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The collection of minerals of Roger Caillois, at the crossroads of nature and aesthetics, is now on display in Paris

Science and art, objectivity and imagination, Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen), esprit de géometrie and esprit de finesse (Blaise Pascal) ... Throughout the history of culture, these domains have been often rigidly framed as opposing forces. Yet, these territories are far from being separate and impermeable: on the contrary, they have always maintained a continuous dialogue, one that has enriched both sides and contributed to a broader and deeper understanding of human experience. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, was not only a painter, but also an engineer, anatomist, and an eminent scholar of philosophia naturalis, and Galileo Galilei, widely regarded as “father of modern science”, likewise engaged in philosophical and literary reflection. Primo Levi, trained as a chemist, flourished as a writer even if under the pressure of tragic circumstances, shaping his narratives with the same symmetry, precision and lucidity required in the observation of nature (from this approach came works such as If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table). Finally, Goethe, renowned for his literary and poetic achievements, also pursued investigations in optics and botany, interests that left a rich trace in visual arts - and so one of Turner's most beautiful paintings bears the exact title Light and Colour, Goethe's Theory ...

Figure 1 J. M. W. Turner, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory), 1843, oil on canvas, Tate Britain, London.

Figure 2 L’Ardeur, agate, probably Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), Paris, National Museum of Natural History, Mineral and Gem Collection, photo by François Farges

Among these beautiful souls at the intersection of science and art is Roger Caillois. Essayist, grammarian, and poet, guided by Cartesian rigour alongside a richly phantasmagorical imagination, Caillois entered UNESCO after the Second World War, a position that allowed him to travel tirelessly across the Americas and Asia. Between 1952 and 1978, these journeys nourished a fervent passion for minerals, leading to the formation of a monumental collection. His fascination for this mineral universe of objets-carrefours or objets-fées was deeply resonant: these entities, placed at the convergence of geology, aesthetics and philosophy, these were not man-made forms, but rather the result of slow and inexorable physical laws, pressures, temperatures and arcane timescales. Yet, this inexorable necessity distilled a gratuitous and silent grace, a form of beauty capable of addressing both rational inquiry and the visual contemplation... L'Écriture des pierres, a work Caillois himself characterized as “the weave of dreams and the chain of knowledge”, gathered the core of his reflections on this subject. In its pages, the seduction of images coexists with the rigorous distance of analysis, holding imagination and critical distance in suspension … The work was lately published shortly before the death of Caillois in 1978.
Half a century later, an exhibition at the École des Arts Joailliers in Paris aims to return Caillois to the prominence he once held, presenting more than two hundred objects drawn from his polyhedric collection.
The itinerary opens at the point of origin of his inspiration, during his exile in Argentina. Far from the tumult of war-torn Europe, he discovered Patagonia, a region abundant in mineral matter whose formations suggested images and vistas beyond themselves - stones he named pierres imagées.

Figure 2 L’Ardeur, agate, probably Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), Paris, National Museum of Natural History, Mineral and Gem Collection, photo by François Farges

The exhibition then follows his intellectual and physical journey toward Asia, spanning Japan, with his exquisite netsukes, and China, where he engaged with the thought of Mi Fu. For this scholar, contemplation directed toward the mineral world offered a privileged path to understanding both nature and the self. This perspective finds an echo in the paésines, landscape marbles whose veined surfaces recall the language of engraving …

Figure 3 Paésine-type limestone, Val de l’Arno (Tuscany, Italy), Paris, National Museum of Natural History, Mineral and Gem Collection, photo by François Farges

Mi Fu also reflected on the rivalry between art and nature. Caillois arrived at a more radical position: nature itself, shaped by “the mysterious and slow processes of geology,” acts as an artist in its own right, a genuine Natura pictrix:

Just as man is an artist, so is nature, which recreates its own forms within itself, imitating itself in some way, [...] and the mysterious stones that contain animals or plants so similar to the real thing are figurations produced by nature repeating itself, which is the sculptor of its own forms (Roger Caillois)

The exhibition brings together many of these “unintentional paintings of sleepwalking nature”, from the septaria he described as “hieroglyphics without messages” ...
.. to onyxes, whose profound blackness evoked the obscurity of creative inspiration and myth, and “express[ed] and represent[ed] nothing other than their own clarity” …
Agates vibrated instead with an iridescent polychromy, their surfaces alive with subtle and fleeting shifts of light and colour:

because they exist in such variety, agates present a great multitude of different images, though all of them are ambiguous and vague like patterns in the clouds … their caprice is a rare one - it will sometimes offer green waves or scales or tiles, like the skin of a snake, like the roofs of markets and alms-houses in Burgundy, or like the surface of the sea ...(Roger Caillois)

