Laura Prosperi
EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE
The Magic of Francesco Garnier Valletti
Possible paths in Turin’s Fruit Museum
Various Authors, Il Museo della Frutta “Francesco Garnier
Valletti”, Palazzo degli Istituti Anatomici-Officina Libraria,
Turin 2007
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It is a nineteenth-century Turin that greets me at this small city museum, an austere Turin of cherrywood furnishings, a capital of challenges and projects, strong and aware of its own potential. The museum’s neighborhood, San Salvario, was the main hub for scientific research in Turin between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Museo della Frutta di Torino, Turin’s Fruit Museum, is first of all the result of a worthy collaboration between academic and civic institutions who wanted to pay homage to a city unfairly reduced to just its industrial identity, a city that here remembers its botanical gardens and municipal greenhouses and the fact that it was the home to such driving forces as the Accademia di Agricultura (Agricultural Academy) and the Regia Stazione Chimico-Agraria (Royal Chemical and Agricultural Station). The splendidly restored collection of fruits is housed in a kind of science lab, in a meticulous reconstruction of interiors that lets visitors understand many things about the years in question. The chemistry laboratory, the specialized library, small nooks for scholarly study and maps illustrating gardens, crop plantings and experimental fields. In that era, ambitions of domination over nature, confidence in human progress and agronomy all combined as one, and that burst of optimism and applied knowledge shines out clearly as you walk through the few rooms. Here everything seems fixed, like a three-dimensional daguerreotype that takes us back in time. The small shelf of notebooks, the reference manual left open on the desk. These details bring to life the cultural energy of an era of hope.
Francesco Garnier Valletti’s wax fruits have been waiting here for us since then. Brilliantly restored, they can be admired in the central room, no larger than the others, in showcases worthy of their precious contents. It is the visitor who feels scrutinized by these platoons of impeccably aligned apples, inhibited by the verisimilitude of whole squadrons of figs, great ranks of peaches, each one different from the rest. Instinctively one looks for the flaw, the detail that betrays the fiction, the over-the-top virtuosity that puts things in order: the biological world on one side, the artifice that imitates it on the other. But it is a waste of time; every single piece is perfect.
Besides being a marvel, it is not immediately obvious what these fruits really are, how this amazing display of technique and craftsmanship serves pomology. You can’t quite grasp what meaning and benefit the creator of these objects gained from embalming nature to restore it, to make it everlasting, realer than reality. Basically, the question arises: cui prodest? Who’s it for?
To understand we need to turn to the Burdin dynasty of nurserymen, who lived in Savoy and Italy in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Martin Burdin, an expert in agronomy, horticulture and the art of gardening, opened an agricultural business in Chambéry, and in 1779 published the company’s first commercial catalog, which revealed the objective difficulty of identifying the species and varieties for sale precisely.
Once a system of orders via correspondence and long-distance sales was established, the problem came to a head. It was fundamental not to fall into the labyrinth of local denominations, into the trap of synonyms and homonyms, which had for centuries developed around the names of fruits: ‘Dear Client, please have patience. What exactly do you mean in your region by Pastinaca or Mela Carla?’
