Wonder and Wakefulness: The Nature of Pliny the Elder

In the Bartels Gallery, Floor 1L

In conjunction with this exhibition, the Johnson Museum hosted cocurator Verity Platt to discuss Pliny the Elder’s many different concepts of nature: click here to watch.

The year 2023 marks the 2000th anniversary of the birth of Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE), the celebrated Roman author, natural philosopher, and statesman. Wonder and Wakefulness celebrates the multifaceted legacy of Pliny’s Natural History, considered the “first encyclopedia” in the Western tradition, and its reverberations through two millennia of art, culture, and natural science.

In his dedication of the book to the future emperor Titus, Pliny refers to the long nights of labor that his “thirty-six volumes and twenty-thousand noteworthy facts” have required, observing that “life properly consists of being awake” (vita vigilia est). In keeping with Pliny’s voracious curiosity, this exhibition brings together a range of art from antiquity to the present related to the classical tradition and Pliny’s interest in the natural world, as well as rare books, plaster casts after antique sculpture, gems, coins, and natural history specimens.

Pliny’s reflections in the Natural History show us Nature in her many guises. Nature serves as teacher, through the cycle of life and of the planets in their courses. She sparks wonder through a host of strange creatures and phenomena. She offers a bountiful resource for human use, but Pliny also warns of the risks of taking too much from her. Pliny’s proto-environmental ideas include debates over consumption, the abuse of power, and the ethics of “luxury” that resonate with climate change and resource extraction today.

Nature also serves as artist, spurring human creativity to mimic or best her inventions. The Natural History can also be read as the earliest surviving work of “art history” in the Western tradition, and as a record of works of art from antiquity now lost or only rediscovered and identified during the Renaissance. Pliny situates the origin of painting in a young woman’s act of tracing her departing lover’s likeness onto a wall. This famous anecdote has been depicted frequently from the Renaissance onward and was even embraced by early photographers, who likewise saw their art as the capture of shadows. Pliny is fascinated, too, by the materials of art, including earths (both pigments and clay), metals, stones, and gems. The exhibition’s emphasis on contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, and even the living art created by microbes, demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Pliny’s ideas on nature as model and cocreator, and on natural materials as both sources and agents of making art.

This exhibition was curated by Dr. Andrew C. Weislogel, the Seymour R. Askin, Jr. ’47 Curator of Earlier European and American Art at the Johnson Museum, and Dr. Verity Platt, Professor of Classics and the History of Art & Visual Studies, with the key involvement of Dr. Courtney Roby, Professor of Classics, and Dr. Laurent Ferri, Curator of Pre-1800 Collections in Cornell Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. PhD students Evan Allen, Olivia Graves, and Rodrigo Guzman-Serrano, as well as undergraduate interns Rayna Klugherz ’23, Ashley Koca ’25, David Legrand ’23, and Hannah Master ’23, have also contributed invaluable research and writing.

Wonder and Wakefulness: The Nature of Pliny the Elder was made possible by a generous gift from Deborah Goodman Davis ’85 and Gerald R. Davis ’84, and supported by an endowment in memory of Elizabeth Miller Francis ’47.

During the course of the exhibition, new information was presented about some of the ancient works included. The Johnson Museum is pursuing further provenance research into the ownership history of the bronze lynx head (95.030) in our collection and will update our public record with the results. Research into works included in the exhibition is ongoing. (Updated 9 June 2023)