Conflicting Duties: Science, Medicine and Religion inRome, 1550–1750

Warburg Institute ColloquiaEdited by Charles Burnett, Jill Kraye and Will Ryan

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Conflicting Duties: Science, Medicineand Religion in Rome, 1550–1750

Edited by Maria Pia Donato and Jill Kraye

The Warburg Institute – Nino Aragno EditoreLondon – Turin 2009

Published by

The Warburg InstituteSchool of Advanced StudyUniversity of LondonWoburn Square London WC1H 0ABand

Nino Aragno EditoreStrada Rosalia 912038 SaviglianoItaly

©The Warburg Institute and Nino Aragno Editore 2009ISBN 978-0-85481-149-6ISSN 1352-9986

Designed and computer set at the Warburg InstitutePrinted by Henry Ling, The Dorset Press, Dorchester, Dorset

Table of Contents

vii List of contributors

xi Illustrations

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

1 Maria Pia Donato. Introduction

9 Pamela O. Long. Engineering, Patronage and the Authorship ofPractice in Early Counter-Reformation Rome

35 Jean-Marc Besse. The Birth of the Modern Atlas: Rome, Lafreri,Ortelius

59 Laurent Pinon. Portrait emblématique du parfait mécène : comment Ulisse Aldrovandi remercie le cardinal Montalto

89 Pascal Dubourg Glatigny. Bernin disputé : science, art et architecture dans la Rome de 1680

109 Sabina Brevaglieri. Science, Books and Censorship in the Academy of the Lincei. Johannes Faber as Cultural Mediator

135 Federica Favino. ‘Marvellous Conjuncture’? The Academy of Maurice ofSavoy in Rome between Politics and the ‘New Science’

157 Antonella Romano. Mathematics and Philosophy at Trinità dei Monti: Emmanuel Maignan and his Legacy between Rome and France

181 Stefania Montacutelli. Da Galileo a Borelli e oltre: la filosofia naturale delle Scuole Pie a Roma nel Seicento

211 Paula Findlen. Living in the Shadow of Galileo: Antonio Baldigiani(1647–1711), a Jesuit Scientist in Late Seventeenth-Century Rome

255 Elisa Andretta. Anatomie du Vénérable dans la Rome de la Contre-Réforme. Les autopsies d’Ignace de Loyola et de Philippe Neri

281 Antonio Clericuzio. Chemical Medicines in Rome: Pietro Castelli and the Vitriol Debate (1616–1626)

303 Maria Conforti. The Biblioteca Lancisiana and the 1714 edition of Eustachi’s Anatomical Plates, or Ancients and Moderns Reconciled

319 Maria Pia Donato. The Mechanical Medicine of a Pious Man of Science: G. M. Lancisi’s De subitaneis mortibus (1707)

355 Lucia Dacome. The Anatomy of the Pope

377 Index

Contributors

ELISA ANDRETTA is a Fellow of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies inAmerica, Columbia University. Her current research concerns medical practices inRome and Madrid in the second half of the sixteenth century. Her publicationsinclude: ‘Dedicare libri di medicina. Medici e potenti nella Roma del XVI secolo’,in Rome et la science moderne : entre Renaissance et Lumières, ed. A. Romano, Rome,2008; and ‘Bartolomeo Eustachi, il compasso e la cartografia del corpo umano’,Quaderni storici, 130, 2009.

JEAN-MARC BESSE is Directeur de recherche at the CNRS in Paris, UMRGéographie-cités (CNRS/Paris I/Paris VII). His books include: Voir la Terre. Six essaissur le paysage et la géographie, Arles, 2000; Face au monde. Atlas, jardins, géoramas,Paris, 2003; Les Grandeurs de la Terre. Aspects du savoir géographique à la Renaissance,Lyon, 2003. He recently edited with M.-D. Couzinet and F. Lestringant, Lesméditations cosmographiques à la Renaissance, Paris, 2009.

SABINA BREVAGLIERI has been a Max Weber Fellow at the EuropeanUniversity Institute in Florence and will be a Visiting Fellow at the WestfälischeUniversität Münster in 2009–2010. Her main fields of interest are the history ofcultural communication, the history of the book and the history of science,especially natural history and medicine in sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuryEurope. She co-edited Moglie, Monaca, Serva, Cortigiana. Vita e immagine della donna

tra Rinascimento e Controriforma, Florence, 2001, and co-authored, with L. Guerriniand F. Solinas, Sul Tesoro Messicano & su alcuni disegni del Museo Cartaceo di Cassiano

dal Pozzo, Rome, 2007.

ANTONIO CLERICUZIO teaches history of science at the University of Cassino.He is the author of Elements, Principles and Atoms. Chemistry and Corpuscular Philo-sophy in the Seventeenth Century, Dordrecht, 2000, and the co-editor of TheCorrespondence of Robert Boyle, London, 2001. He is currently working on earlymodern Italian medicine.

MARIA CONFORTI is Head Librarian of the Biblioteca di Storia della Medicina,University of Rome La Sapienza. She has worked on Italian intellectual andscientific history from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Her mainresearch interests are medical history in Italy in the early modern era and medicalhistoriography. She is currently writing a book on medicine and history in Naples,1585–1725.

