Wunder Musaeum - Museo di Arte e Scienza del Liceo E.Q. Visconti

The Liceo Visconti, since 1870 the first public classical high school in the capital, is a 'place of memory'. It is a place where many events in Italian history, in the history of Rome and the Church from the 16th century to the present day have taken place, where illustrious scholars from four centuries of history have passed through, from Clavius to Galilei, Kircher, Boscovich, Leibniz and Secchi, right up to today's Nobel Prize winner for economics, Modigliani. This is the former Roman College of the Jesuits, built by Pope Gregory XIII and inaugurated in its initial nucleus on 28 October 1584. A place of memory can make us dialogue with the past by reviving its spirit, or remain a simple, well-preserved antique collection, or something whose memory is pulverised. This is a possible fate in modernity: the end of the sacred that was advancing made Hölderlin and then Heidegger say that poets in the time of (spiritual) poverty are forced to reduce the sacred to the trace of the gods that have fled. In our time, 'poverty' is affecting the very dimension of time and memory: flattened in the dimension of the absolute present of multimedia, we risk pulverising memory, the roots of our future. As early as 1986, a group of willing high school teachers (among whom we would particularly like to remember Alessandro Orlandi and William Russell) tried to revive a section of the Collegio Romano that had been gradually dismembered in the twentieth century and was in danger of disappearing: the Kircherian Museum. Kircher, successor to Cristoforo Clavius in the chair of mathematics at the College, an expert scholar of mathematics, physics, Egyptology, alchemy, astrology and occult sciences (as was the spirit of the time), received a donation of archaeological material from Alfonso Donini in 1651, which was to become the nucleus of one of the most important museums in Europe at the time. It is only natural that he should be entrusted with the task of looking after it, both because of his natural curiosity, but also because he was the heir to Clavius' room which already held mathematical and astronomical instruments. The Museum of the Roman College that will be created will become a unique experience for the seventeenth-century visitor, who will be amazed by a journey that is both a profound initiation into the knowledge of the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm, between the universe and living nature, and an expression of the contacts that the Jesuit community had with the whole known world at that time. The structure is not that of the thematic museum that we know from the 19th century, but is based on what had been the cabinet of curiosities, or "chamber of wonders", a composite collection of art objects and naturalistic collections in northern Europe.

Kircher's Museum as described by De Sepi

The heyday of the Museo del Collegio Romano came in the 1670s before Kircher's death (1680) when his main collaborator De Sepi, a 'mechanic', drew up a catalogue of the museum together with Kircher himself (there are traces of his handwriting in the manuscript) (published in 1678). It is on the basis of this description that part of our new exhibition has tried to give at least an impression of what Kircher's museum was like at the height of its splendour. Even the physical location of the museum, now in the Aula Magna, is no longer the same. In a new wing built in the first half of the 17th century, the gallery is located, probably in a cross-vaulted room which now houses the Library of the Ministry of Culture. In the new built environment, the museum moves its steps from the moment described also with an evocative picture by De Sepi .

De Sepi was a "mechanic": on the other hand, the original museum also had an important part in the wonder of new technological objects: clocks, optical instruments, musical instruments, mirrors, the first automatic machines are also protagonists of this Baroque wonder. The vaults were frescoed with symbolic elements, in the centre were some wooden obelisks which are among the very few authentic elements left at the Visconti from this moment in the history of the Kircherian Museum, and the museum presented itself as a kaleidoscope of visual and sound experiences relating to materials, animal species, archaeological finds and sounds from all over the world with which the Jesuit communities had contact, from Rome to China, from Brazil to Europe, from antiquity to the present day. In 1680 Kircher died, and part of the museum did not survive him and was dispersed. The most illustrious victims are his famous 'machines'. Of the exhibits from this early phase of the museum perhaps an armillary sphere and a Gregorian telescope could belong to this 17th century phase, or to the period immediately following.

The Kircherian Museum after Kircher

The museum has a difficult period until 1698, when the naturalist and musicologist Father Filippo Bonanni renews it and provides a new catalogue. Bonanni's period is the first time the museum was moved from the library to the corridor of St. Louis. After Bonanni's death in 1725, the museum's fortunes were intertwined with those of the College's return to a central role in astronomy and physics: the mathematician in charge of the scientific instruments was Orazio Borgondi, the teacher of Ruggero Boscovich, the Jesuit who conceived the Observatory of the Collegio Romano and was responsible for the acceptance of Newton's doctrines. Another serious dispersion of the museum's materials occurred after the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773. In fact, it was in these late eighteenth-century years that the antiquities of the Kircheriano helped to give birth to part of the Vatican Museums. These were the years in which the Pio Clementino Museum had as its prefect the father of Ennio Quirino Visconti, the archaeologist who in the Napoleonic period would work first in the Roman museums and then in Paris, and who would give his name to the school at the end of the nineteenth century. Attempts to reorganise the Kircheriano were made after 1839, under the management of the new prefect Giuseppe Marchi. After 1814, the independent physics department was gradually strengthened under the mid-century management of Angelo Secchi. With Rome as the capital of Italy, the Collegio Romano had by then passed into the hands of the Italian State: in 1870 part of it became the Liceo Visconti, part ended up housing the National Library, and the Museo Kircheriano , after a brief resurrection under the direction of De Ruggiero, and Luigi Pigorini from 1881, saw its collection divided between various institutions: the university museums of "La Sapienza" University for the naturalistic collections, the astronomical museum linked to the Calandrelli Observatory directed by Father Angelo Secchi until his death in 1878, the Villa Giulia museum for Etruscan antiquities, the Pigorini museum for ethnographic antiquities, what was to become the National Roman Museum for ancient art and numismatic collections. A reduced original nucleus of the Kircheriano remains at the Liceo Visconti: part of the project linked to this exhibition consists in being able to retrace, at least virtually, the path of this final phase of the Kircheriano, through the itinerary of the places where the objects of this vanished museum can be found.