Figure 4 Agate, probably Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), Paris, National Museum of Natural History, Mineral and Gem Collection, photo by François Farges

Figure 5 "OEil et binocle," eye agate in quartz, Artigas (Uruguay), Paris, National Museum of Natural History, Mineral and Gem Collection, photo by François Farges

Figure 6 "La vulve," polygonal agate, Sítio Garguelo (Paraíba, Brazil), Paris, National Museum of Natural History, Mineral and Gem Collection, photo by François Farges

Further sections of the exhibition explore Caillois’s fascination for the interplay between symmetry and asymmetry within the mineral kingdom. In fact, crystals could display ordered structures, their regularities fixed through inexorable spirals and angles, or also could assume errant and capricious forms, that appear to chaotically elude rational constraint ...

Figure 7 Agate with a quartz crystal core, probably Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), Paris, National Museum of Natural History, Mineral and Gem Collection, photo by François Farges

Figure 8 "Nuclear Explosion Above the Ocean," agate, Brazil, Paris, National Museum of Natural History, Mineral and Gem Collection, photo by François Farges

Between scientific rigour and poetic rêverie, Roger Caillois also turned to stones in search of forgotten alphabets and miniature cosmic landscapes, perceiving them as condensed universes, each enclosing a world in miniature:

Within confined spaces, the Japanese create miniature versions of the world: a mountain, a lake, a forest, a plain, a temple with its tiny garden... (Roger Caillois)

Figure 9 Fluorite, Tule Melchor Múzquiz (Coahuila, Mexico), Paris, National Museum of Natural History, Mineral and Gem Collection, photo by François Farges

Figure 10 Anorthite, labradorite variety, Ylämaa (South Karelia, Finland), Paris, National Museum of Natural History, Mineral and Gem Collection, photo by François Farges

Caillois’s sensibility could, at times, take on a mystical inflection, most clearly in the concluding section devoted to Crepuscular Images, where masks, spectres, fissures reminiscent of wounds, and landscapes suggestive of an otherworldly domain emerge from the mineral surface:

Intuitively, scientist repudiate comparisons between the healing process of living tissue and that of crystals, which they see as either sacrilegious, scandalous of delusional. Yet, crystals, like living organisms, have the capacity to spontaneously repair their damaged parts. In each affected area, augmented regenerative activity can be observed, which helps redress the impairment, imbalance and asymmetry engendered by the injury. … I don’t discount the fundamental distinction between inert and living matter. But I also consider how they share common properties, notably the capacity to restore their structural integrity, whether the matter is inert or alive (Roger Caillois)

In conclusion, the exhibition has the merit of inviting the public to discover, as Caillois first did, the hidden and often surprising beauty of the mineral world. Between scientific rigour and poetic imagination, his stones reveal speak directly to the eye and the spirit, in a journey where nature itself becomes art and poetry:

I speak about stones that have always laid outside or that sleep in their deposits, in veins, at night. They have not aroused the interest of the archaeologist, not the artist or the diamond merchant. No palace, statue, jewel, no dyke, embankment or tombstone was built from them. They are neither useful nor famous. Their facets decorate no ring or diadem. They do not bear list of victories, or state laws, in indelible numerals. They are not boundary markers or steel, and do not earn credit or deference from bearing with bad weather. They only attest their own presence. Architecture, sculpture, glyptics, mosaic, jewelry did not utilize them. They date from the beginning of the planet and perhaps emerged from another star. If so, they bear the traces of the space coercion and of their dreadful fall. They arose before mankind; and man, as he developed, did not mark them with his art of with his industry. He did not manufacture them, giving them a somewhat trivial purpose, luxurious or historical. They only perpetuate their own memory […] I speak about stones that nothing ever altered besides the violence of tectonics and the slow erosion that started with time, with them. I speak about gems, before sculpture, of nuggets before they are melted, of the profound gel of crystals before the intervention of the gem cutter. I speak about stones as algebra, vertigo and order; stones as hymns and quincunxes; stones as stings and corollas, on the brink of dreams, catalyst and image […] I speak about stones older than – and which outlast – life itself, standing on the cold planets on which they came to being. I speak about stones that do not even have to wait for death and that have nothing to do besides letting sand slide on their surfaces, along with rain shower, backwash, storm, and time! (Roger Caillois)