The Paper Zoo

There is a nice miscellany of zoological illustration on show at an on-line exhibition entitled Lo zoo di carta (the paper zoo), hosted by the Biblioteca Panizzi, of Reggio Emilia, Italy, from which I have picked out the following images:

This shaggy camel is one of the hundreds of engravings in Swiss humanist and scientist Conrad Gesner’s five-volume Historia Animalium (1516-1565).

This engraving of a mermaid is taken from a volume entitled Istorica descrizione de tre regni Congo, Matamba et Angola, a publication of one Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi (d. 1692), a Capuchin friar and missionary.

These are some of the many oddities pictured in a treatise simply entitled De Monstris, by Fortunato (or Fortunio) Liceti (1577-1657), an Aristotelian scholar who also published works on hieroglyphics, spontaneous generation and astronomical controversies.

This distinguished-looking armadillo is taken from the great Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particuliére of George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (1707-1788), a 44 volume production published between 1749 and 1804.

And, lastly, here is a delicately-tinted etching of a porcupine, taken from a four-volume album of quadruped animals, ‘drawn from nature’ published in Venice in the 1770s.

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