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LUCIA DACOME is an Assistant Professor and the Pauline M. H. MazumdarChair in the History of Medicine at the IHPST, University of Toronto. She hasrecently completed a Marie Curie Fellow at the Centre Alexandre Koyré, CNRS.Her research interests are in the history of medicine, the history of the body and theself, and the history of nutrition. She is currently writing a book on anatomicalmodelling in mid-eighteenth-century Italy.

MARIA PIA DONATO is a Lecturer at the University of Cagliari. She is theauthor of Accademie romane. Una storia sociale, 1671–1824, Naples, 2000, and, withD. Armando and M. Cattaneo, Una ‘rivoluzione’ difficile: La Repubblica Romana del1798–1799, Rome and Pisa, 2000, as well as numerous essays on the political, socialand cultural history of early modern Rome, and on the censorship of naturalphilosophy (‘Les doutes de l’Inquisiteur. Philosophie naturelle, censure et théologieà l’époque moderne’, Annales E.S.S., 64, 2009). She is currently writing a bookwhich will explore how early modern medicine confronted death.

PASCAL DUBOURG GLATIGNY has taught history of early modern art andarchitecture at the Universities of Paris X, Poitiers and Lausanne, and is now CNRSSenior Researcher at the French-German Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. His researchconcerns the links between arts, technique and science in early modern culture. Hepublished an edition of Vignola’s Le due regole della prospettiva pratica, Paris, 2003,and is the editor of L’artista, l’opera e la sfida della prospettiva (Rome, 2006); AcademiesFacing the Question of Technique in Architecture in the Early 18th Century (Oxford, 2008);Réduire en art : la technologie de la Renaissance aux Lumières, Paris, 2008.

FEDERICA FAVINO is a Marie Curie Fellow in the History Department of theUniversity of Rome La Sapienza and teaches history of science at the Faculty ofOriental Studies in Rome. She is the author of several essays on the influence of the‘New Science’ at the papal court, on the practice of experimental physics in Romein the seventeenth century, on science teaching at the University of Rome (sixteenthto eighteenth centuries). She is currently writing a book on Giovanni BattistaCiampoli (1589–1643), a papal secretary and disciple of Galileo.

PAULA FINDLEN is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor in Italian History and Chair of theHistory Department at Stanford University.She is the author of Possessing Nature:Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, Berkeley, 1994, theeditor of Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything, New York, 2004,and has produced many other publications on science and culture in early modernItaly. This essay is part of a larger project on science and religion in late seven-teenth- and early eighteenth-century Italy.

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JILL KRAYE is Professor of the History of Renaissance Philosophy at the WarburgInstitute, where she is also Librarian and one of the editors of the Journal of theWarburg and Courtauld Institutes. A collection of her articles was published under the title Classical Traditions in Renaissance Philosophy (2002). She is the editor of TheCambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, Cambridge, 1996, and of CambridgeTranslations of Renaissance Philosophical Texts, Cambridge 1997, and the co-editor ofvarious specialist volumes, including: Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy,London 2000; Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity, Dordrecht, 2005; andtwo forthcoming volumes, Insiders and Outsiders in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy andScientia in Early Modern Philosophy.

PAMELA O. LONG is an independent historian of late medieval and RenaissanceEurope and the history of science and technology. She lives in Washington, DC,and her publications include: Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and theCulture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance, Baltimore and London, 2001;Technology and Society in the Medieval Centuries: Byzantium, Islam, and the West,

500–1300, Washington, DC, 2003; with B. Curran, A. Grafton, and B. Weiss,Obelisk: A History, Cambridge, Mass., 2009; and with D. McGee and A. M. Stahl,The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth Century Maritime Manuscript, Cambridge,Mass., 2009. She is presently at work on a cultural history of engineering in Romebetween 1557 and 1590.

STEFANIA MONTACUTELLI is an historian of philosophy currently workingat the Schweizer Schule in Rome. Her main field of research is the history of cultureand scientific institutions, particularly in the seventeenth century and with referenceto the Galilean tradition. Her latest essay is ‘Air “Particulae” and MechanicalMotions. From the Experiments of the Cimento Academy to Borelli’s Hypotheseson the Nature of Air’, in The Accademia del Cimento and its European Context, ed. M.Beretta, A. Clericuzio and L. M. Principe, Sagamore Beach, Mass., 2009.

LAURENT PINON is maître de conférences at the Ecole Normale Supérieure ofParis, where he teaches modern history, history of science and history of the book.His publications include: ‘Conrad Gessner and the Historical Depth of RenaissanceNatural History’, in Historia, Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed.G. Pomata and N. G. Siraisi, Cambridge, Mass., 2005. He is the editor of theelectronic database Bibliographie des livres scientifiques imprimés à Rome (1527–1720),hosted by the CNRS, and is particularly interested in the editorial activities ofmodern authors.

