ROYAL IMPERIAL MINERALS. THE MINERALOGICAL COLLECTIONS OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPERORS JOSEPH II AND LEOPOLD II BETWEEN MUSEOLOGY, SCIENCE, AND HISTORY

After attending this presentation, attendees will gain insights into the scientific, cultural, and social aspects of the mineralogical collection in 18th-century Central Europe. This presentation will impact the mineralogy community by illustrating the different meanings that it had at the Imperial court of the Habsburg-Lorraine family through the investigation of the mineralogical collections that belonged to the Holy Roman Emperors Joseph II (1740–1791) and Leopold II (1747–1792). As stated by Wilson (1994), Vienna became one of the greatest hotbeds of 18th-century European mineral collecting. Here emerged a very active mineralogical community formed by collectors, mineral dealers, and scholars from all over the Habsburg Monarchy, which were called to build and organize the Royal Imperial mineralogical collections, and to teach in the Imperial mining academies. If Holy Roman Emperor Franz I Stefan of Lorraine’s (1708–1765) passion for naturalistic and mineralogical collecting is a well-established topic, few researchers (e.g., Mottana et al. 2012) have addressed the interest in mineralogy, mining science, and mineral collecting showed by his sons, who in turn inherited the Imperial title, Joseph II (1740–1791) and Leopold II (1747–1792). This presentation thus provides the attendees with contextual information about Joseph’ and Leopold’s general scientific interests, with a special focus on the journey they made, together with Albert Kasimir von Sachsen-Teschen (1738 –1822), to visit the mining districts in Lower Hungary in 1764. Drawing on an extensive range of untapped sources, this presentation then investigates the cores of Joseph’s and Leopold’s interest in mineralogical collecting. The Collectio Mineralium (1765), which was the catalog of Leopold’s private mineralogical collection, will be analyzed in detail along with the collection of minerals, which was donated by Joseph II to the Mineralogical Cabinet of the Roman Collegio Nazareno in 1785. The results obtained are compared to highlight the different spatial dimensions these mineral collections embodied, and the relationships they mediated with scholars such as Ignaz Edler von Born (1742–1791) and Giovanni Vincenzo Petrini (1725–1814). The analysis of the mineralogical collections belonging to Joseph II and Leopold II shows not only the scientific development of mineralogy and mining science at the end of the 18th century but also how mineral collections became a source of state knowledge through which to exhibit both the economic and political development of a country (Vogel 2015). Finally, this presentation includes an overview of the valorization projects that will be launched on Joseph’s mineralogical collection that is currently housed at the Istituto Calasanzio in Rome.