With all your creatures
Plants, Animals, and Humans
After exploring the various sections of the exhibition and climbing the trunk to the highest branches of the tree of knowledge, we are ready to grasp an overview of what is preserved in the Franciscan Library of Assisi, through the main divisions of creation: the plant world, the animal world, and the human being.
In this section, we explore the different “images” of nature and the meanings attributed to them over the centuries by naturalists, botanists, microscopists, doctors, and philosophers. An imaginary of creatures evoked in the Canticle and described in the volumes of the exhibition allows us to fill the library shelves, transforming it into the “Library of Creatures.”
Plants, animals, stones, and celestial bodies
In the Liber de moralitatibus, attributed to Fra Marco d’Orvieto, a 13th-century Franciscan author, we find the description of celestial bodies, elements, birds, fish, animals, plants, and precious stones, both in their physical aspect and their spiritual meaning, moralized through biblical quotations.
Another volume of great visual impact is the Herbolario volgare, a wonderful treatise on botany: its beautiful illustrations, the integration of scientific knowledge and popular traditions, and the fact that it was written in the vernacular contributed to its diffusion among generations of apothecaries, herbalists, practical doctors, and convent nurses.
A substantial series of extraordinary works is instead dedicated to animals, their pages enriched with detailed tables, the result of the research and field observations of tireless naturalists, such as Ulisse Aldovrandi with his work entirely dedicated to birds: the Ornithologiae.
Humans
The last two works offer a look at humans through a curious art, metoposcopy, once used as a basis for a sort of psychological expertise useful for understanding the nature, predisposition, and destiny of each individual.
Based on reading the lines of the forehead, metoposcopy combined astrological calculations and observations of a vast case history of human faces, in an attempt to understand the character facets of the most perfect of creatures.
From the investigation of reality to the rediscovery of the creaturely dimension
The exhibition itinerary concludes here, with a summary look at the varied complexity of the animated world, the pinnacle of the work of the Most High, omnipotent good Lord, who manifests the purpose of the entire universe that came from His hands precisely with the creation of beings capable of standing before Him in a reciprocity of freedom and love.
This is the specific feature of the Franciscan intellectual tradition: a spiritual vision of creation that does not exclude a scientific approach to reality. Inanimate beings, the plant and animal world, and humans themselves are investigated with the critical rigor that the categories and methods of the science of the time suggested. But they ultimately return to being those brothers and sisters spoken of in the Canticle of Brother Sun, united in the praise of God and co-responsible inhabitants of the “common home” that is the world.