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ANTONELLA ROMANO joined the CNRS in 1997 as researcher at the CentreAlexandre Koyré (CNRS-Ehess) and is now Professor of History of Science at theEuropean University Institute, Florence. Her field of investigation is early modernscience in the Catholic world and the relations between European and non-European early modern science. She is the author of La Contre-Réforme mathé-matique. Constitution et diffusion d'un culture mathématique jésuite à la Renaissance

(1540–1640), Rome, 1999, and the editor of Rome et la science moderne : entreRenaissance et Lumières, Rome, 2008, and with P. Chinchilla, Escrituras de lamodernidad. Los jesuitas entre cultura retorica y cultura cientifica, Mexico City, 2008.

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Illustrations

Jean-Marc Besse. ‘The Birth of the Modern Atlas: Rome, Lafreri, Ortelius’

Fig. 1. Title-page of A. Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Antwerp, 1570 (privatecollection)

Fig. 2. Title-page of A. Lafreri, Geografia, Rome, around 1570 (private collection)

Laurent Pinon. ‘Portrait emblématique du parfait mécène : comment UlisseAldrovandi remercie le cardinal Montalto’

Ill. 1. Page de titre gravée, construite autour des armes du mécène, d’UlisseAldrovandi, Ornithologie, II, Bologne 1600 (ce cliché et les suivants sont reproduitsavec la permission de la Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele II, Rome)

Ill. 2. Détail du pilastre droit : emblème du lion zodiacal (BNR)

Ill. 3. Registre supérieur : portrait du cardinal couronné par la religion et la justice(BNR)

Ill. 4. Bas du pilastre droit : l’amour de la vertu accrochant un écu (BNR)

Ill. 5. Compartiment inférieur de la page de titre du tome I d’Ulisse Aldrovandi,Ornithologie, Bologne, 1599 : auteur remettant son livre au pape Clément VIII(BNR)

Ill. 6. Compartiment inférieur du tome II : allégorie sur la libéralité du cardinalMontalto (BNR)

Lucia Dacome. ‘The Anatomy of the Pope’

Fig. 1. Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Cardinal Prospero Lambertini (courtesy of CollezioniComunali d'Arte, Bologna)

Fig. 2. Lambertini writing with the symbols of the papacy waiting next to him (inSS. Domini nostri Benedicti XIV Dissertationes in omni doctrinae genere selectissimae ex

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quatuor ejusdem auctoris de Canonizatione Sanctorum libris extractae …, 3 vols, Venice,1751–2, I, private collection)

Fig. 3. Lambertini writing his way to St Peter (in SS. Domini nostri Benedicti XIVDissertationes in omni doctrinae genere selectissimae ex quatuor ejusdem auctoris de

Canonizatione Sanctorum libris extractae …, 3 vols, Venice, 1751–2, II, privatecollection)

Fig. 4. Lambertini holding a pen: Louis-Antoine de Caraccioli, Vita del papaBenedetto XIV. Prospero Lambertini, transl. from French, Venice, 1783, frontispiece(courtesy of The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto)

Fig. 5. The anatomy room of the Istituto delle Scienze (courtesy of Museo diPalazzo Poggi, Università di Bologna)

Fig. 6. Model of womb with twins; midwifery room of the Istituto delle Scienze(courtesy of Museo di Palazzo Poggi, Università di Bologna)

Abbreviations

ACDF Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della FedeASR Archivio di Stato di RomaASV Archivio Segreto VaticanoBAV Biblioteca Apostolica VaticanaBNR Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele II RomeBUB Biblioteca Universitaria BolognaCarteggio linceo G. Gabrieli, Il carteggio linceo, 2nd ed., Rome, 1996DBI Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Rome, 1961–DSB Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. C. C. Gillespie, 18 vols,

New York, 1970–90MEFRIM Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome: Italie et Méditerranée

RMC Roma moderna e contemporanea

Rome et la science Rome et la science moderne : entre Renaissance et Lumières, ed. A. Romano, Rome, 2008

xiii

Acknowledgements

Many institutions and many people have contributed in various ways to this volume;and it is pleasure to be able to record our gratitude to them. The volume originatedin a colloquium held at the Warburg Institute, 10–11 October 2003, with generoussupport from the École française de Rome, the Centre Alexandre Koyré (CNRS-MNHN-EHESS) and the French Ministère de la Recherche, as part of a researchprogramme, ‘La culture scientifique romaine à l’époque moderne’, directed byAntonella Romano. Our warm thanks go to these institutions, as well as to thescholars who took part in the colloquium, either as speakers or respondents, andwho considerably enriched our understanding of the topics discussed, but whosecontributions are not included in the volume: Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Harold J.Cook, Maarten Delbeke, Silvia De Renzi, Simon Ditchfield, Hiro Hirai, DavidGentilcore, Katharine Park, Simon Schaffer, Nancy Siraisi, Stephane Van Dammeand Jonathan Woolfson. Additional papers by scholars not present at thecolloquium were commissioned at a later stage, with the aim of providing a fullercoverage of the subject in the volume. In the process of editing all the papers, wehave benefited greatly from the assistance of Charles Burnett, Pietro Corsi, MassimoBucciantini, Giovanna Capitelli, Francesca Manzari and Tomaso Montanari, all ofwhom made valuable suggestions and comments. Annalia Cancelliere very kindlycompiled the index, for which we are extremely grateful. We would also like toexpress our appreciation to the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) forgiving Maria Pia Donato a Short Mobility Grant, which enabled her to travel toLondon and collaborate with Jill Kraye on the editing of the volume.

