- Republic of Venice, Early modern Ottoman History, History of Science, History of Medicine, Women's Studies, History, and 31 moreCultural History, History of the Mediterranean, Philosophy of Science, Environmental Sustainability, History and philosophy of science (History), Historia, European History, Early Modern History, Philosophy and history of science, Intellectual History, Historical Geography, Travel Writing, Renaissance Studies, Ottoman History, 18th Century Britain, Safavids (Islamic History), History of Sociability, Coffeehouse, Mediterranean Studies, Ottoman-Venetian relations, Material Culture Studies, History of Science and Technology, Social History of Medicine, Cultural Intermediaries In The Early Modern Mediterranean, Natural History, Venetian History, Venetian possessions in the Eastern Mediterranean, History of Ottoman Science, History of Medicine in Islam, Ottoman History Of Medicine, and Ottoman material cultureedit
- I am a Lecturer and Research Associate in the Departments of History and STS of MIT. Previously, following a D.Phil... moreI am a Lecturer and Research Associate in the Departments of History and STS of MIT.
Previously, following a D.Phil. from Oxford University, I was a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a Junior Research Fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge. I have also been a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and a Visiting Scholar in the HPS Program at Stanford University and in the Science Religion and Culture Program/Divinity School of Harvard University.edit
In: The Matter of Mimesis, ed. M. Bol and E.C. Spary (Brill, 2023), pp. 381-416.
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
Research Interests: History of Ideas, Early Modern History, Renaissance Studies, History of Natural History, Renaissance Humanism, and 9 moreHistory of Science, Cultural Encounters, Italian Renaissance Art, Early Modern Italy, Early Modern Science, Collecting and Collections, History of Collecting, History of Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, and History of pharmacy
Research Interests: Ottoman History, Italian (European History), Renaissance Studies, Mediterranean Studies, Ottoman Empire, and 11 moreOttoman-Venetian relations, 16the century Mediterranean, Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, Mediterranean archaeology, Archaeology of Mediterranean Trade, Venetian possessions in the Eastern Mediterranean, History of Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Venetian Stato da mar, Trade and travel in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, European Diplomacy and Ottoman Empire, and History of pharmacy
La route des succédanés. Les remèdes exotiques, l’innovation médicale et le marché des substituts au XVIe siècle (Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 66/3 (2019)). This article explores the history of exotic drugs through a central... more
La route des succédanés. Les remèdes exotiques, l’innovation médicale et le marché des substituts au XVIe siècle (Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 66/3 (2019)).
This article explores the history of exotic drugs through a central but often ignored issue: the use of substitutes. It does so by comparing how differently plants originating from the « East » and plants originating from the Americas lent themselves to be replaced in the practice and imaginary of sixteenth-century apothecaries. It examines the values, desires and tensions that apothecaries in Italy and Iberia inscribed in the act of substitution and the substances behind it.
This article explores the history of exotic drugs through a central but often ignored issue: the use of substitutes. It does so by comparing how differently plants originating from the « East » and plants originating from the Americas lent themselves to be replaced in the practice and imaginary of sixteenth-century apothecaries. It examines the values, desires and tensions that apothecaries in Italy and Iberia inscribed in the act of substitution and the substances behind it.
Research Interests: History of Science and Technology, Early Modern History, Italian Studies, History of Medicine, Material Culture Studies, and 15 moreRenaissance Studies, History of Natural History, History of Science, Iberian Studies, Mediterranean Studies, Craft Knowledge, Early Modern Italy, Early Modern economic and social history, Atlantic history, Early modern Spain, History of Narcotics and Drugs, History of Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, The History of Ancient and Medieval Pharmacy/materia Medica, History of Botany, and History of pharmacy
In Helen Ann Curry, Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and E.C. Spary, eds., Worlds of Natural History (Cambridge University Press, 2018). A closer look at the involvement of Italian apothecaries in sixteenth-century natural history and... more
In Helen Ann Curry, Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and E.C. Spary, eds., Worlds of Natural History (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
A closer look at the involvement of Italian apothecaries in sixteenth-century natural history and collecting, and their contribution to that emerging field of expertise.
