Bologna, January 28, 2020 - If the Encyclopédie by Diderot and D'Alembert is the scientific synthesis work par excellence of the European Enlightenment , a great editorial success - perhaps today unknown to most - also had Georges' Histoire naturelle- Louis Leclerc count of Buffon . Published by the Imprimerie Royale, which was based in the Louvre palace in Paris, it had in a few years many editions, issues, counterfeits and translations throughout Europe, arriving as far as Bologna with the Series of quadruped animals, which appeared in installments. , on a weekly basis, between 1783 and 1787 , testifying to the success of this type of publication in the years of the most widespread affirmation of Enlightenment thought.

The exhibition “Zoo di Carta . The dissemination of zoological images of Buffon's Histoire naturelle in eighteenth-century Italy ” by Pierangelo Bellettini, director of San Giorgio in Poggiale, one of the venues of the Genus Bononiae circuit. Museums in the city.

The exhibition intends to reconstruct the extraordinary success of the engravings of quadrupedal animals in the editio princeps of the work of Georges-Louis Leclerc Count of Buffon made in Paris between 1749 and 1767 in Italy.

The prints on display are a selection of the 132 zoological illustrations (out of the 200 in the complete collection) recently acquired by the San Giorgio in Poggiale Library, all printed in Bologna in the 1880s by the chalcographers Antonio Cattani and Antonio Nerozzi; a publishing enterprise that is one of the most significant episodes in the history of Bolognese typography in the second half of the eighteenth century.

The one exhibited in San Giorgio in Poggiale is almost an ante litteram collection of figurines : Angora cats, hyenas, poodles, anteaters, now depicted on naturalistic backgrounds now in domestic settings. The Bolognese illustrations are distinguished by the rich descriptive apparatus of the individual figures: they are known animals - the horse, the donkey, the ox - but more often unusual, those that were exhibited for a fee at fairs, such as elephants, rhinos, hippos , camels, or even animals recently discovered in the distant territories of Siam, Guinea, Canada, Brazil. The exotic component has a notable importance in characterizing the environment in which the animal is depicted: pagodas with bulbous domes and mosques with minarets surmounted by the Islamic crescent often appear to define the fauna of countries far from the European continent. Exoticism sometimes takes on archaeological connotations, with ruins alluding to a very distant and mysterious past; so the animals have in the background ancient ruins, togate statues of ancient Romans, pyramids and sphinxes. The recovery of the ancient and the charm of the ruins are a characteristic that is increasingly connoting the eighteenth-century sensiblerie and, present even in the original drawings by Jacques de Sève (from which the Bolognese prints derive), will perpetuate itself in the images of the various editions of the Buffon's work, representing one of the non-marginal success factors.

The exhibition also makes it possible to highlight the important role that Bologna had as a center for the diffusion of the new Enlightenment thought as well as for the production of the illustrated scientific book, immediately after the great cultural and publishing capitals of the Italian eighteenth century: Milan, Naples, Rome and Venice.