Frontispiece to Le Second Eden

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 indicated that the Contants owned thousands of items rare to Europe, including plants, animals, herbs, perfumes, fossils, thousands of bronze statuettes, and one 18-foot canoe. The “cabinet,” precursor to the modern museum, emerged during the Renaissance period as a display of wealth, sophistication, and learning.

This engraving serves as the frontispiece to Paul Contant’s poem, Le Second Eden, one of five works included in Les Oeuvres, the collected opus of the Contants. The illustration was designed by the author and engraved by a local artisan by the name of Pinson, who created vignettes of Adam and Eve engaged in pastoral tasks in the Garden of Eden. The scenes are surrounded by plants numbered to correspond with the preceding text. In his verse, Paul Contant catalogues the plants in his botanical garden and imagines them tended by Adam and Eve in Eden.

The poem joins four other botanical works in verse to complete Les Oeuvres, fusing scientific inquiry and poetry in what is now considered one of the first “museum books,” a detailed and illustrated catalogue of an early natural history collection.