Museums on paper in Emilia-Romagna from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries: from Aldrovandi to Count Sanvitale

Ever since the Middle Ages, the art of Emilia Romagna (a region of Italy), and more generally of the Po Valley, has been characterised by great attention to aspects of daily life. This particular situation has undoubtedly encouraged the relations and links between the world of art and that of science. And, indeed, in Emilia Romagna throughout the modern age a large number of painters worked on commission for naturalists and an equally large number of scientists and ‘amateurs’ themselves undertook the illustration of nature, or were interested in the problems and techniques of the figurative arts, or collected objets d'art.