Thorn apple

ca. 1622-1623 · Watercolour · 27.9 × 31.2 cm

Será possível contemplá-la?

De momento, não recebe

Museu Vitória e Alberto

Londres, Reino Unido

Pertence à coleção, mas de momento não está exposta.

Verificado: há 7 dias
Neste estado desde: 25 de set. de 2026
Fonte: Os dados da própria coleção do museu

No mapa Página do museu

Sobre a obra

This watercolour is part of the 'Paper Museum' assembled by the 17th-century Roman antiquarian and collector Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588-1657). This was a vast visual encyclopaedia of the ancient and natural worlds, consisting of thousands of drawings and prints. Of roughly 7000 surviving drawings from the Paper Museum, around 2500 are of natural history subjects, including fruit and plants.

Cassiano was a member of Europe's first modern scientific academy, the prestigious Accademia dei Lincei, established in Rome in 1603 - half a century before either the Royal Society in London or the Académie des Sciences in Paris. The Accademia, which numbered Galileo amongst its members, placed great emphasis on observation as the key to unravelling the mysteries of nature.

Read on

For his Paper Museum Cassiano commissioned artists to make drawings directly from specimens; the resulting works were intended to be clear and objective scientific records. Little is known about these artists, due to the documentary bias of the visual encyclopaedia.

Cassiano was interested in the previously unknown species which at this time were being imported to Europe from the Americas, and sought to include them in the Paper Museum. The thorn apple was one such plant. Its white flower, which opens during the night, emits an unpleasant smell, giving rise to the name erba puzzolaor 'stinking plant'. Another name to have become attached to it is mela del diavolo,or 'devil's apple', a reference to its spiny fruits. The plant has hallucinogenic properties.

This drawing was originally contained in one of two volumes of botanical drawings in Cassiano's collection entitled Erbario Miniato. One of these volumes remains in the Royal Collection, whilst the other left the Royal Library in the early twentieth century and the contents dispersed.

Museu Vitória e Alberto