A cabinet or museum consists of many objects and works, but it too is an object and work with a history. The Royal Cabinet of Natural History, established in Madrid in 1776, is remarkable not only for its Creole origins and royal status but also for its afterlife as a lost project that spawned several museums and whose scattered traces continue to beguile us. Here we sketch not only the actual historical formation of the cabinet that would become a museum but also the hypothetical history that could have been and was not.

The key element of the Royal Cabinet in Madrid was the collection of its founding director, the Guayaquil-born Creole polymath Pedro Franco Dávila. The collection was assembled mainly in Paris, where Franco Dávila, a cacao merchant, dedicated himself to the careful study and collecting of natural specimens. In Paris he frequented salons and rubbed elbows with the leading naturalists and collectors of the day. Over the course of 25 years, Franco Dávila formed a collection that, according to the renowned naturalist Michel Adanson, was ‘truly the richest private collection ever assembled’¹. Its fame caught the attention of the Hispanic monarchy, which had maintained a cabinet of instruments and antiquities as well as a numismatic museum within the Royal Library since 1711 and in 1752 looked favourably upon Antonio de Ulloa’s proposal to form a natural history cabinet. After long negotiations (there were interested buyers in London and Saint Petersburg as well), part of the collection was purchased and brought, along with its collector, to Madrid by the agents of Charles III. After several years of waiting in storage, a small space for the cabinet was found in upper-floor rooms at the Goyeneche Palace on the Calle Alcalá, which also housed (and still houses) the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. Fittingly, over the portal of the palace hung the motto Naturam et artem sub uno tecto (‘Nature and art under one roof’). Though the space was not grand, the location was enviable, near the Puerta del Sol in central Madrid.

The cabinet opened to the public on 4 November 1776. According to the press, it awakened the curiosity of both madrileños and visitors to the city. Franco Dávila’s collection was particularly rich in shells, minerals and fossils. The collection included all classes of shell, including spherical, cylindrical and conch, brilliant as rubies. Minerals were classified in five orders: calcarean, alkaline, clayey, siliceous and ‘figured’, that is, naturally sculpted rocks. Finally, there were ‘petrifications’ or fossils, that is, curious pieces typically found in the cabinets of the day that bridged the mineral, animal and plant kingdoms. The collection also contained artefacts of human industry: paintings by Murillo and Bosch, gilded tobacco boxes, microscopes, weapons, ethnographic objects, Egyptian bronzes, chinaware, Caribbean idols. It was, in a word, a collection of unusual objects whose common denominator was precisely their singularity. Like the better known collection of Hans Sloane (another chocolate merchant with Parisian and Caribbean connections) that gave rise to the British Museum, the rare and curious were united on shelves and in vitrines.

The many gaps in Franco Dávila’s curious collection were soon filled by new items from the Indies remitted by scientific expeditions sponsored by the crown. Collaborating in this effort were many botanists, naturalists and navy officers, including Ruiz y Pavón from Peru, Martín Sessé y Lacasta and José Mariano Mociño from New Spain or Mexico, Nicolás de Azara from Paraguay, Juan de Cuéllar from the Philippines, Antonio Parra from Cuba and Alessandro Malaspina in his voyage around the world. The Royal Cabinet was soon inundated with corals, desiccated plants and animals, rocks, fossils and ethnographic pieces. The upstairs apartment of the Goyeneche Palace, which included Franco Dávila’s residence, was no longer enough. Indeed, the besieged Franco Davila would request that the remittances be stopped.

The enlightened Charles III, former prince of Naples and the Two Sicilies, now king of the Spains and emperor of the Indies, had grander designs for the Royal Cabinet. In 1785 he commissioned architect Juan de Villanueva, the champion of neoclassicism, to design a magnificent home for the Cabinet of Natural History, along with a chemistry laboratory, a Cabinet of Instruments and Machines and a new, yet-to-be-founded Academy of Sciences (Figure 2). Villanueva’s neoclassical palace of science was erected adjacent to the new Royal Botanical Garden. The museum and gardens were part of a comprehensive urbanisation and leisure project set on the outskirts of the city of Madrid. By a twist of fate, however, Villanueva’s natural history museum became the Prado art museum. How did it happen?

