Gilberto De Angelis, and Giuseppe Olmi, eds.
Shank, Michael H.
Andrea Battistini, Gilberto De Angelis, and Giuseppe Olmi, eds.
All'origine delta scienza moderna: Federico Cesi e I'Accademia
dei Lincei.
Bologna: II Mulino, 2007. 480 pp. + 21 b/w pls. index, append,
illus. [euro]35. ISBN: 978-88-15-11986-5.
Prince Federigo Cesi's Accademia dei Lincei is a revered icon
of early modern science. In textbooks, it is the earliest scientific
society (1603). Dedicated to testing knowledge experimentally, the
Lyncean Academy boasted among its members Galileo Galilei and
Giambattista della Porta. To readers familiar only with this sketch,
this hook offers a salutary shock by providing the contextual frame
without which one cannot assess the significance of the Lyncean Academy.
Thanks to its generous notes, this fascinating collection of 400th
anniversary articles both contributes, and offers access, to the
mushrooming scholarship on the academy. Not least, the volume also sheds
an unexpected light on the social, cultural, and religious context of
early seventeenth-century Italian science, particularly in the Rome of
the Barberini and of Galileo's trial.
Perhaps the most surprising chapter is the first, by De Angelis,
who argues convincingly that Cesi's academy grew out of a
profoundly religious sensibility cultivated in a family deeply tied to
Franciscan spirituality and piety. The goals of the academy were the
love of God and brotherly love, and its motto ("the desire for
wisdom") was all-encompassing. Its focus on the mathematical
sciences, natural philosophy, and natural history was motivated by the
Bonaventurao vision of ascending to wisdom by first cultivating to the
utmost the knowledge accessible to the senses. For De Angelis,
Cesi's academy was a "great historical utopia":
accordingly, he sharply criticizes the frequent subsumption of the
antithetical visions of Cesi and Francis Bacon (the contemplation vs.
the domination of nature).
The sun and the bee are motifs central to Batberini emblematics and
to Luigi Guerrini's chapter. Cesi had dedicated his Apiarium, an
organicist and moralizing treatise on the bee, to Urban VIII, whose
nephew Francesco became a low-key Lyncean immediately before he became a
cardinal. Guerrini shows how the particulars of the bee's behavior
and anatomy become springboards to moral points--precisely the program
that the Lyncean Academy sought to instantiate by starting from the
senses in order to transcend them. Guerrini demonstrates Tommaso
Campanella's heavy borrowing from Cesi in his own commentary on the
pope's poem "De sole et api," and intriguingly reads it
as a statement of friendship.
Roberta Favino's exploration of the skeptical and empiricist trends in Giovanni Ciampoli and other Lynceans helped me understand
better the context of similar strains in Galileo and Urban VIII. Her
analysis also highlights notable differences in outlook between Galileo
and Ciampoli, whose natural philosophy takes nature to be not a book,
but a library, and mathematics to be the language of but a few of its
volumes. Silvia de Renzi's discussion of Johannes Faber, a German
Lyncean who taught at La Sapienza in Rome, offers a glimpse of the
interface between natural philosophy, medical skepticism, the Socratic
model, and the iatrochemical world of the 1620s.
David Freedberg's chapter focuses on Cesi's and Johannes
Heckius's investigations into mushrooms. Recent manuscript evidence
shows that Cesi pioneered the systematic investigation of mushrooms with
extensive use of the microscope, to which Galileo had introduced him in
1624. Cesi used the instrument to discover how ferns reproduce and to
describe the anatomy of--once again--the bee (his microscope-aided
printed illustration preceded Robert Hooke's Micrographia by a
generation).
Three of the last four chapters touch on the Tesoro Messicano, the
Academy's massive introduction to New World flora and fauna,
published posthumously (1651) for most of its contributors, including
the physician Fabio Colonna (the focus of two chapters). Alessandro
Ottaviani discusses Colonna's role in the preparation of the work,
while Federigo Tognoni focuses specifically on Colonna's solutions
to the problems of representing plants in this illustrated volume.
Oreste Trabucco sorts through the Intellectual complexities and personal
conflicts involved in separating the mythical zibelhicum animal
amerkanum from the hyaena odorifera on the terrains of illustration,
description, and anatomy. The collection concludes with Enrica Schettini
Piazza's excellent overview of the long-lost Cesi family archive,
rediscovered in 1996.
In short, this rich collection paints the early Lyncean Academy as
far more than an experimental association typified by Galileo's
interests; rather, it was a diverse confraternity of international
colleagues with a surprising range of interests, many of them
natural-historical. Not least, we may well have underestimated the
importance of the tight Lyncean social and intellectual network when
thinking about the careers of its individual members.
Michael H. Shank
University of Wisconsin-Madison