Fausto Barbagli's first curation job was at the University of Pavia in northern Italy. It was the end of the 1990s, and the university was finally starting to pay attention to its valuable but long-neglected zoological collections. Barbagli is passionate about birds, so he was distressed to find that the labels had fallen off 700 precious taxidermied specimens, devastating their scientific value. A well-intentioned but untrained staff member had decided to spruce up the collection, gifted to the university three decades earlier. He had painted the birds' pedestals - onto which species names had been inscribed - and had fixed neatly typed labels to their feet with rubber bands. As any professional curator knows, rubber perishes.
展开▼
