Scientific Academies
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by AIR Universita degli studi di Milano S Scientific Academies process that science underwent in order to be autonomous from an organic and homogeneous Giulia Giannini view of knowledge, a view that was exactly the Max-Planck-Institut fur€ Wissenschaftsgeschichte hallmark of that model in which the academies (Berlin), Berlin, Germany were born. Abstract The expression “scientific academies” tradition- The first Renaissance academies developed ally refers to those state-supported learned socie- around the middle of the fifteenth century and ties that, from the second half of the seventeenth had a primarily encyclopedic character. The century, carried out collective, experimental main trait of the knowledge cultivated in their research and were regulated by a system of first phase was the revival of the classical culture. norms or by a formal charter. The emergence of On the one hand they, fostered a renewed interest academies such as the Royal Society in London especially in Platonic philosophy, and on the (1660), the Acade´mie Royale des Sciences in other hand they cultivated the dream of a some- Paris (1666), or the Kurfurstlich€ what all-embracing knowledge. Brandenburgische Societa¨t der Wissenschaften Vernacular literature, liberal arts, music, in Berlin (1700) is closely connected with a pro- mathematics, and the study of nature were all gressive specialization of the different types of parts, within the fifteenth to sixteenth-century learning that was largely foreign to the Renais- academies, of a wider landscape of interests. sance conceptions of knowledge. And yet, it is It is exactly this tension and strife towards a precisely during the Renaissance that the Acad- unifying and organic picture of knowledge that emy model developed and spread. threatens any attempt at formulating a classifica- Starting especially with the groups that origi- tion of themes and contents that were addresses nated c. 1440 around renowned humanists such as by the first renaissance academies. Ottaviano Rinuccini and Marsilio Ficino The question of the scientific academy in the (▶ Ficino, Marsilio) in Florence or Pomponio Renaissance should thus be posed and defined Leto and Cardinal Bessarione (▶ Bessarion, considering on the one hand the relation with Basil Cardinal) in Rome, hundreds of various the wider academic phenomenology and on the types of academies flourished and thrived other hand with the birth and rise of the “new throughout the Renaissance (▶ Academies). science,” in particular when it comes to the very Many such learned societies entertained close # Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 M. Sgarbi (ed.), Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_79-1 2 Scientific Academies connections with the courts, with their dynamics, entertain an organic relationship with more clas- and with the unstable political and dynastic lives sical forms of learning. Only from the of the signorie; and all of them depended on the mid-sixteenth century do academies begin to initiative and the patronage of a prince or an focus on specific disciplines and thus evolve aristocrat to survive. For this reason, academies into increasingly more formalized and structured were not only numerous, but also quite ephem- institutions. This process began with literary eral, often lacking a structure and a defined academies and later developed among scientific program. institutions – not only were the latter significantly An almost exclusively Italian phenomenon, fewer than the former but at least until the end of Renaissance academies are de facto a product of the seventeenth century they often lacked an humanistic culture, of aristocratic patronage, and organized structure and a program. of the polycentric cultural life of the time in Italy. The academies devoted to figurative arts and The first scientific academies were born in this drawing are in this respect an exception. Besides context and represent, at least at the beginning, a being considered among the most specialized variation on the humanistic academies of the scientific academies, they were also some of the Renaissance. most regulated and institutionalized ones. The In his monumental Storia delle accademie year 1563 marked the foundation of the d’Italia (5 vol., Bologna, 1926–1930), Michele Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, Maylender identifies the Accademia dei Fenici, under the influence of Giorgio Vasari (▶ Vasari, founded in Milan around 1550, as the first “sci- Giorgio). The academy’s main purpose was to entific” academy. The activities carried out by foster collaboration between artists, and from this academy are documented, according to 1569 it also officially included mathematics, Maylender, in Book I of Bartolomeno Taegio’ Il anatomy, and perspective among its fields of Liceo (Milan, 1571), which discusses “the order study. of the Academies and the Nobility.” The ency- The belief that mathematical sciences played a clopedic program described by Taegio is struc- fundamental role in the