About the Florentine Strozzi Manuscripts

Mara Miniati

Under the proposals of Anthony Turner to continue the research about the Strozzi collection, this paper introduces the manuscripts of the Strozzi Archives preserved in the Archivio di Stato in Florence. The starting point was the discovery by Anthony of the sale of scientific instruments that belonged to the Strozzi family. This very famous and ‘antique’ Florentine family, connected with and hostile to the Medicis, possessed an incredible patrimony. Different, but in any case important and rich branches of this family lived in other Italian cities and abroad. Real ‘wars’ between members of the family, questionable loves, and dangerous passions provoked the dispersion of the patrimony and the frequent sales of it, or of part of it. This paper presents the entity of the Florentine Strozzi Archives, their subject matter, and problems with understanding.

The legacy of David Wheatland

Mr William Andrewes

David Wheatland was one of the foremost collectors of scientific instruments. After his involvement in founding the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University in 1947, he devoted the majority of his time to preserving the apparatus of science at Harvard. He recognized at an early stage that there were some major gaps in the Harvard collection, and that, if it was to be used as a resource for teaching and research, it would greatly benefit from such outside acquisitions. Since the university had no funds for such purchases, he decided to form a collection of his own with the intention of eventually donating it to Harvard.

Before the beginning of World War II, he had already acquired several thousand books on the history of electricity and magnetism. These had inspired him to preserve the scientific instruments at Harvard, and, in turn, they provided a focus for his personal collection. The earliest magnetic instruments that he could find were portable sundials, and these he collected in abundance. He also purchased a very wide variety of electrical apparatus, illustrating the developments in this field from about 1750 to 1930.

As one of the most active collectors in the post-war years, Wheatland came into contact with all the major dealers. This talk will discuss those who helped him to form his personal collection and describe some of the remarkable instruments that he acquired between 1945 and 1980.

Alain Brieux, dealer and scholar in Paris: his archive on scientific instruments

Mr Willem Mörzer Bruyns

In 1958 Alain Brieux (1922-1985) started work in a Paris antiquarian bookstore founded in 1883, at no 48 rue Jacob in St Germain des Pres. After 1960, he specialized in his own field of interest, the history of science and medicine and historic scientific instruments. The shop, renamed Librarie Brieux, became an important meeting point for collectors and scholars, as Brieux was not only a dealer but became a recognized expert and scholar in his field. Over the years the Librarie Brieux published sales catalogues and a number of facsimile editions on historic scientific instruments.

Similar to probably any other dealer in historic objects, Alain Brieux had both individuals and institutions among his customers. Among these were David Wheatland (1898-1993) and Robert Seligman (1921-1999). Institutional customers were the Stewart Museum in Montreal, The Time Museum in Rockford, Illinois, the Bakken Museum and Library in Minneapolis, and the computer firm IBM. After 1972, Brieux played an important role in exposing the Williams forgeries, some of which had been offered to him for sale.

Professor Willy Hartner of Frankfurt University stimulated Brieux in his scholarly work, and in order to understand Islamic astrolabes he learnt Arabic. In 1975 Brieux was one of the three founders of the International Astrolabe Society. He published on Islamic astrolabes with Marcel Destombes and Francis Maddison. With the latter he prepared the manuscript of the Répertoire des Facteurs d’Astrolabes et leurs oeuvres, which will hopefully be published soon.

Brieux’s business archives and documentation is the residue of twenty-five years of dealing and scholarship. They contain records of many of the instruments that went though his business, correspondence with customers, and dossiers on business and scholarly projects. There are also 100 portfolios crammed with photographs of instruments. This archive should be catalogued, and arrangements should be made with the Librarie so that, in the future, the archive will remain available for students and scholars.

Dormant treasures: the Zinner-Archive at Frankfurt University

Dr Silke Ackermann

Dr. Ernst Zinner (1886-1970), director of the Remais-Sternwarte in Bamberg (Germany) 1926-1953 and distinguished historian of Renaissance astronomy, is well known to historians of scientific instruments through his manifold publications on instruments, amongst which his Deutsche und niederländische astronomische Instrumente des 11 – 18 Jahrhunderts (Munich: Beck, 1956), is certainly the most widely known.

Zinner was an untiring traveller, always interested to visit instrument collections or to see sundials on public buildings all over Europe before and after the Second World War. He painstakingly noted what he saw and which pictures he took, thereby accumulating an enormous reference collection on instruments.

While he sold his books, pictures and manuscripts to San Diego, California, in his will he left all his papers to Frankfurt University from where he had received in 1961 an honorary doctorate (Dr. rer. nat. h.c.) in acknowledgement of his great merits to the history of astronomy. These papers, including his diaries, his correspondence with other renowned scholars in the field, interleaved copies of his own publications, negatives, prints, and some instruments, contain most valuable material for research on instruments and collections. Since many of the objects he saw and recorded were lost or destroyed in or after the war, or have severely suffered from other influences, these papers already constitute a historical record in themselves.

Even though it was Zinner’s fondest wish to make his collections widely accessible, the material has hardly ever been studied and is scarcely known to researchers. The purpose of this paper is to give a general overview of the material.

The papers of Thomas Henry Court (1868-1951)

Dr Peter de Clercq

From obituaries and articles written by Harold Heywood (1951, 1969) and Jane Insley (1982), T.H. Court emerges as a man whose activities in the field of historical scientific instruments straddle the artificial boundary lines between trade, collecting and scholarship. Silvia de Renzi, in a recent paper on Robert S. Whipple, who bought many instruments and books from Court, characterizes Court as ‘a successful broker in the varied world of antiquarians, museum curators and academics’.

With his fellow collector R.S. Clay, Court wrote the History of the Microscope (1932), largely based on items in his own collection. Most of his collection, which also contained other types of instruments, he ‘parked’ in, and eventually donated to, the Science Museum, South Kensington. He also gathered information on the history of instrument makers. His collection of trade cards makes up almost half of the material in H.R. Calvert’s catalogue Scientific Trade Cards in the Science Museum Collection (1971).

The Court papers in the Science Museum Library consists of six boxes of correspondence, manuscript and typescript notes on the history of scientific instruments and their makers, see catalogues and offprints of articles on scientific instruments. A son of Harold Heywood (d. 1971), to whom Court had evidently passed his archival material, presented these papers to the Science Museum in 1979. Additions to this material came in 1992 from the office of curator Denys Vaughan.

In the Science Museum Documentation Centre, there are two bulging files on Court’s instrument collection in the Science Museum, and these too contain much information on Court’s place in the scientific instrument community.