Fatal delays in the construction and preparation of Villanueva’s museum project meant that Franco Dávila’s collections were never installed in what might have been the most high-flying natural history museum in the world. Napoleon’s invading army occupied Villanueva’s edifice and the surrounding grounds, dismantling its lead roof for shot. Meanwhile, Napoleon’s Corsican-born brother Joseph Bonaparte was proclaimed José I of Spain and the Indies. King José I created by decree a new Museum of Painting, in part to house the select booty robbed at bayonet point by French troops from Spain’s royal palaces, churches and monasteries, including El Escorial. With the restoration of Ferdinand VII, the reversal of many of the Napoleonic decrees and the Cadiz Constitution of 1812, the Bonapartist painting museum was renamed Museo Fernandino. After the Treaty of Paris, over 200 works were returned to Spain, many from the Louvre. Many more objects were likely lost forever to private collectors. In 1819 Ferdinand VII opened the Royal Museum of Painting and Sculpture in Villanueva’s refitted palace of science, today known as the Prado Museum. The museum had been the pet project of his late wife and queen Maria Isabel de Braganza of Portugal, who had died the year before. Although the Royal Museum of Painting and Sculpture was not officially nationalised until 1868, in effect it was born national. It opened in 1819 with an exhibition of exclusively ‘Spanish’ paintings. In Spain and across Europe, the Napoleonic wake had given birth to national museums of art. By the end of the century, Spain’s image of itself was a mirror called the Spanish school of painting. The global museum and academy of science that Charles III had envisioned for the Prado was effectively erased.

Meanwhile, the sidelined Royal Cabinet of Natural History survived in the Goyeneche Palace, where it had its ups and downs. It assisted with the launch of Spain’s first scientific journal, Anales de Historia Natural (1799), closed during the Napoleonic occupation and limped through the 19th century with scarce budgets and only punctual achievements. At the end of that century the collection lost its home. After years in basements and warehouses, it was installed in what is today the National Museum of Natural Sciences (MNCN) on the north side of Madrid.

The 19th-century divorce of the sciences from the arts in museums and the culture at large was felt not only in Spain but across much of the world. The break-up of cabinets into disciplinary museums (of art, anthropology, history, natural history, science, etc.) was part of this story, played out in London, Paris, Madrid, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Rome, Stockholm, Saint Petersburg, Mexico City, Lima, Istanbul, Cairo and elsewhere. In Madrid, the Royal Cabinet was dislodged from its promised land at the Prado but its collections eventually flowed not only into the MNCN but also the National Archaeological Museum (MAN), from which its American components were later passed to the Museum of the Americas (MA). Today, the MNCN, the MAN and the MA all boast exhibits from the Creole Cabinet of Franco Dávila, and each traces its origins to it.

In this regard, the recent temporary exhibit in the Prado Museum of the contemporary artist and curator Miguel Ángel Blanco is instructive, for it made visible for the space of a few months the otherwise hidden consequences of the violent 19th-century separation of the art museum from the natural history or science museum. Blanco’s intervention in the permanent collection ran from November 2013 to April 2014 and was provocatively entitled, in a double entendre, Historias Naturales. Blanco’s audacious gesture juxtaposed natural objects, many drawn from the collections of the MNCN, with Prado masterworks. As Blanco noted, his intention was to make palpable the haunting ghost of Franco Dávila’s cabinet, thereby raising the spectre of natural science in a museal space consecrated by the historical triumph of the canvas.

