Libonati, E;
(2017)
An aspect of the object habit: Pliny the Elder, audience and politics.
Museum History Journal
10.1080/19369816.2017.1328791.
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Abstract
This paper looks at an aspect of the ‘object habit’ by considering the motivations behind an ancient technical text, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. The text is an ‘encyclopaedia’ of knowledge covering a vast range of subjects and approaches by studying objects including things found in nature and worked by man. For Pliny, these phenomena shared enough to be considered together while presenting an inventory of the resources in the Roman world and thus controlled by the emperor Titus (AD 79–81), to whom the work is addressed. The collection of knowledge for Pliny is a political act. The Natural History’s collapse of distinctions between objects, animate or inanimate, worked by man or in a natural state, as well as its insistence on political motivations for collecting objects and knowledge, serve as starting place for considering the ‘object habit’ and the impact of politics on collecting. Two examples are discussed: a Benin ‘bronze’ at a Cambridge college, and three giraffes gifted to the superpowers of nineteenth-century Europe.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | An aspect of the object habit: Pliny the Elder, audience and politics |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/19369816.2017.1328791 |
| Publisher version: | http://doi.org/10.1080/19369816.2017.1328791 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Object habit, Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Benin ‘bronze’, giraffe |
| UCL classification: | UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1561141 |
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