A closer look at the involvement of Italian apothecaries in sixteenth-century natural history and collecting, and their contribution to that emerging field of expertise.
Research Interests: Early Modern History, Italian Studies, History of Medicine, Renaissance Studies, History of Natural History, and 10 moreHistory of Science, Drugs and drug culture, Early Modern Italy, Republic of Letters (Early Modern History), Collecting and Collections, History of Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Artisan Workshop practice in the Early Modern period, History of Botany, Natural History Museums, and History of pharmacy
In Physician, Polity and Pen in Early Modern Europe, ed. A. Kinzelbach, J.A. Mendelsohn, R. Schilling (The History of Medicine in Context, ed. A. Cunningham and O. Grell; Routledge, 2019).
Research Interests: Intellectual History, Ottoman History, Medieval History, Early Modern History, Italian (European History), and 12 moreHistory of Medicine, Renaissance Studies, History of Natural History, History of Science, Mediterranean Studies, Early modern Ottoman History, Ottoman-Venetian relations, History of the Mediterranean, Islamic Science, Venetian possessions in the Eastern Mediterranean, History of Venice, and History of Botany
This article examines the role of testing and innovation in sixteenth-century Italian pharmacy. I argue that apothecaries were less concerned with testing drugs for efficacy or creating novel products than with reactivating an older... more
This article examines the role of testing and innovation in sixteenth-century Italian pharmacy. I argue that apothecaries were less concerned with testing drugs for efficacy or creating novel products than with reactivating an older Mediterranean pharmacological tradition and studying the materials on which it relied. Their practice was not driven by radical experimentation but by a “culture of tweaking”–of minute operational changes to existing recipes and accommodation of their textual variants–which was rooted in the guild economy fostering incremental over radical innovation and in a humanist reevaluation of past autorities. Workshop practice was also increasingly driven by a new ideal of staying true to nature fostered by the period’s botanical renaissance. This led to an emphasis on ingredients over processes in the shop, and found clearest expression in the elaboration of a taxonomic “language of truth” that helped apothecaries discern between authentic and inauthentic materia medica and harness their sincerity in lieu of testing effectiveness.
Research Interests: History of Science and Technology, Early Modern History, Italian Studies, History of Medicine, Material Culture Studies, and 17 moreRenaissance Studies, History of Natural History, Renaissance Humanism, History of Science, Food History, Natural History, Craft Knowledge, Republic of Letters (Early Modern History), Art and technology, Collecting and Collections, History of Narcotics and Drugs, Medieval Medicine, History of Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, The History of Ancient and Medieval Pharmacy/materia Medica, History of Botany, History of pharmacy, and History of Science and Medicine In Medieval and Renaissance Europe
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Research Interests: Intellectual History, Classics, Art History, Early Modern History, Italian Studies, and 13 moreHistory of Medicine, Book History, Material Culture Studies, Renaissance Studies, History of Science, Natural History, Early Modern Literature, Italian Renaissance Art, Republic of Letters (Early Modern History), Collecting and Collections, History of Collecting, History of Botany, and History of pharmacy
The epistolary exchanges of early modern natural history have long been of interest to historians of science, as they reflect the dynamic nature of the emergent discipline better than the printed volumes of natural history. Less... more
The epistolary exchanges of early modern natural history have long been of interest to historians of science, as they reflect the dynamic nature of the emergent discipline better than the printed volumes of natural history. Less attention, at least until recently, has been paid to the unfinished pieces, the cryptic marginalia, and the practical notes that more often than not accompanied letters. Lists of specimens sent or requested were among the new tools at the naturalist's disposal for dealing with a scientific world increasingly populated by objects. This essay seeks to reconstruct the genealogy of specimen lists by focusing on little-known apothecaries in northern Italy: the individuals traditionally held to be social counterparts to these modest strings of words. It seems that the operations at the back of the shop and the literature generated by the centuries-old drug and spice trades may have been a more defining influence on early modern naturalists than the humanist practices of indexing and commonplacing that were concurrently embraced by Italian studiosi.
