Nature on Display
24. October 2008
Tøyen hovedgård, Naturhistorisk Museum/ The Natural History Museums
How has nature been put on display in different rooms and by different means? Speakers
from various disciplines will elucidate this question by examples taken from museums,
private collections, visual technologies and textbooks.
The seminar is arranged by the project “Nature and the natural”, IKOS, UiO. Questions
may be directed to Liv Emma Thorsen, l.e.thorsen@ikos.uio.no Sign up before 20.
October to Anne Stovner, IKOS a.s.stovner@ikos.uio.no
Students are welcome. The proceedings will be held in Rokokkosalen, Tøyen hovedgård.
Programme
9.00-9.15
Nature on display: Introduction
Liv Emma Thorsen
9.15-10.00
Interpreting nature at The Manchester Museum – from ‘original modern’ to postindustrial.
Henry McGhie, Natural Environments, The Manchester Museum, Manchester University
10.15-11.00
Cultural performances of cod – at Tromsø University Museum.
Anita Maurstad, Tromsø Museum, University of Tromsø
11.15-12.00
A cyclone in my living room: John Aitken and the domestication of ‘outdoor physics’.
Ben Marsden, Department of History, School of Divinity, History and Philosophy,
University of Aberdeen
12.00-13.00 Lunch
13.00-13.30
“Exotism” on display at La Specola Museum.
Gianna Innocenti, Department of zoology, La Specola Museum, University of Florence
13.30-14.00
Representing the basking shark.
Brita Brenna, Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo
14.00-14.15 Coffee and tea
14.15-15.00
Staging prehistoric worlds: Visual technology and literary technique in the nineteenth
century.
Ralph O’Connor, Department of History, School of Divinity, History and Philosophy,
University of Aberdeen
15.15-16.00
A fatal visit to Venice: the transformation of an Indian elephant.
Liv Emma Thorsen, Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University
of Oslo
Abstracts
Interpreting nature at The Manchester Museum- from ‘original modern’ to postindustrial
Manchester, in the northwest of England, is commonly regarded as the first industrial
city, having developed through technological innovation during the Industrial Revolution.
This initial development was followed by a period of economic decline through the mid
Twentieth Century and the subsequent emergence of a post-industrial economy. Given
this history, Manchester is an interesting model with which to explore societal relations
with nature and with natural objects. Written descriptions of early Manchester as a bleak,
unhealthy society can be contrasted with Romanticist visions of nature and the collecting
activities of local naturalists. The ‘culture of collecting’ that existed through Nineteenth
Century Britain meant that large collections of natural objects were formed by those with
the time, money and inclination to do so. These were brought together in Manchester in
private collections and latterly in a private museum; this fell on financial difficulties and
the collection became the property of Owens College, now The University of
Manchester. This paper will explore a number of themes related to the natural history
collections and displays, notably (1) the organisation of the collections, (2) the value
systems that were attached to them at different times, (3) the relationship between display
and other aspects of museum work, (4) the biographies of a selection of individual
objects and the importance of the concept of the synecdoche in understanding museum
displays and collections; (5) particular attention will be paid to the tensions that exist
between the founding principles of the museum and contemporary approaches to
museums and to nature and its interpretation.
Henry A. McGhie
Natural Environments, The Manchester Museum
The University of Manchester
henry.mcghie@manchester.ac.uk
Cultural performances of cod – at Tromsø University Museum
While museums traditionally present natural sciences’ nature or cultural sciences’
culture, Tromsø University Museum is currently presenting an exhibition on cultural
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performances of nature. The cod – an important fish in many of the western coastal
societies – is assigned various societal and cultural missions, and the cod’s natures
depend on who speaks for it. Some will state it is a EU- proponent, others will state the
opposite. Presenting the exhibition, as well as some of its cods, my talk will also focus on
some of the challenges we faced displaying perspectives on nature in a museum
exhibition.
Anita Maurstad
Tromsø Museum,
University of Tromsø
Anita.Maurstad@tmu.uit.no
A cyclone in my living room: John Aitken and the domestication of ‘outdoor
physics’
This paper takes the work of John Aitken, meteorologist, to illustrate one facet of ‘nature
on display’ in late nineteenth-century Scotland. Those evaluating Aitken’s career in the
early twentieth century made him out to be an aficionado of ‘outdoor physics’. They
recognised his profound and spiritual engagement with the ‘everyday’ phenomena of the
natural environment, whilst understanding that his achievements in explain those
phenomena (not least the formation of clouds) according to scientific canons was not to
explain them away: in no sense did it diminish, for him, a sense of glory and wonder. A
key feature of Aitken’s work, and my focus here, was his ambition to reduce complex
phenomena on the largest natural scale (a beautifully coloured sky, a vast weather
system) to the scope of his country house workshop laboratory. Trained as an engineer,
Aitken used his fine mechanical dexterity to capture a cyclone in his living room. This
process, labelled by Peter Galison ‘mimicry’, used models as suggestive analogies
mimicking natural phenomena, from which useful inferences could be made. It was a
scientific style intermediate between the reductive, analytical practices of the physical
laboratory and the observation of untamed natural phenomena. In an age of ‘big science’,
requiring large-scale international involvement and expense shouldered more often by the
institution than the amateur, Aitken prided himself on a distinctive ‘test-tube kind of
work’, devoid of mathematical complication, that nevertheless won him the Royal
Society’s prestigious Royal Medal. For Aitken, glaciers, rainbows, and clouds could all
be reduced to small-scale homely demonstrations fit for gentlemanly entertainment.
