2011
Cairn
Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, « Notes romaines. Le « voyage d'archive » d'Alexander von Humboldt (1805) », Études Germaniques, ID : 10670/1.ewlehn
A few months after completing his American five-years expedition — for which he was to be celebrated as “a second Columbus” —, Alexander von Humboldt began travelling again, this time to Italy. Accompanied by the French chemist Louis Joseph Gay-Lussac, later on by the German mineralogist Leopold von Buch, Humboldt travelled throughout the peninsula from April to October 1805, carried out meteorological and geomagnetic measurements along the way, went to Naples to observe Vesuvius at the time of a violent earthquake and eruption. In Roma, besides visiting the city museums or monuments, and meeting Italian or foreign scientists and artists, he spent time at the Vatican library where he studied some precious Mexican “paintings” together with their comment by an exiled ex-Jesuit scholar, Father José Lino Fábrega. I argue, here, that Humboldt’s tour of Italy, specifically his work on the prehispanic codices, throw new light on his scientific practices and on his program of a decentered and all-encompassing science, articulating the local and the global, the present and the past, the New World and the Old.