The ontological status of the early modern drawing album is historically complex, being both a book of visual knowledge and an assemblage of art works; an artist’s preparatory instrument and a collectible in its own right. As Catherine Loisel has recently noted, terms describing such objects – sketchbook, taccuino, livre de dessins – illustrate the conceptual range of its historical perception and the difficulties of classification: some were placed in libraries as books; others in museums as works of art. This paper will analyse the changing functions of the early modern drawing album from artist’s studios to libraries, drawing cabinets, and museums. It will then draw on this history of institutional classification to interpret the forms of visual knowledge these albums were understood to represent.

This paper aims at a parallel consideration of connoisseurship – or ‘expert cultures’ – and collecting practices in the arts and natural history in the long 17^th century. Starting from Father Resta’s drawing albums and some contemporary (mainly) graphic collections of different naturalists, I will scrutinize the underlying structures of order and patterns of knowledge production and transfer. By doing so the original purpose and further use of the relevant collections will be highlighted and analyzed as well as practices of systematization and epistemic values or meanings. On the basis of the presented material, I intend to showcase how collecting preceded (scientific) knowledge in different nascent disciplines and how these fields of knowledge possibly influenced each other at such an early stage of ‘scientification’.

Early scientific societies created and collected large quantities of prints and drawings in the course of their natural philosophical work. They collected and displayed these images in a variety of ways, sometimes hung in meeting rooms or bound in albums. How did these collections shape the knowledge produced by these institutions? And what does it mean for a scientific society to have an art collection?

This paper considers these questions by investigating not only the collecting practices of early scientific institutions, but also how images circulated between them. I will focus on three of the first and most influential scientific societies: the Accademia del Cimento in Florence, the Royal Society of London, and the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris. By comparing the graphic and collecting practices of these institutions, this paper aims to understand how image collecting aided the development of organized science in the early modern period.