The Scientific Cabinets and the Visconti Museum

In 1870, De Ruggiero gave Professor Mantovani, a science teacher at the Liceo Visconti, an endowment of scientific instruments and naturalistic collections consisting of marbles, exotic woods in rectangular tablets, animals (including a crocodile, reptiles and dried fish), an 18th-century herbarium, 400 glass preparations, Father Kircher's wooden obelisks and the entire physics cabinet according to Gilberto Govi's inventory with 423 physics instruments. It should be noted that the Astronomical Observatory in the second half of the 19th century had been under the direction of Father Angelo Secchi, a distinguished father of astrophysics in Italy, who, due to his scientific merits, remained in charge of the Observatory until his death in 1878. Some astronomical and meteorological instruments therefore migrated to the Observatory in the Calandrelli tower and then to museums under the direction of the Vatican. At the end of the nineteenth century belong the devices for repeating Foucault's pendulum experiment, and in 1894 a "magic lantern" was purchased for projecting plates.Before and after the Great War this section of the Liceo Visconti experienced a particularly happy season, due to the shrewd management of Antonio Neviani between 1892 and 1927, who transformed the laboratories back into a museum structure, with the purchase of furniture and display cases. On the upper floors of the lyceum, the laboratories were even transformed into storerooms for provisions for the school staff during the Great War.

It is a dignity that the Visconti Natural History Museum will only retain until the 1940s. The need for classrooms led to a progressive dismantling of the structure, culminating in the creation of new laboratories in the 1970s, which ended up reducing the historical collections to the attic, now "devalued". It was at this point that the valuable work of Prof. Alessandro Orlandi and Prof. William Russell between 1986 and 1991, with the collaboration of the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence, and the valuable work of restoring objects from the physics cabinet by researcher Paolo Brenni came into play: this enabled a new accurate cataloguing of the physics instruments, and the restoration of 17th century works such as Visconti's armillary sphere. Kircher's precious wooden obelisks are therefore also located in this "upper section", while Neviani's naturalistic collections are already housed in the Aula magna.  This is the beginning of the dream of virtually bringing Kircher's original museum back to life in the Collegio Romano, a dream that was certainly initiated by the recently deceased Dean Dora Marinari. A milestone in this process was the 2001 exhibition 'Athanasius Kircher.  The Museum of the World. Machines, esotericism, art', curated by Eugenio Lo Sardo and held at Palazzo Venezia. This exhibition also inspired our display, in an attempt to recreate as far as possible a museum tour starting from the original museum as a theatrically baroque staging of the world and knowledge then available to seventeenth-century humanity. Obviously, the intention of the work begun by Alessandro Orlandi (who had the good fortune to work full-time for the Museum for a long period) was to start from the traces of Kircher, preserving the valuable work of his predecessors, curators of the Visconti Museum, such as Mantovani and Neviani, or illustrious predecessors in the Physics Department, such as Secchi. This remains our intention, which in addition to providing a more accessible location in the Aula Magna for the most important pieces of the Visconti collection, is to retrace the Visconti "museums" from Kircher to Kircheriano, from the Neviani and Mantovani naturalistic and mineralogical collections to the Aula magna at the end of the 20th century, from the physics cabinet of Boscovich's master to Angelo Secchi's astrophysical instruments of the 19th century, up to the refurbishment and restoration of the physics cabinet by Orlandi and Russell in 1991. In recent years the museum's curatorial work, generally managed by science teachers, has been joined by other specialisations (such as the history of science for the writer of these lines, Paola Vasconi, who organised the educational work connected with the celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the death of Cristoforo Clavius, Galileo's distinguished mathematician correspondent), or art history, or physics. This has made it possible to recover other materials, such as a unicorn head (by Cecilia Piana Agostinetti), or to reconstruct two specimens of Foucault pendulums, a fine wooden specimen kept in the Aula Magna, and another in the physics cabinet (by Cecilia Piana Agostinetti with the technical advice of engineer Massimo Calabresi). Finally, the students were involved in the museum's activities by building a small cabinet of naturalistic curiosities in the laboratory area (curated by Giorgio Narducci). Finally, under the direction of Clara Rech, the current group, made up of Romana Bogliaccino, Cecilia Piana Agostinetti and Paola Vasconi, brought to fruition the idea of reconstructing a "room of wonders" inside the Aula magna to rebuild a Museum of the Collegio Romano that tells the story of the Visconti "museums".