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In 1612 France former Queen Marie The Medici (papal family and financiers of the Jesuits) arranged pomp and circumstance at the wedding of her son Louis XIII and Anne of Austria at the Place Royale in Paris.
The festivities described by several different artists showing a luxuriance and a display of kind rarely seen; giants, parades, tournaments, ballet, all kinds of exotic animals; elephants, leopards, reindeer, unicorns and dragons. The Sun is worshipped.
Kircher includes fantastic animals, such as the unicorns, which Kircher considers real, since Queen Christine of Sweden gave him a horn, or the griffons, quoted by his Jesuit brothers in China.
From The Stars of Galileo Galilei and the Universal Knowledge of Athanasius Kircher byRoberto Buonanno
In the middle of the seventeenth century, the most famous museum in Italy was the gallery at the Roman College. Filled with magic lanterns, distorting mirrors, automata, mummies, exotic animals, mythical* creatures (giants, sirens, unicorns), and numerous Egyptian and Chinese artifacts, the museum fulfilled its claim to be a microcosm of the world.
Paula Findlen in Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters
*real
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