Treasures from Wunderkammer: the skull with coral from the Museum of Natural History in Pisa

The skull with coral is one of the most famous and at the same time most fascinating artifacts in the Natural History Museum of Pisa, which is housed at the Certosa di Calci. The skull, presumably dated to a period between the 16th and 17th centuries, has a branch of coral attached to the bone surface. Coral, an organic material that forms on the seabed, has a long tradition of use in Europe, especially during the Renaissance and Baroque eras, as a symbol of protection, power and beauty. Coral was believed to ward off evil spirits and protect against danger, as evidenced by its presence in jewelry and decorations. But why is there a skull with a coral in Pisa?

It should be premised that coral was once thought to have grown spontaneously on the skull. In his Descrizione storica e artistica di Pisa e de’ suoi contorni published in 1838, the Pisan scholar and engraver Ranieri Grassi wrote that in the Museum of Natural History, which was already active at the time (although in the nineteenth century it was located in thebuilding attached to the Botanical Garden), among the various artifacts that were legacies of the grand ducal collections, one could observe “the much famous human skull with coral born on it, fished in the sea near the island of Sardinia.” In reality, however, there are even older mentions of this singular find: as early as 1605, the English writer Robert Dallington, in his account of a trip he made to Tuscany in 1596(A Survey of the Great Dukes State of Tuscany in the Yeare of Our Lord 1596), reported that in the grand ducal collections “there are [...] pieces of a’ounce, not yet assayed, of gold and silver; rough corals, of which some can be seen grown on the skulls of dead people, and infinite curiosities of this kind, more delightful to behold than need be reported here” (in the original: “Besides peeces of Ure untried both of Gold and Silver, Corall unpolished, whereof ye shal see some growe upon the Sculles of dead men, with infinite such like, more delightfull to bee seene, then needfull to be related of”).

In addition, the skull with coral also appears depicted in a very famous painting by Domenico Remps (1620 - 1699), Lo scarabattolo preserved at the Museo dell’Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence (and reconstructed right at the Museum of Natural History of the Certosa di Calci), a celebrated trompe-l’oeil depicting a cabinet filled with curiosities that aroused the interest of collectors of the time: cameos, shells, bizarre insects, small paintings with landscapes and still lifes, engravings, miniatures, mirrors, scientific instruments, coral sprigs and, indeed, the skull with coral from the University of Pisa. In all likelihood the work was commissioned by Marquis Francesco di Cosimo Riccardi, who was then butler to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo III de’ Medici: in fact, the skull was part of the grand ducal collections, and it appears mentioned in theInventory of the Gallery and Garden of His Serene Highness compiled by Fra’ Matteo Pandolfini on July 16, 1626 (this was the inventory of the goods kept in the building attached to the botanical garden, i.e., the garden of the semplici). Here, the skull is mentioned as a “petrified human head over which a coral gill was born.” Similar description in the 1673 inventory: “a petrified dead man’s head with coralloid incrustation and born over a piece of red coral.”

Still in the eighteenth century, the skull with coral had aroused the scientific interest of the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort: at that time, the belief still held that corals were plants (and not animals), and it was therefore believed that they reproduced like plants. “These embryos,” the scientist wrote, “are commonly found on most of the bodies that are extracted from the bottom of the sea. I possess several sea fungi and several shells that are coated with them. And in the cabinet of Pisa a piece of coral is shown attached to a fragment of a human skull.”

It is, therefore, an object that has raised so much curiosity in the past, which is why it is now one of the museum’s most celebrated exhibits, indeed: the skull with coral is associated with the very concept of the Wunderkammer, a collection of natural and man-made curiosities. “We can only imagine,” wrote scholar Elena Bonaccorsi, “what fantasies this find has sparked: from the existence of a man-wit of Nature to the possibility that those drowned in the frequent shipwrecks might have been ’colonized’ by sea creatures.” The reality, however, is far less suggestive than how men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries imagined it: coral was in fact deliberately applied to the skull. Nothing to do, then, with the behavior of this species or with singular catches in the seas of Sardinia. “A fake,” Elena Bonaccorsi brands it: “Today, even children visiting the Museum know that the coral did not grow on the skull and that someone glued them together, probably with pitch, but no one yet knows who it was who carried out this prank capable of fooling travelers, artists and scientists for a long time.”

Today, the Museum of Natural History of the University of Pisa, located in the beautiful Certosa di Calci, houses a vast and fascinating collection of scientific artifacts, including fossil specimens, minerals, taxidermied animals, and, as a symbol of an extraordinary combination of biology and culture, precisely the human skull decorated with coral. A find that stands out for its uniqueness, but the fact that it is a fake created probably as a joke should not detract from its importance: it remains an object of great historical value, which has offered, and offers, many insights into exploring the connection between natural science and art, as well as telling the story of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century collecting. So much so that it is still preserved in the museum’s Wunderkammer today.

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