{"id":197150,"date":"2015-07-15T18:37:55","date_gmt":"2015-07-15T21:37:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=197150"},"modified":"2015-09-11T18:47:31","modified_gmt":"2015-09-11T21:47:31","slug":"the-collector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/the-collector\/","title":{"rendered":"The Collector"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The

GUILHERME GAENSLY \/ NATIONAL LIBRARY \/ PAULA CARVALHO \/ USP<\/span>The Paulista Museum in 1902GUILHERME GAENSLY \/ NATIONAL LIBRARY \/ PAULA CARVALHO \/ USP<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

The few existing descriptions of the mansion at 27 Largo Municipal\u2014now Jo\u00e3o Mendes Square in downtown S\u00e3o Paulo\u2014suggest a scene of chaos. Scattered throughout its rooms were thousands of items of historical or scientific value: collections of coins and clamshells (some containing pearls), plaster statues, china, swords, a barometer and measuring rods, musical instruments (including a copper and leather ophicleide, a distant relative of the trombone), samples of wood and lianas, fossils and stuffed animals (including an anteater, a jaguar, and a few owls), a handkerchief used by Emperor Dom Pedro II, and a suit of armor, along with tribal Indian bones, skulls, and various other objects.<\/p>\n

The mansion once housed the Sert\u00f3rio Museum, one of the leading cultural attractions of the then sleepy capital city of S\u00e3o Paulo in the late 19th century. In 1884, Pedro II visited the museum (located elsewhere at the time) with Princess Isabel, who is said to have commented on a disagreeable smell emanating from a stuffed armadillo. According to researcher Heloisa Barbuy of the Paulista Museum, \u201cthe presence of a private museum in S\u00e3o Paulo in the late 19th century points to the restless desire for progress on the part of S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s elite.\u201d Barbuy adds that \u201clike coffee and the railroad, the museum functioned as an instrument of modernity; but it had a practical aspect as well, thanks to the high value that pedagogical theories of the time placed on its animal and rock collections.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"White

PAULA CARVALHO \/ USP <\/span>White glass bottle containing a wood crucifixPAULA CARVALHO \/ USP <\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

The mansion and its collection, open to the public, belonged to Joaquim Sert\u00f3rio, a wealthy paulista <\/i><\/em>about whom little is known.<\/i><\/em> After a career in the National Guard (a paramilitary force organized during the Brazil\u2019s regency period) he became a member of the city council of S\u00e3o Paulo, where he bought and sold land, real estate and coffee. Sert\u00f3rio died at the age of 78 on December 5, 1905, four years after the death of his wife. His collection came to form the nucleus of what was to become the Paulista Museum. Later, the museum became \u00a0part of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (USP), and led to the creation of USP\u2019s Museum of Zoology. In a recent study, the historian Paula Carolina de Andrade Carvalho of the Paulista Museum notes that the history of the Sert\u00f3rio Museum resembled that of the Ashmolean Museum, which has been open to the public since the 17th century. Begun by royal gardeners and funded by Elias Ashmole, a wealthy 17th century Englishman, the museum was later donated to Oxford University.<\/p>\n

In 1890, when Sert\u00f3rio announced his desire to divest himself of the collection, newspapers in S\u00e3o Paulo argued in favor of the government acquiring the museum in view of its cultural significance to the city. It was then that Francisco de Paula Mayrink, a politician and businessman, entered the scene to purchase the museum and donate it to the government of S\u00e3o Paulo.\u00a0 The Sert\u00f3rio collection became part of it and went on to help form the State Museum under its director, Swiss botanist Alberto Loefgren, hired years earlier by Sert\u00f3rio to catalogue and organize his collection.<\/p>\n

\"Aneroid

PAULA CARVALHO \/ USP <\/span>Aneroid barometer in wood case with metal feet and handlePAULA CARVALHO \/ USP <\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

In 1893 the State Museum was renamed the Paulista Museum, housed since 1894 at the Ipiranga Palace where it came to be the main institution of its kind in the state of S\u00e3o Paulo. The first director of the renovated museum, German zoologist Hermann von Ihering, set out to build an institution dedicated to natural history; but his successor,\u00a0 historian Affonso Taunay, who had a greater appreciation of the history section, allowed the focus on natural history and its collection to diminish and, subsequently, disperse.<\/p>\n

A survey conducted by Paula Carvalho, published in 2014 in the journal Anais do Museu Paulista<\/i><\/em>, calculates that the Sert\u00f3rio Museum\u2019s natural history collection comprised 430 mammals, 1,600 birds, 460 reptiles and amphibians, 292 fish, along with insects, mollusks, skulls, nests, and eggs. While Taunay directed the Paulista Museum from 1917 to1945, much of this collection was transferred to the zoology department of the S\u00e3o Paulo State Department of Agriculture, which would later become the Zoology Museum at USP, also in the city\u2019s Ipiranga neighborhood. Many items were lost and others deteriorated, like the foul-smelling armadillo that Princess Isabel was quick to notice.<\/p>\n

The Paulista Museum holds 60 of the Sert\u00f3rio\u2019s historical artifacts. Among its many rare items is a relief map of Bragan\u00e7a, a city in the interior of S\u00e3o Paulo, made by a German engineer, and a 16th century wood artifact that was used for more than two centuries at what was known as the \u201cdew point,\u201d at Largo da S\u00e9 Square, to mark the point where the city ended and the rural areas began.<\/p>\n

\"Wood

GUILHERME GAENSLY \/ NATIONAL LIBRARY \/ PAULA CARVALHO \/ USP <\/span>Wood pen with ivory nib from the Sert\u00f3rio MuseumGUILHERME GAENSLY \/ NATIONAL LIBRARY \/ PAULA CARVALHO \/ USP <\/span><\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A businessman\u2019s collection forms the nucleus of the Paulista Museum ","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[152],"tags":[241],"coauthors":[5968],"class_list":["post-197150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-retrospect","tag-history"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197150"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=197150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}