Ben Marsden
Department of History
School of Divinity, History and Philosophy
University of Aberdeen
b.marsden@abdn.ac.uk
“Exotism” on display at La Specola Museum
The Florentine Museum “La Specola” was opened to the public of any social level in
1775, by order of the enlightened Grand Duke Peter Leopold of Lorraine who wished to
put together all the “natural curiosities” from his collections, as well as from the Medici
ones, with a didactical purpose.
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The zoological collections consisted of many Italian and foreign specimens and among
them, on display there were several amazing animals, peculiar for their provenance, rarity
or dimension that gave rise to the social imaginary of the Museum visitors.
The talk will show a selection of the unusual animals on display and give an account of
their arrival at La Specola Museum as many specimens have a “story” to tell the visitor.
One of the most ancient specimens, still on display in a Museum Hall, is the skeleton of
an Indian elephant that was kept alive and exhibited to the Florentine people in the
Loggia dei Lanzi, near Palazzo Vecchio in Florence till 1655, the year of its death.
Champollion’s expedition to Egypt in 1828-29 brought back to La Specola a mummy of
the Nile crocodile, still exhibited in the Reptilian room. First Adolfo Targioni Tozzetti
and later Enrico Hillyer Giglioli, through exchanges with foreign institutions, researchers
and relevant personalities of the time or through expeditions abroad increased the
collection with specimens that were prepared for the public exhibit in characteristic
“dioramas”, sometimes representing their behaviour, exceptionality or weirdness.
Among them, the rare big Mediterranean fishes, the fragile Venus flower basket sponge
(Euplectella aspergillum) that arrived to the Museum from unusual catches, the giant
salamander (Andrias japonicus) donated alive to the Director of the Museum by the
Italian ambassador in Japan in 1875 and kept for more than 40 years in an aquarium, or
the Tasmanian wolf, a gift of the Australian Museum, presently an extinct species.
Gianna Innocenti
Museo di Storia Naturale, Sezione Zoologica
Università di Firenze
gianna.innocenti@unifi.it
Representing the basking shark
This paper will discuss the work involved in making a basking shark into a scientifically
valuable representation. Basking sharks are enormous animals living in the North Sea,
and they are particularly valuable for their content of oil. By the mid-1700 century they
were increasingly sought by fishermen of the North Sea coast. In the 1760s the basking
shark had not been described scientifically, and the naturalist-bishop of Trondheim
diocese in the Northern part of Norway made it his duty to make an accurate description
of this animal. Commonly these giant fishes would be killed and the liver cut out, while
at open sea. On the behest of the bishop fishermen tried to observe and represent the fish
– wooden models were made to represent it. Later written descriptions were delivered by
the local schoolteacher. Thereafter fishermen were asked to bring the head and the gills
of the fish to the bishop, and finally they succeeded in stuffing a fish with moss and
bringing the whole animal to his home in Trondheim. At last when the whole fish were
present in his house, the bishop could make an accurate scientific description, which also
accounted for the hardship and work involved in bringing the fish to his collection where
it could be studied scientifically. My interest in this paper is to trace the work involved in
making the fish representative for the scientific community and to investigate what role
the fish was to play in the writings of the bishop.
Brita Brenna
Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages
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University of Oslo
b.s.brenna@ikos.uio.no
Staging Prehistoric Worlds: Visual Technology and Literary Technique in the
Nineteenth Century
The decades following the French Revolution saw the development of a range of visual
technologies by which the natural world was displayed to increasingly diverse urban
audiences across Europe and America. Panoramas, dioramas, stage scenery and new
forms of magic lantern represented landscapes on a grand scale and with minute attention
to verisimilitude, designed to produce the illusion of being present at the scene depicted.
This paper examines how these technologies were drawn on by science writers in the
nineteenth century in order to popularize the new science of geology, transporting readers
into the landscapes of the vanished past. Visual displays themselves (such as the monsters
in the Crystal Palace Gardens, or pictorial representations in museums and books) have
attracted more attention from historians, but until the end of the century words played a
more sustained role than images in enabling audiences to imagine these lost worlds and
their monstrous denizens.
Ralph O’Connor
Department of History
School of Divinity, History and Philosophy
University of Aberdeen
ralph.j.oconnor@gmail.com
A fatal visit to Venice: the transformation of an Indian elephant
Museo di Zoologia in Padova, Italy has a skeleton of a male Indian elephant on display.
The skeleton is referred to as “Elefante indiano di Venezia” or “the Indian elephant of
Venice” on the museum’s web site and in written sources. The caption under the
photograph of the skeleton says “scheletro dell’elefantino” or “the skeleton of the small
elephant”. The fact that this natural history specimen is presented to the public as
something more than an example of Elephas maximus indicus is quite special. This paper
will examine the biography and transformation of the elephant from being a darling of the
public when part of a travelling menagerie, to being a natural history specimen displayed
in a museum. The elephant’s biography sheds light on possible connections between
nature, culture, aesthetics and the appreciation of animals.
Liv Emma Thorsen
Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages
University of Oslo
l.e.thorsen@ikos.uio.no
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