Cosimo Alessandro Collini (1727–1806) was one of the most vivid characters at the court of the Electoral Palatinate. Following a convoluted path, the former drop-out and confidant of Voltaire became the confidential secretary of the prince-elector, a highly regarded scientist, and the "court historian" of Mannheim.
Voltaire helped Collini get his job.
Collini came from an old Florentine noble family. In 1749, he left his study of the law and his connections to his home city and traveled to Prussia. In Berlin, the destitute Collini met Voltaire. As his personal secretary, he accompanied him to Mannheim and Schwetzingen in 1753. With the help of the famous philosopher, he finally received a place as a confidential secretary to the prince-elector at the court of Prince-Elector Carl Theodor in 1760.
Due to his research into the history of the Electoral Palatinate, Collini was distinguished with the title of court historian, tasked with writing down history, by Carl Theodor. In 1763, he was among the founding members of the "Academia Theodoro Palatina," the Electoral Palatinate Academy of the Sciences, which the prince-elector coined following the Parisian model. He was named the director of the Natural History Cabinet in Mannheim Palace a short time later. Collini then stood in the limelight of the sciences.
Engraving of a Pterodactylus antiquus from 1784.
Collini was fascinated by the "cabinet of natural curiosities," a result of many years of the prince-electors' passion for collecting. He was the first to catalog the innumerable shells, fossils, minerals, ostrich eggs, and walrus tusks. Collini led the Natural History Cabinet beginning in 1764 and expanded it with presentations of insects, rare plants, and ethnological collection pieces. He was particularly fond of agates and basalt, whose find spots he himself viewed on many travels.
Table display case from the prince-elector's cabinet.
In the time of the Revolutionary Wars beginning in 1792 and particularly after the death of Carl Theodor in 1799, the decline of the Natural History Cabinet was almost impossible to prevent. In 1803, Collini had to dissolve it entirely. He sent a large part of the collection to Munich, but some pieces went to the collection in Baden and are now part of the Natural History Museum in Karlsruhe. Collini could not get over the destruction of "his" Natural History Cabinet. In 1806, he died in his chosen home of Mannheim.