Research Interests: Intellectual History, Museum Studies, Early Modern History, History of Medicine, Material Culture Studies, and 9 moreHistory of the Book, Renaissance Studies, History of Science, Craft Knowledge, Republic of Letters (Early Modern History), Collecting and Collections, History of Collecting, History of Botany, and History of pharmacy
This is an introduction to the world of artisanal contacts of the Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius (1526‒1609) within the context of Venice and the Veneto. Despite Clusius’s renowned generosity and openness to exchanges with tradesmen and... more
This is an introduction to the world of artisanal contacts of the Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius (1526‒1609) within the context of Venice and the Veneto. Despite Clusius’s renowned generosity and openness to exchanges with tradesmen and empirically-educated naturalists in continental Europe, his direct interactions with apothecaries from the Veneto, and indeed from the Italian peninsula, seem to have been very limited. This article considers some of the reasons for this discrepancy, advancing the thesis that behind Clusius’s disinterest in these individuals lay different natural historical interests and a different conception of exotic nature.
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"This is an introduction to the world of artisanal contacts of the Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius (1526‒1609) within the context of Venice and the Veneto. Despite Clusius’s renowned generosity and openness to exchanges with tradesmen... more
"This is an introduction to the world of artisanal contacts of the Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius (1526‒1609) within the context of Venice and the Veneto. Despite Clusius’s renowned generosity and openness to exchanges with tradesmen and empirically-educated naturalists in continental Europe, his direct interactions with apothecaries from the Veneto, and indeed from the Italian peninsula, seem to have been very limited. This article con- siders some of the reasons for this discrepancy, advancing the thesis that behind Clusius’s disinterest in these individuals lay different natural historical interests and a different conception of exotic nature.
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Interview for the Ottoman History Podcast (Interviewer: Nir Shafir). Starting in the fifteenth century, medical doctors from the Italian peninsula began accompanying Venetian consular missions to cities in the Mamluk and Ottoman empires.... more
Interview for the Ottoman History Podcast (Interviewer: Nir Shafir).
Starting in the fifteenth century, medical doctors from the Italian peninsula began accompanying Venetian consular missions to cities in the Mamluk and Ottoman empires. These doctors treated not only Venetian consular officials, but also local artisans and rulers. In this podcast, Valentina Pugliano discusses the experiences of these travelling doctors both in the Italian peninsula and in the Middle East. We explore their interactions with the local population and their effect on the medical ecology of the Middle East as well as the sources we use to write such histories. Together, the experiences of these doctors point to the connected histories of medicine and science in the early modern Mediterranean.
Listen to the podcast here! https://soundcloud.com/ottoman-history-podcast/venetian-physicians-in-the-ottoman-empire-valentina-pugliano
Starting in the fifteenth century, medical doctors from the Italian peninsula began accompanying Venetian consular missions to cities in the Mamluk and Ottoman empires. These doctors treated not only Venetian consular officials, but also local artisans and rulers. In this podcast, Valentina Pugliano discusses the experiences of these travelling doctors both in the Italian peninsula and in the Middle East. We explore their interactions with the local population and their effect on the medical ecology of the Middle East as well as the sources we use to write such histories. Together, the experiences of these doctors point to the connected histories of medicine and science in the early modern Mediterranean.
Listen to the podcast here! https://soundcloud.com/ottoman-history-podcast/venetian-physicians-in-the-ottoman-empire-valentina-pugliano
Research Interests:
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MEDICINE, ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH IN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN WORLD 1400-1750 Christ’s College, University of Cambridge Monday 3 and Tuesday 4 April 2017 Organized by Valentina Pugliano (Cambridge) and Nükhet Varlık (Rutgers-Newark)... more
MEDICINE, ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH IN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN WORLD 1400-1750
Christ’s College, University of Cambridge
Monday 3 and Tuesday 4 April 2017
Organized by Valentina Pugliano (Cambridge) and Nükhet Varlık (Rutgers-Newark)
Generously sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and Christ's College, Cambridge
This conference will offer, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of medicine and healing in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, ca. 1400-1750. While a considerable body of scholarship exists on Islamic and Byzantine science and medicine and their influence on the medieval Latin West, the state of medical theory and practice in the following centuries has been comparatively neglected and often spoken of in terms of intellectual stagnation and decline. The conference aims to challenge this narrative and reveal the continued vitality of knowledge making and transfer across the eastern Mediterranean world. Taking as our focus the politically heterogeneous southern Europe and eastern Mediterranean, the Mamluk Kingdom, and the Ottoman Empire, we will reconstruct the healthscape of this region in the early modern period, exploring its medical unity and disunity and the human and environmental factors that played a part in it.
