Decorre dia 14 de Outubro de 2011 na Sala Polivalente do ICS no âmbito dos Seminários de História a sessão dupla com as seguintes intervenções:

Obelisks on the move. From Egypt via Rome to Santiago de Chile por Peter Mason (independent researcher).

Obelisks on the move. From Egypt via Rome to Santiago de Chile is a story about the movement of objects, and with them of ideas, across continents that is both visual and very material. its purpose is to examine the different contexts in which some obelisks from Egypt could and can be found in Rome with an eye for the sense of place. It concludes with an obelisk that, though located thousands of miles from Egypt and Italy, still betrays the influence of its Roman models.
Peter Mason is an international editorial adviser to the Journal of the History of Collections (Oxford) and an independent researcher based in Rome. Books like The Lives of Images (2001) or Before Disenchantment. Images of exotic animals and plants in the early modern world (2009) are examples of his Warburgian approach to the history of art, combined with a familiarity with Latin America. ‘Obelisks on the move' is part of a monograph (in preparation) entitled Colossal that will explore the range of the colossal from archaic Greece to Giacometti.

Spectacular science: display and knowledge of living nature at court in early modern Europe por Florike Egmond (Fellow of the Scaliger Institute, University of Leiden, Holanda)

Nature at court and aristocratic collections of naturalia in early modern Europe are often looked at as forms of status display and self-representation. This paper argues that these collections were, moreover, crucial to the development of the natural sciences (botany, zoology) and that it was, indeed princely and aristocratic fashion which enabled the so-called "botanical Renaissance" of the 16th century that preceded the scientific revolution.
The material presented comes mainly from collections in the Habsburg countries and the works of well-known naturalists at the time, such as Clusius and Gessner, but the argument bears on the whole of Western Europe in the period 1500-1620.
Florike Egmond studied history in the Netherlands, is a Fellow of the Scaliger Institute, University of Leiden, and lives in Rome. Her main field is the study of nature in early modern Europe within the wider context of cultural and scientific history. 
She has recently published a monograph on the formation of the discipline of natural history in the 16th century, focusing on the European contacts and exchanges of the naturalist Carolus Clusius, and is currently involved in the Leiden-based project Re-Reading the Book of Nature. For this project she is studying various unpublished illustrated manuscripts and preparing a study of the way in which nature was studied visually and in detail before the microscope. 

Some books in English:   
¨     The World of Carolus Clusius. Natural History in the Making, 1550-1610 (London, 2010).
¨     Carolus Clusius. Towards a cultural history of a Renaissance naturalist, edited by Florike Egmond, Paul Hoftijzer and Robert Visser (Amsterdam, 2007).   -- NB freely available online 
¨     Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe 1400-1700, edited by Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond (Cambridge UP, 2007). 
¨     The Whale Book. Whales and other marine animals as described by Adriaen Coenen in 1585, edited and with an introduction by Florike Egmond and Peter Mason (London, 2003)
¨     Bodily Extremities. Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, edited by Florike Egmond & Robert Zwijnenberg (Aldershot, 2003).