Apothecary Desk

Father and son Jacques and Paul Contant were apothecaries and collectors of cultural and natural history objects in Poitiers, where they amassed one of the most important cabinets de curiosité in seventeenth-century France. The Contants collected specimens from the Mediterranean region and exchanged objects with the University of Montpellier to form their large and unique collection. Their records indicate that they owned thousands of items rare to Europe, including plants, animals, perfumes, fossils, thousands of bronze statuettes, and one 18-foot canoe. The “cabinet,” a precursor to the modern museum, emerged in European cities during the Renaissance period as a display of wealth, sophistication, and learning.

This full-page engraving of a cabinet appears in Les Oeuvres, the collected opus of the Contants. The volume was published in 1628, and includes five works of botanical catalogue in verse. The illustration forms the frontispiece for the poem Le Jardin et Cabinet Poetique, the most popular work in Les Oeuvres, in which Paul Contant details the flowering plants in his collection. The cabinet is labeled systematically in the manner of Dioscorides’ De materia medica, a foundational pharmacopoeia, and it is surrounded with a border of seashells and flowers. The engraving was completed by the Poitiers artist Pierre Demoges based on an original drawing by Paul Contant. In his verse, Contant draws an analogy between his cabinet of preserved specimens and his botanical garden of live specimens, citing them as two entities that form a single chapter in the great ‘book of the world.’