With an introductory lecture by Professor Peregrine Horden, Royal Holloway University of London.
Please register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/medicine-environment-and-health-in-the-eastern-mediterranean-world-1400-1750-tickets-32272100722
Registration: Full £50 (per day £25); Students £25. Buffet lunch and refreshments included. We can provide support to book overnight accommodation in college for attendees who wish to do so. For any query, please contact Valentina Pugliano (vp261@cam.ac.uk)
Christ’s College, University of Cambridge
Monday 3 and Tuesday 4 April 2017
Organized by Valentina Pugliano (Cambridge) and Nükhet Varlık (Rutgers-Newark)
Generously sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and Christ's College, Cambridge
This conference will offer, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of medicine and healing in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, ca. 1400-1750. While a considerable body of scholarship exists on Islamic and Byzantine science and medicine and their influence on the medieval Latin West, the state of medical theory and practice in the following centuries has been comparatively neglected and often spoken of in terms of intellectual stagnation and decline. The conference aims to challenge this narrative and reveal the continued vitality of knowledge making and transfer across the eastern Mediterranean world. Taking as our focus the politically heterogeneous southern Europe and eastern Mediterranean, the Mamluk Kingdom, and the Ottoman Empire, we will reconstruct the healthscape of this region in the early modern period, exploring its medical unity and disunity and the human and environmental factors that played a part in it.
With an introductory lecture by Professor Peregrine Horden, Royal Holloway University of London.
Please register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/medicine-environment-and-health-in-the-eastern-mediterranean-world-1400-1750-tickets-32272100722
Registration: Full £50 (per day £25); Students £25. Buffet lunch and refreshments included. We can provide support to book overnight accommodation in college for attendees who wish to do so. For any query, please contact Valentina Pugliano (vp261@cam.ac.uk)
Research Interests: Jewish Studies, Ottoman History, Early Modern History, Middle East Studies, Italian Studies, and 11 moreHistory of Medicine, Material Culture Studies, Renaissance Studies, History of Science, Mamluk Studies, Early Modern Europe, Byzantine Studies, Early modern Ottoman History, History of the Mediterranean, Islamic History, and History of pharmacy
CALL FOR PAPERS MEDICINE, ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH IN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN WORLD, 1400-1750. 3-4 April 2017, Cambridge UK Organised by Valentina Pugliano (Cambridge) and Nukhet Varlik (Rutgers-Newark) This conference aims to offer,... more
CALL FOR PAPERS
MEDICINE, ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH IN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN WORLD, 1400-1750.
3-4 April 2017, Cambridge UK
Organised by Valentina Pugliano (Cambridge) and Nukhet Varlik (Rutgers-Newark)
This conference aims to offer, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of medicine, environment and health in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, ca. 1400-1750. While a considerable body of scholarship exists on Islamic and Byzantine science and medicine and their influence on the medieval Latin West, the state of medical theory and practice in the following centuries has been comparatively neglected and often spoken of in terms of intellectual stagnation and decline. The conference aims to challenge this narrative and reveal the continued vitality of knowledge making and transfer across the eastern Mediterranean world. Taking as our focus the politically heterogeneous southern Europe and eastern Mediterranean, the Mamluk Kingdom, and the Ottoman Empire, we aim to reconstruct the healthscape of this region in the early modern period, exploring its medical unity and disunity and the human and environmental factors that played a part in it.
MEDICINE, ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH IN THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN WORLD, 1400-1750.