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Introduction

Maria Pia Donato

The aim of this volume is to examine selected aspects of scientific culture in Romefrom the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century by attempting to answer a varietyof questions. What were the distinctive aspects of scientific life in Rome during theearly modern era? Why did they emerge, and how did they operate in practice?What features were specific to the Roman context in comparison to the rest of Italyand of Europe? When were the periods of growth and of crisis?

The choice of the topic requires some explanation. An extensive revision of themethods and goals of the history of science has been going on for some decadesnow. A more comprehensive concept of modern science has developed through theinclusion of ‘minor’ disciplines (natural history, botany, chemistry) and of aspectswhich cannot be described as modern. At the same time there has been anenlargement of the geopolitical horizons in which the history of science is conceivedand narrated. If rethinking early modern science is also a matter of relocating it,1

then an exotic place like Rome – so remote from the usual itinerary of Florence,Padua, London, Paris and Leiden – surely deserves closer attention.

No one, moreover, would dispute that, at least since the 1990s, the problem ofcontext has assumed considerable importance, not only in the ‘externalist’ socialhistory of science, but also in relation to its ‘internal’ developments. Obviously, suchan approach can only be applied to contexts which have been thoroughly studied;and, as odd as it might seem, until recently this was not the case for early modernRome. Indeed, it is only in the past three decades that many aspects of the political,social, religious and cultural history of the city and of the Papal States have beenexplored in detail.2 The results of these explorations provide the foundation for thenew approach to scientific culture in Rome embodied in this volume. It is our hopenot only to shed light on early modern science by viewing it from a previously

1. I have borrowed this phrase from K. Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Constructionof Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900, New York, 2007.

2. Although still focused on the now outmoded problem of the ‘modernity’ of the papal monarchy,P. Prodi, Il sovrano pontefice, Bologna, 1982 (translated into English as: The Papal Prince. One Body andTwo Souls: The Papal Monarch in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 1987) was a turning point in the studyof early modern Rome. For research published since then, see Bibliografia romana 1989–1998, Città diCastello, 2004; and, for a general introduction to the main trends in current scholarship, see Storiad’Italia, Annali 16: Roma, la città del papa: vita civile e religiosa dal giubileo di Bonifacio VIII al giubileo di papaWojtyla, ed. L. Fiorani and A. Prosperi, Turin, 2000; Storia di Roma dall’antichità a oggi, II: Roma delRinascimento, ed. A. Pinelli, Rome and Bari, 2001, and III: Roma moderna, ed. G. Ciucci, Rome and Bari,2002. See also Court and Politics in Papal Rome, 1400–1700, ed. G. Signorotto and M. A. Visceglia,Cambridge, 2002.

1Conflicting Duties, Warburg Institute Colloquia 15, 2009.

MARIA PIA DONATO

neglected vantage point but also, by focusing on the social and political peculiaritiesof Rome in this period, to contribute to a deeper understanding of this uniquecontext.

More needs to be said, however, about science in Rome. The city has never beenregarded as a major scientific centre. Quite the opposite: it is as the home of theCounter-Reformation papacy and of the Inquisition that it has established its placein the history of Western science. The trials of Giordano Bruno and Galileo havecast an ominous shadow on intellectual life in papal Rome, notwithstanding theefforts of Catholic apologists to categorize them as ‘incidents’ and to denounce the‘conspiracy against the truth’.3

This view of Rome was formulated during the Enlightenment and was furtherelaborated within the framework of positivism, which in Italy coincided with thebitter struggle between the newly unified Italian state and the Catholic Church.This legacy helped to shape Italian national identity from the period of Unificationto the present day,4 and it has had a profound and lasting influence on the historyof science and philosophy. For this reason, a number of paradoxical positionsunderpin most of the older scholarship on Rome. The role of the Renaissancepapacy in promoting the revival of learning, for instance, is seen in terms of thepatronage of individual popes and cardinals, acting in their capacity as monarchs andhumanists, rather than being treated as part of the wider cultural history of Rome.5

Similarly, the city is credited with the birth of the first ‘modern’ academy of naturalphilosophy, the Lincei; and yet the academy’s closure in 1630 is cited as evidencefor the Inquisition-led persecution of the new science.6 Despite the opening of thearchives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in 1998, it remains difficultto overcome the alternation between accusation and apology which for so long has

3. The quoted phrases come from J. J. Walsh, The Popes and Science, New York, 1911, which waswritten in response to A. D. White’s influential work, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theologyin Christendom, New York, 1896.

4. P. Galluzzi, ‘The Sepulchers of Galileo: The “Living” Remains of a Hero of Science’, in TheCambridge Companion to Galileo, ed. P. Machamer, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 417–47; Galilei e Brunonell’immaginario dei movimenti popolari fra Otto e Novecento, ed. F. Bertolucci, Pisa, 2001; and P.Redondi, ‘Dietro l’immagine: rappresentazioni di Galileo nella cultura positivistica’, Nuncius, 9,1994, pp. 65–116.

