Kosmos, the University of Pavia’s Natural History Museum, has in its collections a taxidermied hippopotamus that once belonged to the Celeste Gallery of the Gonzaga family of Mantua.
The artefact, which arrived in Pavia in 1783 and is now on display in the galleries of the renewed museum, has recently undergone a series of multidisciplinary investigations.
These studies proved to be useful and complementary to the 18th-century information we had at our disposal, namely details gleaned from the correspondence of Lazzaro Spallanzani, director of the Museum of Pavia during the reign of Maria Theresa, and from a memoir by Girolamo Carli, secretary of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts in Mantua.
This multidisciplinary approach has enabled us to establish a link between the hippopotamus found at Kosmos and the one captured by Federico Zerenghi along the Nile on 20 July 1600.
The Laboratory of Dendrochronology and Dendroecology (LabDendro) at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences of the University of Pavia, coordinated by Prof. Paola Nola, contributed to the identification of poplar wood as the material used to construct the base on which the animal stands.
Download the full article for free to find out more.