3-4 April 2017, Cambridge UK
Organised by Valentina Pugliano (Cambridge) and Nukhet Varlik (Rutgers-Newark)
This conference aims to offer, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of medicine, environment and health in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, ca. 1400-1750. While a considerable body of scholarship exists on Islamic and Byzantine science and medicine and their influence on the medieval Latin West, the state of medical theory and practice in the following centuries has been comparatively neglected and often spoken of in terms of intellectual stagnation and decline. The conference aims to challenge this narrative and reveal the continued vitality of knowledge making and transfer across the eastern Mediterranean world. Taking as our focus the politically heterogeneous southern Europe and eastern Mediterranean, the Mamluk Kingdom, and the Ottoman Empire, we aim to reconstruct the healthscape of this region in the early modern period, exploring its medical unity and disunity and the human and environmental factors that played a part in it.
Research Interests: European History, Greek History, Jewish Studies, Ottoman History, Medieval History, and 30 moreEarly Modern History, Middle East Studies, History of Religion, Italian Studies, History of Medicine, Material Culture Studies, Renaissance Studies, History of Natural History, History of Science, Mamluk Studies, Food History, Early Modern Europe, Ottoman Studies, Ottoman Empire, Early modern Ottoman History, History of the Mediterranean, Early Modern Intellectual History, Republic of Letters (Early Modern History), History of Medicine in Islam, Medieval Islamic History, Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, Mediterranean and North Africa, Early modern Spain, Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations in the Middle Ages, History of Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, History of pharmacy, Medieval Islamic and Turco-Iranian world, Mongol world empire, Seljuk, Mongol, post-Mongol, and Ottoman Anatolia (1200-1500), Comparative empire, frontier, and political culture, and Persian and Ottoman Turkish historical writing
The Bolognese physician Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) is well known to both historians of science and of art for his active interest in natural history and for his generous patronage of several Italian and German artists, such as the... more
The Bolognese physician Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) is well known to both historians of science and of art for his active interest in natural history and for his generous patronage of several Italian and German artists, such as the Veronese Jacopo Ligozzi and the Frankfurt-born Cornelius Schwindt. For more than fifty years, the naturalist relied on his so-called ‘artistic workshop’ for the preparation of hundreds of drawings, watercolours, woodcuts, and engravings portraying the plants, animals, and minerals that filled his museum of nature and provided the raw material for his botanical and zoological studies. Upon embarking on his career of artistic patron as early as the 1560s, Aldrovandi began thinking about the relationship between painting and botanical knowledge, between the art of representation and the truth of nature. Little known, however, is that he also began to ponder more specifically about pigments and colours, leaving scattered notes as well as full essays that speak of his significant fascination for the subject. This paper will investigate these writings and Aldrovandi’s ‘colour sensiblity’, focusing in particular on an unpublished manuscript which, entitled De coloribus, yet bears little relation to the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise of the same name. We will find the naturalist interested not so much in the materiality of pigment production, as in the history of colours, their variety and their tradition in the literature of ancients and moderns. Colours were appreaciated for their aesthetic and symbolic value. They were also thought to provide one of the most reliable signs for the correct identification of natural specimens. We will discuss the naturalist’s understanding of colours through the twofold filter of art collecting and consumerism, and of the epistemological accuracy that science required of art.
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Damascus, 29 August 1542. Cornelio Bianchi, physician to the Venetian Consul, returns to his lodgings in his nation's fondaco after attending a local court hearing. Once there, he fetches his journal and summarizes the morning's... more
Damascus, 29 August 1542. Cornelio Bianchi, physician to the Venetian Consul, returns to his lodgings in his nation's fondaco after attending a local court hearing. Once there, he fetches his journal and summarizes the morning's unpleasant events. The presiding Ottoman judge (kadı) had just settled an accusation of misconduct presented against him by a resident 'Turk', by ordering the foreign doctor to pay 8 maidini in 'forced alms' or, as Bianchi computed, Lire 1 soldi 12. The claim concerned the payment for a standard purgative treatment Bianchi had ordered for his patient at the consular apothecary's, a laxative drink made with dates and two syrups. Whereas the Turk claimed the doctor had pocketed the money meant for the apothecary and demanded reimbursement, Bianchi believed the real reason for the quarrel to be his own unwillingness to enter into a contract of cure (patto di guarir) with the man. As a 'French disease' sufferer, the latter probably promised an undesirably long and uncertain case. Bianchi followed this entry with a 'Resolution': never again to treat 'Turks or Moors or similar scoundrels'. This vow was destined to be short-lived, however, and Damascene Muslims continued to form part of his clientele alongside Christians and Jews. Similarly, his commitment to contracts remained low.