5. It would not be incorrect to see Walsh’s The Popes and Science (n. 3 above) as a forerunner of thisthesis. A modern assessment of the subject can be found in Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library andRenaissance Culture, ed. A. Grafton, Washington DC and New Haven, 1993, especially N. M. Swerdlow,‘The Recovery of the Exact Science on Antiquity: Mathematics, Astronomy, Geography’, pp. 125–68,and N. G. Siraisi, ‘Life Sciences and Medicine in the Renaissance World’, pp. 169–98.

6. For older literature on the Lincei see E. Schettini Piazza, Bibliografia storica dell’Accademianazionale dei Lincei, Florence, 1980. G. Gabrieli, Contributi alla storia dell’Accademia dei Lincei, Rome,1989, is representative of the ambiguous way in which the academy has been treated. A similar attitudesurfaces in Pietro Redondi’s Galileo Heretic, transl. R. Rosenthal, Princeton, NJ, 1987 (orig. Turin,1983), a path-breaking book (in spite of its questionable conclusions) on the history of culture andscience in Baroque Rome.

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INTRODUCTION

distorted attempts to evaluate the role of the Inquisition, at least in relation to theGalileo affair.7

Only in recent years has the old black-and-white picture acquired subtlershading. New research has profoundly changed our understanding of the Academyof the Lincei within the political, religious and intellectual context of the Barberinipapacy.8 Studies on other academies and on the printing trade have proved usefulfor comprehending the social and intellectual circumstances which shaped the studyof nature in Rome.9 It seems clear now that the intellectual vitality of the Universityof Rome has been underrated.10 Roman medicine is also attracting increasingattention.11 Last but not least, the spectacular growth of studies on the Jesuits and

7. See, e.g., The Church and Galileo, ed. E. McMullin, Notre Dame, Ind., 2005. But the growing amountof research based on material from the archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith is producingnew insights into the history of censorship; see at least Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy,ed. G. Fragnito, Cambridge, 2001; U. Baldini, ‘Die Römischen Kongregationen der Inquisition und desIndex und der Naturwissenschaftlichen Fortschritt im 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert: Anmerkungen zurChronologie und zur Logik ihres Verhältnisses’, in Inquisition, Index, Zensur: Wissenskulturen der Neuzeitim Widerstreit, ed. H. Wolf, Paderborn, 2001, pp. 229–78; I primi Lincei e il Sant’Uffizio: questioni di scienzae di fede, Rome, 2005; S. Ricci, Inquisitori, censori, filosofi sullo scenario della Controriforma, Rome, 2008; M.P. Donato, ‘Scienza e teologia nelle congregazioni romane: la questione atomista, 1626–1727’, in Rome etla science, pp. 595–634. For a general overview of recent scholarship see also A dieci anni dall’aperturadell’archivio della Congregazione per la Dottriva della Fede: storia e archivi dell’Inquisizione, Proceedings of theconference held in Rome 21–23 February 2008 (forthcoming).

8. S. Ricci, ‘Una filosofica milizia’: tre studi sull’Accademia dei Lincei, Udine, 1994; A. Clericuzio andS. De Renzi, ‘Medicine, Alchemy and Natural Philosophy in the Early Accademia dei Lincei’, in ItalianAcademies of the Sixteenth Century, ed. D. S. Chambers and F. Quiviger, London, 1995, pp. 175–94; E.Bellini, Tra Umanisti e Lincei: letteratura e scienza a Roma nell’età di Galileo, Padua, 1997; D. Freedberg,The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his Friends and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History, Chicago, 2002; I.Baldriga, L’occhio della Lince: i primi lincei tra arte, scienza e collezionismo (1603–1630), Rome, 2002; seethe article by Brevaglieri in this volume for a more detailed analysis of recent scholarship on the Lincei.

9. W. E. Knowles Middleton, ‘Science in Rome, 1675–1700, and the Accademia fisicomatematicaof Giovanni Giustino Ciampini’, The British Journal for the History of Science, 29, 1975, pp. 138–54; J.-M.Gardair, Le “Giornale de’ Letterati” de Rome (1668–1681), Florence, 1984; A. Romano, ‘I problemiscientifici nel “Giornale de’ Letterati” (1668–1681)’, in Dall’erudizione alla politica. Giornali, giornalistied editori a Roma tra XVII e XX secolo, ed. M. Caffiero and G. Monsagrati, Milan, 1997, pp. 17–38; M.P. Donato, Accademie romane. Una storia sociale, 1671–1824, Naples, 2000; Naples, Rome, Florence: unehistoire comparée des milieux intellectuels italiens (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles), ed. J. Boutier, B. Marin and A.Romano, Rome, 2005; the articles in Rome et la science also shed light on many of these subjects.

