bore one inscription in Hebrew, “There is no plant below that does not have its corresponding planet in the firmament to shake it and tell it ‘Grow’” . The other inscription was in Samaritan: “Whoever knows the mystery of the lower and upper world and the knot that binds the things hidden away in them, he will penetrate the deepest secrets of the mountains” . The fourth bay, with the naked earth maiden carrying her cornucopia, quoted a line from Plato in Greek: “There is nothing sweeter than knowing everything” . It was one of Kircher’s favorite citations, testifying as it did to his own delight in his vast knowledge. The second inscription read, in Latin, “He can truly be said to have entered the workshop of wisdom and virtue who contemplates God continually in the works of Nature” . A smaller roundel in this same vault showed flowers turning toward a blazing sun: on the title page of Kircher’s Magnes, this is the emblem for Natural Magic. The other roundel commemorates one of his best-known experiments, the resurrection of a dead plant (it was an experiment that other natural philosophers had difficulty reproducing). The final bay in the gallery, showing the Zodiac, bore three inscriptions, in Persian “Whoever penetrates to the root of the upper and lower order, to him none of the mysteries in the world will remain hidden” ; in Syriac: “Learn wisdom, my son, for she exceeds the scepters of kings, and fills men with every good thing that they can desire” ; and Amharic: “The river Gehon is in the heavens, and which answers to the Gehon, that is, the Nile. The Nile is on earth, and if you understand its mystery, every desire of your soul will be fulfilled” . A smaller roundel showed an Egyptian lion on a pedestal. This was the world of Athanasius Kircher, a world “bound with secret knots” that made order out of its incredible complexity, where human ingenuity, properly applied, could reveal many of those secrets, but where, in the end, the immense magnificence of Creation could only inspire awestruck prayer and contemplation. For Kircher, experimentation and investigation served to reinforce religious faith; as a result, many of his own ideas came to challenge the intellectual and doctrinal limits imposed within his own order and by the Inquisition. Like many of his contemporaries, he used the term “natural magic” in a sense that had as much to do with experimentation as it did with calling up spirits, as he tried to discover why magnesium burns with such intensity, or why adding lemon to the new Chinese drink chai, then just beginning to appear in Europe, changed its color. He called the bond of magnetism a “magic chain” (catena magica), because he did not quite understand how it worked—but then, neither do modern physicists. In 1656, at the urging of his colleague Gaspar Schott, he published a dialogue on cosmology, Itinerarium Extaticum Coeleste, in which he presented a universe composed of four elements rather than five, where the crystalline spheres of Aristotle were shown not to exist, and where the region of the fixed stars was so immense that it could be regarded as infinite except in the mind of God. Although Kircher carefully presented these arguments as revelations in a dream, the book excited immediate controversy within the order. Yet the fact that the Itinerarium Extaticum was published at all, and reprinted in a new edition in 1660 (with the slightly modified title Iter Exstaticum Coeleste), shows that the Jesuits of the later seventeenth century were no longer “thinking as one”. The relationship between natural philosophy and religion could not, in fact, be fixed by decree. Like his museum, Kircher’s books also display the conflict between his research and the strictures of his order. Twice he was ordered to delay publication of works he had written to meet immediate crises: De Prodigiosis Crucibus (Rome, 1661) showed that the strange phenomenon of crosses appearing on the clothing of people in Naples was connected with the eruption of Vesuvius; when airborne bits of lava landed on woven linen, the dark ash spread along the perpendicular lines of warp and weft. There was no secret supernatural message. Similarly, his Scrutinium Pestis (Rome, 1658) argued that microorganisms (he called them «tiny, slender and subtle worms») were responsible for the outbreak of plague in Italy in 1656, the first work to present such an idea. Because the Jesuit ratio studiorum explicitly forbade medical studies, the censors ordered that a physician approve Kircher’s work before it was published; fortunately Pope Alexander VII (his old friend from Malta, Fabio Chigi) believed Father Athanasius at once and set up quarantines in Rome to contain the disease. Kircher’s