60RECONFIGURING ANIMAL SKINS7,000 natural objects, anticipated the taxonomical approaches of the
Enlightenment.^69 The hippopotamus was stuffed to become an epistemo-
logical tool for one of the earliest and most prestigious institutional collec-
tions of natural objects (fig. 1.2). It originally was the possession of Gran-
duca Pietro Leopoldo, and it is reported to have lived for a year in the
Boboli Gardens in Florence before being preserved and eventually becom-
ing a specimen in the Museo della Specola in Florence. Before becoming
a display piece at the Medici Museum, the hippopotamus may have been
involved in a number of transactions through which its exchange/
commodity value changed from living, wild animal to royal pet (a form
of trophy), then to stuffed animal, and finally to museum specimen in
different objectifying/commodifying stages. Mapping these moments in
the animal’s past enables the identification of the discursive formations,
practices, and power/knowledge relations that brought the individual
animal to become a museum piece in the first place. The cultural afterlife
of this specimen thus began as the result of the emergence of the discur-
sive formation of natural history and the need to tangibly classify living
beings in accordance with the epistemic modalities of the Renaissance.
This analytical approach positions the object as the sedimentation of a
circular power/knowledge relation involving discourses, practices, insti-
tutions, and author-function networks. The hippopotamus inscribed
kingly power—its visibility in the museum assessed the omniscience of
the Granduca in the eyes of illustrious guests and citizens. It signified
a much valued love for scientific knowledge as directly linked to the
wealth, social status, strength, and power necessary to own such an ex-
otic and exclusive animal. Its rarity heightened the prestige of the collec-
tion and, by implication, that of the Granduca, who could be therefore
seen as actively contributing to the production of knowledge.^70 Tra nsac-
tions involving natural objects lay at the epistemological core of medieval
and early Renaissance culture. The trade of religious relics and natural
objects alike, initiated by the crusaders, provided a representational ma-
terialization of the mythologized conquests of nature that was central to
the episteme of that period.^71 It is within this interlinking of discourses,
practice, and power/knowledge relationships that the crocodile hanging
from the ceiling of the church at Nossa can be reconsidered. In this case,
the crocodile was prepared to hang from the ceiling of a church and not
to be displayed in an early natural history exhibit. Its function was de-
fined by the discourses of natural theology of the Middle Ages. The