Museo Cartaceo

(The Paper Museum)

   The Museo Cartaceo was a collection of approximately 7,000 drawings created by the leading Baroque masters of Rome, among them Pietro da Cortona, Nicolas Poussin, and François Duquesnoy, for the patron and collector Cassiano dal Pozzo to record the natural and man-made world. The collection included a significant number of archaeological renderings that recorded the monuments from antiquity that proved to be of great use to artists of the period, who were given access to view them and who borrowed elements from them to include in their own compositions. The collection also provided visual documentation in the botanical, geological, ornithological, and zoological fields. The drawings were catalogued by category and bound to facilitate their use for research. The Museo Cartaceo provided the foundations for today's research and classification methodology and a gauge with which to measure the scientific and archaeological concerns of the period. When dal Pozzo died in 1657, the volumes were inherited by his brother Carlo Antonio. They later became the property of Pope Clement XI, who purchased them in 1704. His family, the Albani, sold the collection to George III of England and most of the drawings are now housed in the London Royal Library.