10. D. S. Chambers, ‘Studium urbis and “Gabella Studii”: The University of Rome in the FifteenthCentury’, in Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. C. H.Clough, Manchester, 1976, pp. 68–110; Roma e lo ‘Studium Urbis’: Spazio urbano e cultura dal Quattro alSeicento, ed. P. Cherubini, Rome, 1992; F. Favino, ‘Mathematics and Mathematicians at the Universityof Rome “La Sapienza” (17th–18th Centuries)’, in Science Teaching in Early Modern Europe [= Science &Education, 15, 2006], pp. 357–92; C. Carella, L’insegnamento della filosofia alla ‘Sapienza’ di Roma nelSeicento. Le cattedre e i maestri, Florence, 2007. This re-evaluation of the Sapienza would not have beenpossible without a general reassessment of the role of universities in shaping modern intellectual life,in which C. B. Schmitt’s numerous publications played a decisive role; some of his articles onuniversities and ‘modern science’ have been reprinted in his The Aristotelian Tradition and RenaissanceUniversities, London, 1984.

11. A. Carlino, Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning, Chicago and London,1999; La sanità a Roma in età moderna, ed. M. Piccialuti [= RMC, 13, 2005, 1]; La peste a Roma

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their philosophical traditions – which is itself a by-product of the revised paradigmof modernity as applied to science12 – has enhanced our knowledge of Rome, thebirthplace and main centre of Loyola’s Society of Jesus. The Collegio Romano, towhich the best Jesuit professors were summoned (and where they were able to usethe newest instruments, including the observatory, the distilling laboratory and theMuseum Kircherianum), has been increasingly seen as a scientific institution,capable of promoting a constant renewal of Aristotelianism and disseminating itfrom Rome to the rest of the world.13 Strange as it might seem, however, thisincreased recognition of the importance of the Jesuits could well endanger thedevelopment of new approaches to the history of science in early modern Rome ifit serves to re-enforce the traditional image of the city as a stronghold ofconservatism – a conservatism which is more subtle and flexible than it has beenportrayed in the past, but perhaps all the stronger and more persistent for that.14

The point is that we should be trying to reconstruct scientific life in Rome in itsentirety, not seeking to rescue this or that aspect of it.

(1656–1657), ed. I. Fosi [= RMC, 14, 2006, 1–3]; Space, Objects and Identities in Early Modern ItalianMedicine, ed. S. Cavallo and D. Gentilcore [= Renaissance Studies, 21, 2007]; N. G. Siraisi, History,Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning, Ann Arbor, 2007.

12. For a critical appraisal of the Jesuits’ ‘retour en grâce’ see L. Giard, ‘Le Devoir d’intelligence,ou l’insertion des Jésuites dans le monde du savoir’, in Les Jésuites à la Renaissance: Système éducatif etproduction du savoir, ed. L. Giard, Paris, 1995, pp. XI–LXXIX; Les Jésuites dans le monde moderne: Nouvelleapproches historiographiques, ed. A. Romano and P.-A. Fabre [= Revue de Synthèse, 120, 1999].

13. W. A. Wallace, Galileo and His Sources: The Heritage of the Collegio Romano in Galileo’s Science,Princeton, 1984; G. Baroncini, ‘L’insegnamento della filosofia naturale nei Collegi italiani dei Gesuiti(1610–1670): un esempio di nuovo aristotelismo’, in La ‘Ratio studiorum’: modelli culturali e praticheeducative dei Gesuiti in Italia tra Cinque e Seicento, ed. G. P. Brizzi, Rome, 1981, pp. 163–215; U. Baldini,Legem impone subactis: Studi su filosofia e scienza dei Gesuiti in Italia, Rome, 1992; Il Collegio Romano [=RMC, 3, 1996]; A. Romano, La Contre-Réforme mathématique. Constitution et diffusion d’une culturemathématique jésuite à la Renaissance, Rome, 1999; U. Baldini, ‘The Academy of Mathematics of theCollegio Romano from 1553 to 1612’, and P. Findlen, ‘Scientific Spectacle in Baroque Rome:Athanasius Kircher and the Roman College Museum’, both in Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters,ed. M. Feingold, Cambridge MA and London, 2003, pp. 47–98, 225–84. There have been many studiesof outstanding Jesuit ‘scientists’; see, e.g., Les Jésuites (n. 12 above), as well as the works of Baldini andRomano cited in this note, on Christoph Clavius; M. Camerota, ‘Aristotelismo e nuova scienzanell’opera di Christoph Scheiner: intorno ad un commentario al De caelo’, Galilaeana, 2, 2005, pp.43–86; Giambattista Riccioli e il merito scientifico dei gesuiti nell’eta barocca, ed. M. T. Borgato, Florence,2002; Enciclopedismo in Roma barocca: Athanasius Kircher e il museo del Collegio romano tra Wunderkammere museo scientifico, ed. M. Casciato, Venice, 1986; Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything,ed. P. Findlen, New York and London, 2004; J. J. Renaldo, Daniello Bartoli: a letterato of the Seicento,Naples, 1979; L. Beltramo, De rebus physicis: Daniello Bartoli e la prosa scientifica, Turin, 2004; E. Caruso,‘Honoré Fabri, gesuita e scienziato’, in Miscellanea secentesca: saggi su Descartes, Fabri, White [= Quadernidi Acme, 8, 1987], pp. 85–126; The New Science and Jesuit Science: Seventeenth Century Perspectives, ed. M.Feingold, Dordrecht, 2003, on Christoph Grienberger, Orazio Grassi and Honoré Fabri.

