Frontspiece

Father and son Jacques and Paul Contant were apothecaries and collectors in Poitiers, where they amassed one of the most important cabinets de curiosité in seventeenth-century France. The Contants collected cultural and natural history objects in 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 unusual 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 Les Oeuvres, the collected opus of the Contants. The illustration was designed by Paul Contant and engraved by Pierre Demoges, featuring an expanded title of the work and a border of numbered plants, animals, and anthropological scenes that correspond to the text that follows.

Les Oeuvres contains five works of botanical catalogue in verse, among them Les commentaires fur Dioscoride, a botanical catalogue completed by Jacques Contant, and Le Second Eden, a poem by Paul Contant describing the plants that grew in the Garden of Eden. Fusing scientific inquiry and poetry in what is now considered one of the first “museum books,” Les Oeuvres is a detailed and illustrated catalogue of an early pharmaceutical collection.