Inside the Collection: Cassiano dal Pozzo's Extraordinary Paper Museum

In this film our curator explores the extraordinary Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, one of the most ambitious intellectual projects of the seventeenth century and one of the greatest treasures of the Royal Collection. Bringing together thousands of drawings, watercolours and prints, Cassiano created a vast visual archive designed to document the natural world, ancient civilisations and human knowledge itself.

Unlike many collectors of his age, Cassiano dal Pozzo was not primarily interested in acquiring the most expensive or prestigious objects. Instead, he sought to create a comprehensive record of knowledge through images. Over the course of his life, he assembled a collection of around ten thousand drawings and prints covering subjects as diverse as Roman antiquities, archaeology, architecture, zoology, botany, geology and scientific observation.

Much of this remarkable collection was later acquired for King George III and is now preserved within the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. Together, these drawings form one of the most important visual archives created during the age of scientific discovery and scholarship.

The film examines some of the surviving albums assembled by Cassiano, including collections devoted to the everyday objects of ancient Rome. Rather than collecting rare antiquities themselves, Cassiano commissioned artists to record objects from collections across Italy, creating an organised visual reference library that could be studied and compared. These drawings reveal a fascination with daily life in the Roman world, from lamps and vessels to tokens, tools and household objects.

Among the highlights is a magnificent drawing by Pietro da Cortona, depicting the Trophy of Marius, one of the monumental sculptures of ancient Rome. While modern viewers may admire it as a work of art, Cassiano valued it as archaeological evidence, carefully documenting details of Roman armour, decoration and military equipment to better understand the ancient past.

The Paper Museum was also devoted to the study of natural history. Cassiano and his collaborators investigated specimens that challenged conventional understanding, including corals, fossils and unusual minerals. These drawings reflect the growing scientific curiosity of the period and a desire to classify and understand the natural world through observation and evidence.

The collection includes extraordinary zoological studies, such as a detailed drawing of a hippopotamus. Created from a preserved skin rather than a living animal, the image provided viewers with one of the few opportunities to study a creature rarely seen in Europe. For many seventeenth-century audiences, drawings like these acted as substitutes for the exotic animals that existed only in travellers’ accounts and princely menageries.

Cassiano's greatest scientific passion was perhaps ornithology, the study of birds. The film highlights an exceptional drawing of a pelican created after a specimen was brought to him for examination. Cassiano went beyond simple observation, conducting dissections and detailed studies of anatomy in an effort to understand how these creatures functioned. Accompanied by written notes and scientific investigation, the drawings demonstrate a remarkably modern approach to research and knowledge gathering.

What makes the Paper Museum so significant is that it bridges the worlds of art and science. The collection was not assembled merely as a cabinet of curiosities, but as a systematic attempt to document, classify and understand the world. Every image was intended to contribute to a larger body of knowledge.

Following Cassiano's death, the collection gradually lost its identity and became absorbed into larger libraries and collections. It was only much later that scholars rediscovered the scale and significance of the Paper Museum. Modern research and cataloguing projects have helped reconstruct Cassiano's achievement, revealing it as one of the most important scholarly enterprises of the seventeenth century.

Today, the Paper Museum stands as a testament to the curiosity, ambition and intellectual vision of Cassiano dal Pozzo. Preserved within the Royal Collection, it offers a unique window into how scholars, artists and collectors sought to document the world long before the age of photography, museums and modern science.