14. This interpretation has been put forward more or less openly in some of the literature onGalileo, as a reaction to the exaltation of the modernity of Jesuit science which at times tinges Catholicscholarship on the subject; on this topic see M. Bucciantini, Contro Galileo. Alle origini dell’affaire,Florence, 1995; M. Torrini, ‘Da Galileo a Kircher: percorsi della scienza gesuitica’, Galilaeana, 2, 2005,pp. 3–18.

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Much remains to be done on this score. The difficulty is not so much a lack ofinformation as the need to construct new tools of interpretation. As AntonellaRomano pointed out in 1999 in her introduction to one of the first collective worksdevoted to scientific culture in early modern Rome (and one of the many she herselfhas been involved in), all the effort put into revising the history of science would nothave produced results without the growing number of investigations highlightingthe social, cultural, political distinctiveness of the city.15 That science in Rome hasbecome a major area of research is the outcome of many converging trends, both inhistory and in history of science. Nor is it possible to understand the interactionbetween science and culture, above all in such an exceptional context, without takinga genuinely interdisciplinary approach.

The present volume is an attempt to advance this process of reinterpretation. Indifferent ways, all the articles grapple with one key question. Given that a variety ofactivities related to science took place in Rome – it was, after all, one of the largestcities in early modern Europe – was there something specific about the scientificculture there which distinguished it from other contexts? Did the special nature ofRome produce a special kind of science? And if so, what kind? Of centralimportance to answering these questions is, of course, the relationship betweenscience and religion, a theme which surfaces in each of the articles.

In order to ensure that contributors addressed the interaction between scienceand religion in the most rewarding manner, they were asked to give particularconsideration to four characteristic features of Roman society, culture and politicsin the early modern era: in the first place, the plurality of competing powers withinthe papal Curia, itself surrounded by the courts of cardinals and ambassadors, andthe complex dynamics of patronage due, among other factors, to the elective natureof the papacy; secondly, the presence of (and competition among) numerousreligious orders, all supranational in their organization and composition, but eachwith its own tradition and culture; thirdly, the role of ecclesiastical censorship,which the Holy Office and Congregation of the Index attempted to imposethroughout the Catholic world, and its impact on intellectual life in Rome and onthe relations between its cultivated élite and the ‘Republic of Letters’; and finally,the interconnection of science, art and antiquarianism, which began earlier in Romethan elsewhere and remained stronger.

In light of these features, famous episodes, together with lesser-known aspects ofscientific life in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rome, are revisited in thisvolume. While engaging in a dialogue with current scholarship on science in early

15. A. Romano, ‘Roma e la scienza: figure, istituzioni, dibattiti’, RMC, 7, 1999, pp. 347–68, and her‘La culture scientifique à Rome à la Renaissance’, MEFRIM, 114, 2002, pp. 467–506. On the socialbackground to cultural life in early modern Rome see M. Caffiero, M. P. Donato and A. Romano, ‘Dela catholicité post-tridentine à la République romaine: splendeurs et misères des intellectuels courti-sans’, in Naples, Rome, Florence (n. 9 above), pp. 171–208.

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modern Rome, which centres on three main topics – Galileo, the Jesuits and thesocial history of medicine – all the contributors have tried to indicate avenues whichcan expand our understanding of this period. There are thus articles on differentdisciplines: medicine, natural history, geography, chemistry, mathematics,engineering and natural philosophy. And different institutions are also explored:academies, hospitals, libraries, monasteries, universities and courts. Yet, for all thisdiversity, such was the complexity of Rome that the various social and intellectualworlds inevitably overlapped, while individuals moved across boundaries andassumed multiple identities.

What stands out, in the end, as an enduring feature of scientific activity in papalRome is the disjunction between aims and results. The natural sciences were almostalways encouraged and practised in order to promote the supremacy of the CatholicChurch and the glory of the papacy, although there were significant shifts over timewhich eventually caused the failure of projects which were badly timed or unable tofind the right patron. The study of science was almost never devoid of theologicalimplications, far more and for a much longer period of time than in other centres.Each of the articles in this volume reveals a different aspect of this (hardlysurprising) situation. They reveal, however, that in most cases advancements inscience occurred because of religious interference, not in spite of it. This extends toCatholic Rome the reinterpretation of the relation between science and religionalready well established in the historiography of other European contexts, especiallyBritain in the wake of Charles Webster’s groundbreaking work.16

Clearly, the interplay between science and religion varied over time anddepending on the individual discipline. In the case of medicine, because of itspractical utility, as well as its institutional and economic autonomy, the interactionwas especially dynamic. As emerges from Elisa Andretta’s article on the anatomy ofsaints, the Counter-Reformation expanded the functions and uses of medicinewithin Catholic society. The need for improved public sanitation in the city grewin line with the strengthening of the papal monarchy. In my own essay on suddendeaths, I argue that this political dimension engendered a lively research traditionin Roman medicine, which continued even in the new religious climate of‘moderate’ piety which characterized the early Enlightenment. This is also thetheme of Lucia Dacome’s piece on Benedict XIV and the collections of anatomicalartefacts. Papal patronage of medicine was virtually unlimited; and Maria Confortidescribes a particularly successful episode, the opening of the Lancisiana Libraryunder Clement XI. Utility, too, explains the early success of chemistry in the contextof Roman medicine and science, despite its ideological connotations, as AntonioClericuzio demonstrates in his contribution on Pietro Castelli. In addition, the

