ABSTRACT
Renaissance museums owe to the past more than their name. There is a profound association between ancient models and subsequent practices; this contributed to the philosophical programmes that underlay their collecting practices. Museums of natural history are usually associated with the reformulation of the history of nature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Linnaeus and Darwin); but although undoubtedly this is true, so it is the fact that they originated within a predominately Aristotelian and Plinian framework. Naturalists of the Renaissance had the natural philosophers of antiquity as guidance during their researches. Aristotle, for instance, offered philosophical purpose for the collecting of nature, or the method by which one can arrive at a proper name for a previously unidentified phenomenon (Findlen, 1994: 57). Pliny's contribution is even more profound, however.
