The Amateur’s Gaze vs. the “Learned” Eye: Theorizing Natural History Collections in the Second Half of the 18th Century

The flourishing practice of natural history collecting, which characterized the second half of the 18th century, was supported by a major theoretical effort to define how samples should be collected, preserved and displayed. This specialized literature was mainly produced within the French academic world to educate the non-specialized readership and to provide naturalists with the right methods to set up their cabinets. As a consequence, texts theorized two opposite views on collecting, reflecting two different approaches to nature. On the one hand, the scientific collection, aimed at the most faithful reproduction of nature and its laws through a rigorous and methodical display of the specimens; on the other hand, the amateur cabinet, conceived a space for visual pleasure where to contemplate natural beauty and inside which aesthetic choices offset the difficulty of making natural order visible. This paper will question this theoretic dichotomy. I will argue that the scholarly French élite referred to the “taste vs. method” opposition as a strategy to discredit non-professional collectors in order to legitimize the practice of scientific collecting as the only one able to formulate a valid scientific content. As a matter of fact, was the opposition between amateurs and scientists truly operational? Was it really possible to exhibit nature in a cabinet without using any decorative artificialities which, according to scientists, prevented the visitors of natural history cabinets from experiencing and understanding the natural order?