great Mundus Subterraneus (Amsterdam, 1665) begins with a long mathematical discussion on how to find the centers of solid objects, implying that the Earth, in conformity with Aristotle, forms the center of the universe. Only a careful reading of the lengthy text reveals that its author’s real ideas about the universe were far more complex, with elements borrowed from Tycho Brahe (a world system in which the planets circled the Sun and the Sun circled the Earth), Paracelsus (matter composed primarily of salt, sulphur, and mercury), and Giordano Bruno (the immense size and infinite fertility of the universe). This tendency to hide radical thoughts behind layers of seemingly orthodox discussion made Kircher’s books difficult to grasp; as Jesuit censors noted on several occasions, he contradicted himself. The censors attributed these contradictions to sloppy scholarship, but they are more often strategic, balancing a radical claim (the Moon is made of the same elements as Earth) with an orthodox statement to the opposite effect (the Moon is made of quintessence). Ultimately, however, his reputation as a natural philosopher suffered for this lack of clarity. Kircher also faced a perennial struggle to balance the demands of scholarship with those of showmanship. His earliest researches into ancient Egypt began with an insight of genuine value: that Coptic, the liturgical language of Egyptian Christians, preserved the language of the pharaohs. Kircher was the first modern scholar to understand this fact, but it was not enough on its own to enable him to decipher the hieroglyphs. In the first place, his data were unreliable: one of his most important pieces of evidence, a bronze tabletop inlaid with silver, now in the Museo Egizio of Torino, was produced in Roman times by a Roman artisan for a Roman client. Its hieroglyphic inscriptions are meaningless. Some of the inscriptions on Rome’s surviving obelisks are little better; the obelisk in Piazza Navona, with which Kircher was intimately familiar, dates from the time of the Emperor Domitian (82-96 A.D.) and shows its own peculiarities of language and orthography. With intense pressure from Cardinal Barberini to produce a successful decipherment and no one bold enough, or informed enough, to contradict him, Kircher began to invent readings for these Egyptian documents, earning an international reputation in his own lifetime, but without earning universal trust. His Sphinx Mystagoga (Amsterdam, 1672) is as contradictory a work as his Oedipus Aegyptiacus: on one hand, it supplies fanciful decipherments of Egyptian texts sent him by a French correspondent; on the other, it provides a detailed report of an archaeological excavation in the area of ancient Memphis, just south of Cairo. The book’s large engraving of what are supposed to be the pyramids of Gizeh instead bears a striking resemblance to the pyramid field of Napata in Nubia: there is still a great deal to be discovered about Athanasius Kircher’s Egyptology. Kircher’s experiments often excited the same suspicions as his Egyptological researches. Those contemporaries who tried to repeat his miraculous resurrection of a dead plant were invariably disappointed; his recipe for theriac, the universal antidote to poison, inspired similar skepticism. The sheer virtuosity of his tricks and illusions, from the Delphic Oracle to his magic lanterns and megaphones, made it tempting to suspect that his experiments were tricks as well. They may have been tricks to a higher purpose, testing wit and awakening faith, but any illusion, however entertaining, remained a show rather than a philosophical inquiry. However controversial his researches, however, Athanasius Kircher was the best-known Jesuit natural philosopher in the seventeenth-century world. His books were read on from Beijing to Puebla, anywhere that Christian missionaries had taken their Gospel. In 1665, he entered into an arrangement for exclusive publication rights with a Dutch printer, Johann Jansson, beginning with the monumental Mundus Subterraneus of that year. Kircher’s own instincts for publicity meshed beautifully with Jansson’s; together, with the help of Amsterdam’s superb professional engravers, they produced a series of folio volumes that were remarkable for their imaginative combination of text and illustrations. Jansson also issued vernacular translations of Kircher’s best-selling works. Many readers of Kircher’s late works on the Bible, Arca Noë (1675) and Turris Babel (1679), were uncertain whether to interpret them as serious investigations or as fables. The censors who examined his reduction of Christian philosophy to twenty-seven symbols, Ars Magna Sciendi (1669), complained that it was cumbersome and