Federico Angelo Cesi was an Italian naturalist. He was the founder of the Accademia dei Lincei.
Background
Cesi was born on February 26, 1585, in Rome, Italy, to an aristocratic family highly connected in Rome and the Papal States. The family derives its name from Cesi, a little town near Rome. Federico was the first of eleven legitimate male children born to Federico, marchese di Monticelli and his wife, Olimpia Orsini of Todi.
Education
Cesi was educated at Rome by private tutors.
Career
Cesi, hereditary marquis of Monticelli and duke of Acquasparta, acquired those titles in 1628 and 1630. He was made prince of San Angelo and San Polo in 1613 and assumed administration of all family estates in 1618. His noble status, together with the moral and financial support of his mother assisted him in carrying out his scientific program against his father’s strong opposition and, in later years, against growing antagonism toward science in theological and academic circles.
Cesi founded the Lincean Academy in Rome, in 1603, with four members. In 1610 Giovanni Battista Porta was enrolled, and after the election of Galileo in 1611 the Academy grew rapidly. Among its eventually thirty-two members were such foreign scientists as Mark Welser, Theophilus Müller, and Johannes Faber. Cesi was its principal administrator and sole financial supporter until his death, which was soon followed by the condemnation of Galileo and the collapse of the Academy. The Praescriptiones Lynceae, drafted by Cesi in 1605 and published in 1624, fixed the objectives of the Academy as the study of science and mathematics, the pursuit of new knowledge, and the publication of scientific discoveries. The Academy’s first important publication was Galileo’s book on sunspots (1613). That work had in turn been inspired by Welser’s publication at Augsburg in 1612 of Christopher Schemer’s letters on sunspots, sent by Welser to Galileo, whom he knew through Cesi.
In 1616, when the Holy Office forbade the Copernican doctrine, Cesi supported freedom of opinion within the Academy against the Lincean mathematician Luca Valerio, who moved to dissociate the membership from the forbidden views. The Academy published Galileo’s Saggiatore in 1623 at Cesi’s expense and would have published the later Dialogue also, if Cesi had not died before the imprimatur was obtained. Either personally or through his Academy, Cesi sponsored publication of scientific works by Porta, Johannes Eck, and Francesco Stelluti. His wide correspondence circulated scientific information in early seventeenth-century Italy and Germany, as did Mersenne’s shortly afterward in France and England. Cesi also informed his colleagues of currents favorable or adverse to science at Rome and represented their interests in tactful discussions with authorities there. He tried (without success) to establish branches of the Academy at Naples and in other cities, both in Italy and abroad, envisioning an international scientific society. He labored for many years with three fellow academicians on a Theatrum
totius naturae - a projected “Cosmos” in the Humboldtian sense. All that was eventually published of this was a folio broadside, the Apiarium, dedicated in 1625 to Pope Urban VIII and containing the first anatomical drawing made with the microscope, and the Nova plantation et mineralium mexicanorum historia, edited from manuscripts of Francisco Hernandez. To the latter work was appended Cesi’s Phytosophicae tabulae; although printed in 1630, the work was not published until 1651, funds for its completion and assembly having been cut off by Cesi’s death.
Cesi’s phytosophic tables anticipated by more than a century the work of Linnaeus in formulating a rational system for the classification and nomenclature of plants. Not only did Cesi conceive a natural system based on morphology and physiology, but he is reported to have discovered the spores of cryptogams and described the sexuality of plants in the course of his studies of microscopic plant anatomy. Except for the tables, however, his botanical work remains in manuscript. Cesi's library, scientific instruments, and manuscripts, dispersed after his death, have now been largely reacquired by the present Accademia dei Lincei at Rome, which was reconstituted as a national academy in 1875.