Research Interests: Intellectual History, Cultural History, Early Modern History, History of Medicine, History of Natural History, and 15 moreHistory of Science, Intellectual History of the Renaissance, Global History, Early modern Ottoman History, History of the Mediterranean, Early Modern Intellectual History, Early Modern Italy, Intellectual and cultural history, History of Medicine in Islam, Islamic Intellectual History, Antiquarianism in the sixteenth century, History of Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, History of Venice, History of Botany, and History of pharmacy
In Helen Ann Curry, Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and E.C. Spary, eds., Worlds of Natural History (Cambridge University Press, 2018). A closer look at the involvement of Italian apothecaries in sixteenth-century natural history and... more
In Helen Ann Curry, Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and E.C. Spary, eds., Worlds of Natural History (Cambridge University Press, 2018). A closer look at the involvement of Italian apothecaries in sixteenth-century natural history and collecting, and their contribution to that emerging field of expertise.
Research Interests: Art, Early Modern History, Italian Studies, History of Medicine, Renaissance Studies, and 12 moreHistory of Natural History, History of Science, Drugs and drug culture, Early Modern Italy, Republic of Letters (Early Modern History), Collecting and Collections, History of Collecting, History of Medicine in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Artisan Workshop practice in the Early Modern period, History of Botany, Natural History Museums, and History of pharmacy
This article examines the role of testing and innovation in sixteenthcentury Italian pharmacy. I argue that apothecaries were less concerned with testing drugs for efficacy or creating novel products than with reactivating an older... more
This article examines the role of testing and innovation in sixteenthcentury Italian pharmacy. I argue that apothecaries were less concerned with testing drugs for efficacy or creating novel products than with reactivating an older Mediterranean pharmacological tradition and studying the materials on which it relied. Their practice was not driven by radical experimentation but by a "culture of tweaking"-of minute operational changes to existing recipes and accommodation of their textual variants-which was rooted in the guild economy fostering incremental over radical innovation and in a humanist reevaluation of past autorities. Workshop practice was also increasingly driven by a new ideal of staying true to nature fostered by the period's botanical renaissance. This led to an emphasis on ingredients over processes in the shop, and found clearest expression in the elaboration of a taxonomic "language of truth" that helped apothecaries discern between authentic...
Research Interests: History of Science and Technology, Pharmacy, Early Modern History, Italian Studies, History of Medicine, and 15 moreMaterial Culture Studies, History of Natural History, Renaissance Humanism, History of Science, Natural History, Craft Knowledge, Language, Collecting and Collections, Italy, History of Narcotics and Drugs, Humans, History of Botany, Historical Studies, History of pharmacy, and Materia Medica
Famed for his collection of drawings of naturalia and his thoughts on the relationship between painting and natural knowledge, it now appears that the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) also pondered specifically color and... more
Famed for his collection of drawings of naturalia and his thoughts on the relationship between painting and natural knowledge, it now appears that the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) also pondered specifically color and pigments, compiling not only lists and diagrams of color terms but also a full-length unpublished manuscript entitled De coloribus or Trattato dei colori. Introducing these writings for the first time, this article portrays a scholar not so much interested in the materiality of pigment production, as in the cultural history of hues. It argues that these writings constituted an effort to build a language of color, in the sense both of a standard nomenclature of hues and of a lexicon, a dictionary of their denotations and connotations as documented in the literature of ancients and moderns. This language would serve the naturalist in his artistic patronage and his natural historical studies, where color was considered one of the most reliable signs f...