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Giacomo Costantino Beltrami (1779-1855); oil on canvas, by E. Scuri, c.1859; now in the Museo Caffi. After Beltrami's death, the painter depicted him (in Italy) as an explorer wearing the moose-hide coat, quiver, and arrows, and surrounded by other artefacts he had collected. Courtesy of Museo Caffi, Bergamo.
Source publication
Overshadowed by the immense cultural patrimony of Italy, within its extensive museum systems, many historically significant nineteenth-century Italian ethnographic collections from non-western peoples have remained ‘dormant’ and largely unknown to museum scholars until recently. The world’s first ‘museum of anthropology’ was founded in Florence, in...
Contexts in source publication
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... most significant ethnographic collection of North American Indian objects in Italy was assembled among the tribes of the Middle and Upper Mississippi River in 1823 by Giacomo Costantino Beltrami (1779-1855) from Bergamo. A former Napoleonic magistrate, wealthy businessman, poet, social-critic, amateur naturalist and proto-ethnographer, Beltrami (Fig. 1) was an Italian Freemason member of the newly established order of the Grande Oriente d'Italia (Scottish Rite). He was forced into exile in the early 1820s by the papal authorities due to his Masonic ties and his political sympathies for the nationalistic Carbonari movement active in Central Italy. As a result, Beltrami embarked on a ...
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... particularly impressive piece is a military-style capote of finely tanned moose skin and decorated with porcupine quillwork, a gift from Woascita, daughter of Leech Lake Ojibwe Chief Cloudy Weather (or Great Cloud). It is the same coat that Beltrami wears in the idealized portrait of him in the wilderness by Enrico Scuri, painted around 1859 (see Fig. 1). 48 The American Indian pieces in the private Beltrami-Luchetti Museum in Filottrano, created in the Beltrami Palace in the late 1970s by Count Glauco Luchetti , moral heir and trustee of the Beltrami heritage in Italy, are fewer but equally important. 49 The Indian objects on display in glass cases in the main hall (Sala No. 1, see ...
Citations
... 19th-century "naturalists" or natural history collectors like Abbott can also be considered "proto-ethnographers" or "accidental ethnographers" (Taylor and Marino 2018), whose legacy collections and recorded observations can contribute to ethnographic knowledge today, though such travelers were untrained in any formal science of ethnography. The Abbott archives include two maps of his travels in Trang, reproduced here. ...
This article presents information about Trang in southern Thailand from two trips there by the American naturalist William Louis Abbott (1860-1936), focusing on twelve locally used musical instruments Abbott collected in 1896 on his first visit. A second visit (late December 1898 to March 1899) provided another opportunity for him to record observations. The musical instruments he collected are now in the Ethnology collection (Department of Anthropology) of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. The information presented here adds to the relatively few 19th-century primary sources for the ethnography and music of southern Thailand. This article also notes similarities between some of these village instruments and the elaborately decorated but structurally similar ones produced under royal patronage for the Thai court, represented within the same Smithsonian collection by other musical instruments received as royal gifts from Thai monarchs. [Note: this is a pre-print proof; this issue is currently being printed; publication date expected Nov. 2019 then this pre-print notice will be removed: Journal of the Siam Society 107(2):91-116 (+ Contributor information, p. 172).]
In her contribution to the study of the work of Giacomo Costantino Beltrami, Sandra Busatta (2021:47) argues that four pieces of quillwork in collections preserved in Bergamo and Filottrano were the surviving parts of a cradleboard he had collected in 1823 among the Dakota of Minnesota, making them together "the oldest preserved Dakota cradleboard in the world." The following essay will attempt to place this claim into the wider context of a discussion of what is known about Eastern Sioux baby carriers, focusing on the significance of documentary evidence and its role in the attribution of the provenience in time and space of insufficiently documented objects.
This article examines some significant yet little‐known early anthropological achievements in Italy. These include the world's first museum of anthropology, founded in 1869 by Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910) at Florence (Firenze), Italy, where that same year he also established Italy's (and the world's) first cattedra (university professorship) of anthropology. Mantegazza sought to develop a unified “science of man,” with a broad definition of the new discipline that brought together human physiological, ethnographic, and “comparative psychology” collections within his new anthropology museum, later complemented by a companion “psychological” museum. Even though Mantegazza's Florentine school of anthropology ended under Fascism, today the surviving Museum of Anthropology in Florence is still the repository of important ethnographic collections from early Italian traveler‐explorers and other contributors. Their study was an important component of Mantegazza's science, which is receiving new attention by modern Italian anthropologists.