16. C. Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660, London, 1975.

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example of chemical medicine shows how swiftly new knowledge and practicescirculated in Rome, aided by the large presence of people from many differentnational and cultural backgrounds, also highlighted in the article by SabinaBrevaglieri.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, astronomy and physics were scarcely ableto break free from the long-established and institutionalized disciplinary hierarchyof the scholastic tradition. The collapse of Aristotelianism did not undermine thesupremacy of theology. This led some natural philosophers in Rome, the majorityof whom, in contrast to other cities, were clerics and members of religious orders,to concentrate their efforts on revamping scholasticism. At times this entailedincorporating ideas and practices from the new science, as is illustrated by PaulaFindlen’s article on the Jesuit Antonio Baldigiani. The central character in AntonellaRomano’s contribution, the Minim Emmanuel Maignan, would not have identifiedhimself as a scholastic: after a spell in the 1640s as one of the main figures on theRoman scientific scene, he spent the rest of his life in France, constructing anoriginal philosophical system, which included a corpuscularian theory of matter anda non-Aristotelian physics of the eucharist. Nonetheless, in some respects hisendeavour harked back to the scholastic tradition.

Others adopted oblique forms of discourse in order to make the new naturalphilosophy compatible with the structures of power and knowledge in Counter-Reformation Rome. The Calasanzian Order studied here by Stefania Montacutelli,for instance, placed the Galilean tradition at the core of its pedagogical project. Yetin spite of the importance given to this heritage in fashioning the order’s image, noCalasanzian priest published anything in the field of physics or mathematics beforethe eighteenth century. In her article on the academy of Cardinal Maurice of Savoy,Federica Favino also addresses the question of dissimulation. Academicians couldtake advantage of the fictional framework of Carnival, when the world was sym-bolically turned upside down, to confront the most problematic issues of naturalphilosophy. Such ephemeral arrangements, however, left the novatores vulnerable toshifts in political alliances. Sometimes the tactics adopted involved operating on theborder between different institutions, as Brevaglieri argues in her contribution onJohannes Faber, who belonged to the Academy of the Lincei and to the Con-gregation of the Index at one and the same time. Others involved in the study ofbotany, chemistry, geography and engineering had to negotiate, on a case by casebasis, between the demands of society and the imperatives of the Catholic Churchand the papacy.

Regardless of the uneven achievements and unequal importance of the differentfields of endeavour, what comes to light in the various contributions to this volumeis the central place of Rome for men of science. The city exerted a powerfulattraction on scholars and skilled professionals throughout the world. As Jean-Marc

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Besse demonstrates in his article on the atlases of Antoine Lafréry and AbrahamOrtelius, Rome was full of cultivated customers and collectors, talented artists andrich historical sources, all waiting to be exploited. The material and financialresources of the city – even if it was not always easy to gain access to them – wereessential to any large-scale project such as Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Historia naturalis.Laurent Pinon, in his contribution, decodes Aldrovandi’s rhetorical strategies as anemblem-maker in search of patronage, which he ultimately failed to secure. PamelaLong, in hers, analyses the way in which engineers competed with one anotherthrough their networking and shows how their desire to serve as many patrons aspossible led them to engage in different branches of learning, in particular,antiquarianism. This backward-looking search for legitimization (which is alsoapparent in Conforti’s article) meant that they often took a conservative andunoriginal approach to technical problems; nevertheless, it contributed to theemergence of engineering as a learned discipline. Pascal Dubourg Glatigny’s articleexamines similar issues of professional status a century later in relation to therestoration of the cupola of St Peter’s. Even though a number of actors claimedtechnical expertise, it was the artists and antiquarians who managed to gain controlover the works through their manipulation of a wider and more powerful patronagenetwork – although, paradoxically, the episode began with unprecedented attack onthe most famous and well-connected artist in Rome, Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

It was not, however, simply a matter of seizing professional opportunities in whatwas a comparatively rich marketplace. What needs to be put in perspective is thatit was also the quest for the legitimacy which the authority of the papacy, both as aspiritual and as temporal power, could confer on their activity that drew so manymen of science to Rome in the early modern era. The many figures discussed in thisvolume seem to have converged there (or, in the case of Ortelius, to havedeliberately stayed away) as part of a conscious, if not explicit, strategy of affirmingtheir particular approach to the production of scientific knowledge in what theyregarded as the centre of religious power. To be sure, both in their strategies andin their undertakings, they at times collided with the representatives and guardiansof that power, bringing their individual duties and identities into conflict. Moreover,they often became entangled in the peculiar logic of this very unusual place, so thatthey got out of touch with contemporary science. It will be necessary to come togrips with these contradictions and complexities if the history of science in earlymodern Rome is to be rewritten.

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