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Abaydulova A. K. F. Knappe’s Drawings in the Corpus of Illustrations to “Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica” by Peter Simon Pallas: On the History of the Collections of the Cabinet of Naturalia in the Kunstkamera

Anna Abaydulova
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Saint Petersburg, Russia
E-mail: abaidulova@kunstkamera.ru

 

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ABSTRACT. The article presents a complex of unpublished drawings by Karl Friedrich Knappe (1745–1805), which are found in the corpus of illustrations to the fundamental work “Zoographia Rosso-Asiatica” by Academician Peter Simon Pallas (1741–1811) in the funds of St. Petersburg branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Karl Friedrich Knappe is an animal painter from St. Petersburg, the head of the animal and bird painting class at the Academy of Arts (1775–1795), the author of illustrations for the work of Pallas “Flora Rossica”. He did not participate in expeditions of Pallas, and this gives grounds to assert that the drawings were created in St. Petersburg between 1774 and 1795, based on field materials and stuffed birds obtained during expeditions and included in the collection of the Cabinet of Naturalia in the Kunstkamera. Since the technique of making stuffed animals was imperfect in the 18th century, and it was impossible to preserve the objects for a long time, the drawings from the collection of Pallas, including drawings by Knappe, were already in the 19th century used as a source for the visual reconstruction of the zoological collections of the Academy of Sciences in the last third of the 18th century. The study of these drawings gives us the opportunity to imagine what the exhibits from the academic zoological collections looked like, it also allows us to observe how Academician Pallas in consort with the artists worked with visual sources achieving the necessary accuracy of an image. Knappe's drawings are important as a visual source for studying the structure of the natural scientific collections in the Kunstkamera, and as a source on the history of scientific illustration in Russia as well. The article provides first publication of the descriptions of all the extant Knappe’s drawings with a decryption of Pallas’s autograph marks.

 

KEYWORDS: Knappe, Pallas, scientific illustration, Kunstkamera, cabinet of naturalia, natural scientific collections, museum collections, St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, history of the Kunstkamera, history of science

 

DOI 10.31250/2618-8619-2022-2(16)-69-79
УДК 069.8

 

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