ineffective. And yet modern readers of these books will see real value in Lieven Cruyl’s spectacular engraved views of Mesopotamian archaeological sites in Turris Babel, in the elaborate plans for the interior of Noah’s Ark in Arca Noë, and in the ways that the philosophical symbols of Kircher’s Ars Magna Sciendi foreshadow modern symbolic logic. In many respects, Kircher’s later career, when he had given up his great hope of being sent on mission to China, was single-mindedly devoted to imaginary travel. Through his readings and his correspondence, he journeyed in his imagination with remarkable freedom, plumbing the universe in his Itinerarium Extaticum Coeleste, plunging into the depths of the earth (and the belly of a whale) in his sequel to that book, Itinerarium Terrestre, touring China, Tibet, and India in his China Monumentis Illustrata (1668), and returning to antiquity in his biblical books. Only three works were based on his own excursions, Historia Eustachio-Mariana (Rome, 1665), an account of the sanctuary of Mentorella, whose church Kircher was instrumental in restoring; Latium (1671), dedicated to the countryside around Rome; and his troubled Itinerarium Hetruscum, savaged by a Tuscan censor extraordinary (who complained that “Germans never get it right”), and never published. In the 1670’s, as the church of Sant’Ignazio neared completion, its supporting structures finally began to encroach on Kircher’s Museum. The collections moved into a space on the ground floor of the Collegio, where the elderly Kircher complained about the darkness of the rooms; he was going blind. Ironically, this was the moment when his assistant and successor as curator, Georgius de Sepibus, published the first catalogue of the Museum’s collections. (As with Christoph Clavius, we know this Jesuit only by his Latinized name). It was printed in Amsterdam, by Johann Jansson, in 1678. There had been no need for a catalogue before; visitors had always had Athanasius Kircher in person to guide them around the collections. A second catalogue would be published in 1709 with significantly different emphases by the museum’s eighteenth-century curator, Filippo Buonanni. The two catalogues, perhaps not surprisingly, are organized along completely different lines. De Sepibus, who wrote under Kircher’s supervision, probably provides a faithful reflection of the museum’s original design, but Buonanni, a distinguished natural philosopher and one of the most authoritative voices in the debate on spontaneous generation, tried to arrange the collection more in accordance with the guiding principles of eighteenth-century natural history—we would say that he arranged it more scientifically. For De Sepibus, who actually fashioned many of Kircher’s clever machines, the museum’s collection stood out for its works of human ingenuity: the Egyptian artifacts, portraits of dignitaries, the wooden obelisks, and the mechanical devices he had helped to create: magic lanterns, camerae obscurae, bells, telescopes, microscopes, megaphones, furnaces, alembics, glass bulbs, pantographs, organs, clocks, and combinations of several instruments in one. The long title of his catalogue provides an concise account of what visitors may expect to find: The celebrated Museum of the Collegio Romano of the Society of Jesus, whose great section on antiquities, statues, images, and paintings from the bequest of Alfonso Donnini Father Athanasius Kircher has enriched with countless additional objects, at the insistence and pressing demands of many, especially foreigners and those avid for curiosities of learning, and many machines, as well as foreign objects brought back from the Indies . The catalogue’s preface emphasizes the close association between the museum and Kircher himself, calling it “the workshop of Art and Nature, the treasury of the Mathematical disciplines, the epitome of practical philosophy, the Musaeum Kircherianum”. The term “practical philosophy” is especially revealing of how de Sepibus (and by extension, Kircher) viewed the museum’s purpose; these were the days before the term “science” had come into general use to describe what the members of the Royal Society in London were calling “natural philosophy”, but in effect the phrase «epitome of practical philosophy» asserts that the museum of the Collegio Romano is a museum of science. Furthermore, by calling it an epitome, de Sepibus presents the Museum of the Collegio Romano as a miniature universe of practical philosophy. He uses the term “mathematical disciplines” in a broad sense as well, including astronomy and cosmology, an association that the museum’s fresco decorations intentionally reinforced. De Sepibus also provides our only image of the museum