In 1772, after a variety of twists and turns, the Monconys-Pestalozzi Collection was sold to the city of Lyon, which entrusted its management to the Académie des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts de Lyon. The Académie had already been bequeathed and was in charge of the well-known Pierre Adamoli Collection. These groups of objects, along with others that came in the years which followed, were transferred to the Palais Saint-Pierre in 1793 and would form the nucleus of the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle that came into being as such in the 1830s. At that time an initial effort was made to inventory the collection. Despite the fact that this documentation is often patchy and incomplete, examining it has allowed us to identify some of our pieces as having been part of these early collections. That is true, for instance, of a very rare skull of a babirusa (a wild pig native to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi) painted with red lacquer and with teeth highlighted in gold (fi g. 2), for which we found an accurate description in this old inventory. T. A. M.: These old collections were primarily devoted to natural history. Was the museum’s the African and Oceanic collection, discussed its wealth and history with us. Tribal Art Magazine: The Musée des Confl uences is still a very young institution, but in many ways it is the inheritor of a long history. What can you tell us about the museum’s background? Marie Perrier: The current museum represents the culmination of a fi fteen-year effort. It was a project developed by the Rhône department in the late 1990s when it became clear that the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle in Lyon, for which it had been responsible since 1991, was in need of renovation. With its innovative and interdisciplinary approach to its subject matter, which is based on the diversity of its collection, the Musée des Confl uences has now established itself within the continuum of the city’s museums. A signifi cant part of the thirty thousand pieces that make up the ethnographic and archaeological collections (both part of the anthropology department), for example, comes from the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, which in turn was rooted in the curiosity cabinets that were well established in Lyon in the seventeenth century. The best known of the fi fty or so cabinets from that time was undoubtedly that of the brothers Balthasar and Gaspar de Monconys. It was sold in 1700 by their heirs to Jérôme-Jean Pestalozzi, a physician at the Hôtel-Dieu, who enriched it with medical works and natural science objects, as well as with other pieces associated with his profession. FIG. 3 (above): Installation view of Espèces, la maille du vivant. Installation design: Agence Zen+dCo. © Bertrand Stofl eth – Musée des Confl uences, Lyon. FIG. 4 (below): Shield. Moluccan archipelago. Second half of the 19th century. Wood, shell. H: 109 cm. Donated by Émile Guimet in 1879. Musée des Confl uences, inv. 60000760. © Quentin Lafont – Musée des Confl uences, Lyon.
T84 EN Online
To see the actual publication please follow the link above