THE RECENT flowering of interest in patronage has prompted a number of exhibitions and studies devoted to the reconstruction of dispersed collections, but none so ambitious as the projected catalogue of Cassiano dal Pozzo's 'Museo Cartaceo', which is being prepared under the editorship of Francis Haskell and Jennifer Montagu, with the generous support of Olivetti, and under the aus-pices of the British Academy and Cassiano's own Accademia dei Lincei. Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588-1657) has often figured in these pages before, primarily as a collector of paintings, with an unrivalled series of works commissioned from Poussin. However, if this conjures up the image of a major patron, it would be misleading, for Cassiano never had the financial means to rival the great contemporary collec-tions formed by the princes of the church. Where he could rival them, however, was on paper, creating in that medium a collection which in some ways reflected, and in many ways surpassed, that of his patron, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, Senior. He could assemble drawings of most of the major (and minor) antiquities in Rome (see Fig.31) and - thanks to his various correspondents - elsewhere; he could commission facsimiles of the Vatican Vergil and Terence; he could assemble drawings and copies of drawings of Mexican plants, and a volume of water-colours of citrus fruits far more extensive than those grown in any Roman garden, including studies of their seeds produced with the aid of the recently invented microscope (drawings which were to be engraved, without acknowledgement of their source, in the Hesperides of his friend Giovanni Battista Ferrari). And, if the alzarone sent (via Cassiano) by Peiresc for the serraglio of the Cardinal has long since gone the way of all flesh, the paper record of it made for Cassiano still survives. 

Even with the aid of an international committee, the cataloguing of these drawings presents numerous prob-lems. There is, first, the task of sorting out those made for Cassiano from those acquired by his brother, Carlo Antonio, who continued to add to the collection. Further, such 'puteana', including the drawings Cassiano acquired from the estate ofFederico Cesi, must be distinguished from the rest of the Albani collection, into which the greater part of the dal Pozzo sheets were incorporated when this collec-tion was bought by George III (see p.549). Secondly, some attempt must be made to attribute the drawings, and here Cassiano's habit of commissioning minor artists such as Francesco Villamena, or the miniaturists Giovanna Garzoni and Jean de Saillant, may lead to important discoveries, while his employment of young draughtsmen at the outset of their careers, such as Pietro da Cortona, Francois du Quesnoy and Pietro Testa, gives ample opportunity for scholarly connoisseurship and raises the pleasing prospect of scholarly dissension. It is also likely that many of the sheets will defy the most painstaking efforts at attribution; indeed, it would be fair to say that some of the draughtsmen might benefit by remaining anonymous. Thirdly, while the greater part of the collection is at Windsor, other sheets were separated at an early date, and some of the natural history drawings (which, of course, were scarcely regarded as art) were 'deaccessioned' not so long ago; though more enlightened keepers have attempted to re-cover them, the process of doing so could be long and costly. All these must be tracked down, and added to those already known in the Royal Library, the Soane Museum, the Institut de France, and elsewhere, not only to fulfil the desirable aim of completeness, but because it is only when all the various numbers on all the drawings can be fully analysed, with the aid of a computer, that it may be possible to reconstruct how they were originally arranged, and how Cassiano envisaged his 'paper museum'. For this is one case where the interest of the whole surely outweighs its parts. The individual sheets vary greatly in their quality, which ranges from the superbly beautiful to the frankly inept, but the information they supply, whether on an Etruscan mirror or the mosaics of Palestrina, on a deformed artichoke (see Fig.49) or a rare mushroom, is of a fascination which can only be increased when it is seen in the context of one encyclopaedic collection, employing the same taxonomic approach over the whole range of knowledge. 

The Cassiano industry is in full swing. Work on the correspondence throws light on the meaning these drawings held for their owner, as he and Peiresc are found discussing the iconography of the antique painting known as the Aldobrandini wedding, or enquiring whether the skin of an Ethiopian 'horned donkey' might have made good parchment (no, but it was ideal for bags). New discoveries have been made in the British Museum and in the King's Library, including a book of drawings of fortifications, and a volume of prints quaintly, if inexactly, entitled by its English owner 'Popish Ceremonies'. This autumn will see the publication of the first of what is planned as a series of Quaderni puteani, another of which will contain the papers of a colloquium to be held in December at the British Museum and the Warburg Institute, all funded by the generosity of Olivetti. In the meantime, the appetite for seventeenth-century antiquarianism may be whetted by the articles on pp.543-61.