In the first-floor vestibule, for example, Blanco suspended from the ceiling a stuffed royal eagle (águila real) poised to attack Leone and Pompeo Leoni’s bronze, Carlos V y el Furor. Named El furor de las águilas (The Fury of the Eagles), this arresting scene was the trademark image of the intervention, digitally reproduced on the Prado website and printed and displayed as the exhibit’s imposing poster (Figure 3). In one sense at least not unlike Diego Velázquez’ Las Meninas, Blanco’s inaugural scene was an allegory of an allegory, a mirror of a mirror whose ostensible object and subject of representation was defined by the cross of sovereign gazes. ‘This naturalised eagle’, noted Blanco, ‘with its body posed in a posture appropriate to its species, appears to free itself from its symbolic referent, threatening the emperor in its position of attack, hanging from the ceiling.’ Nature seemed to challenge the sovereignty of art.

Historias Naturales also drew the attention of museumgoers to the fact that many of the masterworks now hanging in the Prado mix mythical scenes of nature with very precise, naturalistic representations. Blanco thus sought to establish an initially disturbing but also ‘harmonising’ dialogue between natural science and art. The old dialectic was thus updated with multiple examples: an azurite rock specimen from Chile was placed before the greenish-blue waters of Patinir’s sublime Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx; fossils from a petrified forest were set alongside The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti by Botticelli. At the far end of the long gallery of the first floor and visible from the vestibule, Charles V’s sovereign bronze eyes and ours came to fix on a ‘naturalised bull’. In yet another ‘harmonious’ intervention, Blanco seductively positioned his stuffed Toro de Veragua before Peter Paul Ruben’s El rapto de Europa. As the caption notes, the bull was one of the many forms taken by Zeus. In El rapto, it is explained, Zeus ‘assumes the form of a beautiful white bull to seduce Europa to approach and caress him’. Europa climbs on his back and is carried off by the deceptive god. A mimetic visual effect of deception is created vis-à-vis the eye of the spectator, for ‘the presence of the naturalised bull in the museum attracts and threatens’.

But the halls of the Prado in November are not the streets of Pamplona in July. What was threatened here was not only the spectator’s aesthetic expectations but more generally art history’s sovereign reign over the halls of the Prado. Blanco’s intervention thus reminds us that the trace of Franco Dávila’s ‘lost’ cabinet may yet lead us into a future where the history of science and the history of art once again share the same roof.

FURTHER READING

Blanco, M.Á. (2013) Historias Naturales (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado).

Museo del Prado (n.d.) Historias Naturales: un provecto de Miguel Ángel Blanco (Madrid), https://www.museodelprado.es/actualidad/exposicion/historias-naturales-un-proyecto-de-miguel-angel/860d26d4-8793-4737-be9f-e744e5c2daf4.

Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (n.d.) ‘Google Arts and Culture’, http://www.mncn.csic.es/Menu/Exposiciones/Visitasvirtuales/seccion=1187&idioma=es_ES.do.

Pimentel, J. (2009) ‘Across nations and ages: the Creole collector and the many lives of the megatherium’, in The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820, edited by S. Schaffer, L. Roberts, K. Raj, and J. Delbourgo, 321–53 (Uppsala: Studies in History of Science).

Pimentel, J. (2003) Testigos del mundo (Madrid: Marcial Pons).

Sánchez Almazán, J. (ed.) (2012) Pedro Franco Dávila (1711–1786): de Guayaquil a la Royal Society. La época y la obra de un ilustrado criollo (Madrid: CSIC).

Sánchez-Valero, M., J.S. Almazán, J. Muñoz and F. Yagüe (2009) El gabinete perdido. Pedro Franco Dávila y la historia natural del Siglo de las Luces (Madrid: CSIC).

Thurner, M. (2015) ‘In the museum of the museum’, Museum Worlds, vol. 3, 105–27.

¹ M. Adanson, ‘Prologue’, in P. Franco Dávila and J-P. Romé de L’Isle, Catalogue systématique et raisonné des curiosités de la nature et de l’art, qui composent le Cabinet de M. Davila…, (Paris: Briasson, 1767), 2:vi.