Luka Voronin’s Expedition Drawings in the Collection of Illustrations to Peter Simon Pallas’ Zoographia rosso-asiatica: Attribution and Descriptions

Abstract

Twenty three drawings by Luka Voronin, artist to the J. I. Billings – G. A. Sarychev North-East Expedition (1785–1795), were discovered in the collection of illustrations for Academician P. S. Pallas’ Zoographia rosso-asiatica at the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive the Russian Academy of Sciences. For Pallas, this expedition became an important source of information about the Russian fauna. The expedition’s materials were used by him in the preparation of Zoographia rosso-asiatica, which is why some of Voronin’s expedition drawings that had been selected by Pallas were preserved in the collection of illustrations. In this article, the process of attribution of Voronin’s zoological drawings is described and the descriptions of all drawings are published for the first time. The descriptions are given in the order of illustrations in Zoographia rosso-asiatica and contain modern names of the illustrated species, the Latin names given by Pallas, the date, size, transcript and translation of the marks, and descriptions of other distinctive features of the sheets. Introducing Voronin’s zoological drawings sheds new light on the pages from the expedition’s history and broadens the source base for the history of natural science illustration in Russia. Studying these drawings may become an important part of the visual reconstruction of natural-science collections of the Petersburg Kunstkamera of the late 18th – early 19th century.