in its seventeenth-century setting: an engraving in which Father Kircher conducts two visitors around the gallery. The engraver used two ancient tricks of his art to make the museum seem much larger than it actually was: he constructed his perspective view from a high vantage, and he made the human figures in the foreground about half as tall as they would have been in life (Piranesi would employ the same techniques to give his views of Rome their sense of monumental scale). Many of the other objects on display in the engraving are still preserved; hence we know that the skeleton in the background belongs to a human fetus rather than an adult, and that the obelisks ranged down the center of the museum are little more than a meter in height. Except for the three tiny foreground figures, all the other elements of the museum are all shown in accurate proportion to one another. We meet Kircher and his companions beneath the fifth and innermost vault of the museum, where we can see that the engraver has reproduced the museum’s decorations with scrupulous accuracy. Sadly, by the time this image was published, the museum had been moved from its gallery, and Father Kircher, blind, deaf, and senile, could do little more than wander between his rooms and the Collegio’s pharmacy. He died in 1680, but the real Athanasius Kircher, the tireless investigator of the mysteries of divinity and the laws of nature, had faded away years before. Buonanni published his catalogue when he reorganized the Museum, neglected after the deaths of Kircher and de Sepibus. By that time, many of the marvelous machines had broken; they had never been built to withstand generations of students. To Buonanni’s own mind, the collection’s most precious holdings were its specimens of plants and animals, and these are what he emphasizes in his Musaeum Kircherianum. As the catalogue’s title reveals, however, the museum was still entirely associated with the name of its first curator. In 1773, Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Jesuit order, turning the schools and living quarters of the Collegio Romano over to secular priests. Athanasius Kircher’s museum was dispersed, but the building retained its dedication to scientific research; in 1787, the astronomer Father Giuseppe Calandrelli installed an observatory and weather station on the former Collegio’s roof. In 1823, Pope Leo XIII restored the Society of Jesus and returned the Collegio Romano, buildings and institution, to Jesuit hands. At that time, the museum’s holdings were reassembled and installed in a brightly lit third-floor gallery as the Museum of Natural History, a rubric that also included Kircher’s ancient bronzes and his exotic artifacts. There it survived the liberation of Rome in 1870, the suppression of the Collegio Romano in 1871, and the introduction of the building’s new tenants: the Liceo Ennio Quirino Visconti (the first state school of the new Italian state), the Ministry of the Interior, and the Biblioteca Vittorio Emanuele II, which incorporated the old Jesuit library among its collections. In 1882, the museum undertook a thoroughgoing campaign of restoration, repairing walls, pavements, and roof (installation of the library on the floor below had inflicted structural damage that is still visible today); further restorations were undertaken in 1892 and 1907. In the Fascist period, the museum’s holdings were divided among a series of specialized national museums: the Etruscan bronzes went to the Museo Nazionale Etrusco, the ancient sculpture to the Museo Nazionale delle Terme, the objects from China, Africa, and the Americas to the Museo Storico-Etnografico «Luigi Pigorini», the steatite statues and the carved meteorite to the Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Venezia, the biological specimens to the Department of Biology of the University of Rome, «La Sapienza», the scientific instruments, fetal skeleton and obelisks to the Liceo Visconti, and the paintings to the Museo Nazionale di Arte Antica in Palazzo Barberini. Kircher’s pen holders and blotter survive in the storerooms of the Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Venezia. The Fondo Gesuitico of the Biblioteca Vittorio Emanuele II, with original manuscripts for several of Kircher’s books, was eventually incorporated into the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in the Castro Pretorio. In 2001, an exhibition in Palazzo Venezia reunited the components of Athanasius Kircher’s Museum under the guidance of Eugenio Lo Sardo, briefly and compellingly replacing the modern idea of specialized museums with Father Kircher’s idea that a museum can be a universe in itself.
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