Thus it was the difficulties Martin Burdin was having in his commercial dealings that accelerated the need for taxonomic rigor. The dilemma did not fall on deaf ears, and, half a century later, it was Martin’s nephew Auguste who sought a solution to the problem, creating the first public Pomological Museum. It was at this point that they realized that, to achieve this seemingly trivial goal, great resources and enormous talent were needed. It soon became clear to all that analysis would not be enough; not even the most obsessive of descriptions could reliably distinguish between varieties of apricots or plums, when nature seemed to defy the childish instinct for distinction and classification. We all know that one fruit can be very different from another, even when they are produced by the same plant, on the same branch and in the same season. The approximation of ‘agronomical language’ had deep roots and centuries-old foundations: environment, contextual needs and human labor had always intersected in the agricultural field and the agronomical elite taking on the challenge soon realized that imposing order on the confused mass of existing linguistic forms would take more than the erudition of scientific laboratories and mere academic manuals. By the time the project had taken root, the Burdins were already the heirs to an agricultural empire of flourishing and innovative activities between Italy and Savoy. Their nurseries, situated over a wide area, were conceived in a way that was truly revolutionary. Scientific ambition and a sense of public benefit combined with commercial far-sightedness and a strong business instinct. Regular exhibitions, publications, experimentation and institutional representation were part of a single enlightened journey which, over the course of three generations, had probably already seen its greatest splendor. Auguste, creator of the museum and client of Francesco Garnier Valletti, is interpreted by his biographers as the most visionary and the most outrageous of the line. ‘He had identified in Francesco Garnier Valletti’s production of artificial fruit an innovative ‘advertising’ strategy and a solution to the problem which had long tormented the great nurserymen.’ (Various Authors, 2007, p. 49)
The spirit of his ambitions is clear from his words: ‘To know the species and varieties of fruits, whether indigenous or non-native, which grow and ripen in this beautiful part of Italy, was always a desire felt by many, a desire that has grown following the numerous and, to a great extent, praiseworthy varieties produced for many years in the horticultural world. It is known on the other hand how much the nomenclature of fruits harvested in Piedmont varies according to province, and the addition of newly introduced varieties is leading to extreme confusion, due to the reluctance of growers to transcribe and register their common names: additionally, despite the attention of Pomologists, more than a few synonyms intervene among them. All this means that, confronted with the numerous collections presented in the catalogs of the most renowned nurserymen, the public remains hesitant or can make wrong choices.’ (Various Authors, 2007, p. 49)
The opportunity for these two personalities and their respective worlds to meet came at the second Floriculture Exhibition, organized by the Royal Academy of Agriculture in May 1852. The show was a big success with the public and included 162 artificial fruits commissioned from Garnier Valletti. Their popularity was enough to convince Auguste Burdin to make a decidedly large-scale investment that his premature death shortly transformed into a debt that he passed on to his heirs: 54,000 lire to create a collection based on the grand cataloging of Pomona generale, the most exhaustive work on the subject, including an annual stipend of 3,000 lire for wax-modeler Garnier Valletti. But who was this man whose art had enchanted curious visitors, incredulous farmers and skeptical academics to the point of inspiring such enthusiasm and meriting a such a commission? What experience did the midnineteenth century wax modeler have to have before the world offered him praise and profit? Francesco Garnier Valletti was born in Giaveno, in Piedmont, in 1808. Originally a confectioner, he became infatuated with the difficulty of naturalistic modeling, quickly making fruit reproduction his life’s obsession. This provincial modeler, able to capture every single streak visible on the stalk of a fruit, was soon seeking to bridge the gulf between passion for the truth and the limits of technique. This very personal challenge took him far from home—to Vienna and St. Petersburg, initially—feeding a fame that was to span the whole of Europe.
In just under 50 years he managed to reproduce, on his own, something like 5,000 varieties of fruit, leaving at least five noted collections—one in Milan, two in Turin, two in Florence and one in Todi—and an unknown number of small private collections. As well as the models of the Pomona artificiale, as he baptized his work, he produced drawings, watercolors and endless pages of notes. Self-taught, with an apprenticeship that lasted a lifetime, he benefited from experiencing the dynamism of a context without which his role would have been little known. The enthusiasm for natural sciences, the fashion for collecting, the early progress of agronomic culture: Garnier Valletti knew how to draw ideas and motivation from all this, and then make them serve his incredibly skilled craftsmanship.
To his raw material, simple wax, he was always adding new ingredients in a tireless quest for perfection. Dammar resin, alabaster powder, gypsum, ashes, Greek pitch, beeswax, colophony, turpentine and minerals for coloring—he combined all of these according to formulae we can only guess at. Maestro Garnier Valletti was to take away with him handfuls of secrets when, essentially without followers, for once he let the ending foreseen in every organic cycle be victorious. More mortal than his fruit, this determined and tireless wax modeler left us without revealing any of his tricks to a world that, if his outbursts were anything to go by, would not have deserved them anyway.
Notes
1) Various Authors, Il Museo della Frutta “Francesco Garnier Valletti”, Palazzo degli Istituti Anatomici-Officina Libraria, Turin 2007, p. 49.
2) Società del Museo Pomologico di Torino, 1853, publisher unknown, in Various Authors, Il Museo della Frutta “Francesco Garnier Valletti”, op.cit., p. 49.
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