ABSTRACT
The tendency towards specialization and the adoption by many Italian scholars of an order of arrangement shaped by medical and pharmaceutical practice also contributed significantly towards modifying the concept of confrontation between art and nature in their museums. The printed catalogue, by contrast, is typical of the seventeenth century, an age in which, by a process of involution, Italian society and customs were taking on a Spanish quality which contributed towards an emphasis on external values. Some scholars have been misled by this form of organization into anachronistically attributing functions to Ulisse Aldrovandi’s museum which in fact became typical only in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century museums. Scipione Maffei organized a museum of epigraphy in Verona, with definite conservative and didactic aims. Collections like those of Luigi Ferdinando Marsili and Maffei represent the earliest models which incorporated the new criteria governing the formation and arrangement of museums in the eighteenth century.