new political and military tured around ten monthly meetings or organization of the state brought Cosimo I to congregations, each devoted to a different subject create one of the first academies endowed with a and entirely carried out in the vernacular: dialec- legal status and financed by the state. Like the tic, rhetoric, poetry, natural philosophy, meta- Acade´mie Royale de Peinture et de physics, arithmetic, moral philosophy, Sculpture – founded in France in 1648 and household and state government, and reading of reorganized by Louis XIV in 1661 – the Floren- academic works. Although it is difficult to deter- tine academy of drawing had a formal charter, mine whether Taegio is actually referring to the was directly supported by the king and, more Accademia dei Fenici, the program of activities importantly, included teaching among its activi- described in Il Liceo appears to provide a faithful ties, something that academies both in the picture of the relationships between science and Renaissance and in modern times did not nor- the academies around the mid-sixteenth century. mally offer. Signs of interests that nowadays would be On the other hand, information regarding the defined as scientific are also found in other academies devoted to the study of nature is very “mixed” academies of the time, such as the scarce at least until the Lincean experience. Accademia degli Infiammati in Padua In the proem to his Secreti nuovi di (1540–1550), the Accademia Fiorentina maravigliosa virtu` (Venice 1567), Girolamo (Florence, 1541), the Accademia degli Affidati Ruscelli (c. 1518–1566) describes an academy in Pavia (1562), or the Accademia degli Unanimi “kept and called secreta” that he helped to estab- in Salo` (1564). Among their activities are topics lish in Naples. With the exception of his state- connected with arithmetic, cosmography, geom- ments, there is no evidence that the Accademia etry, or philosophy of nature, which in turn Segreta ever existed but it was probably founded Scientific Academies 3 in the early 1640s when Ruscelli moved to mechanics. Not unlike many other Renaissance Naples. According to Ruscelli, the aim of the academies, the Linceans had an emblem (the academy was “to make the most diligent inquiries lynx) and a motto (Sagacius ista). A set of rules and, as it were, a true anatomy of the things and similar to those found in religious or chivalric operations of Nature itself.” Even though the orders defined the selection criteria for new appli- activity of Ruscelli’s group was meant to be cants as well as the ideals and lifestyle to which kept secret, the members devoted themselves the members would have to conform. “equally to the benefit of the world in general The Lynceographum (2001), which Cesi and in particular, by reducing to certainty and began in 1605, regulated every aspect of the true knowledge so many most useful and impor- Linceans’ life and called for a radical reform of tant secrets of all kinds for all sorts of people, be learning and customs. The academy was initially they rich or poor, learned or ignorant, male or designed as a sort of lay confraternity in which female, young or old.” The Secreti nuovi contains scientific activity was driven by religious enthu- 1,245 recipes that Ruscelli claims were only a siasm. Every work published by one of its mem- fraction of the “experiments” carried out within bers had to display the title “Lincean” next to the the academy. Most of them dealt with medicine, name of the author; moreover, members were the others ranged from alchemical processes and forbidden to belong to any religious order and to cosmetics to various technical recipes. discuss matters connected with politics or reli- A similar academy, the Academia Secretorium gion. Cesi put forward a model of knowledge in Naturae, was founded by Giambattista della which a disinterested form of knowledge Porta (▶ della Porta, Giambattista) at his home contrasted with the “bookish” learning of the in Naples in the 1650s. As William Eamon schools as well as with courtly worldliness. In pointed out, “the nearly identical names of the his project, explained in the Discorso del natural two academies, their proximity in time and place, desiderio di sapere (1616), the study of nature is and the similarity of their experimental method- articulated into observation and experimentation. ologies, was surely no coincidence.” Della Porta However, this emphasis on the value of direct only mentioned the academy in the preface to the observation of nature and of experimental prac- second edition of his Magia Naturalis (1589), tice, which became even stronger in 1611 when which largely consists of a vast collection of Galileo joined the academy, was often relegated recipes and experiments ranging from medicine to a theoretical level rather than being adopted as to optics, from crafts to distillation. At least two a real research model. The academy was in fact artisans, the distiller Giambattista Melfi and the more an ideal community of scholars than a place herbalist Flavio Giordano, were involved in the for regular meetings.