Background
Filippo Bonanni was born on January 7, 1638, in Rome, Papal States (now Italy).
Roman College, Piazza del Collegio Romano 1A, 00186 Roma RM, Italy
After his novitiate, in 1656 Filippo Bonanni was sent to study at the Society's noted Roman College.
Roman College, Piazza del Collegio Romano 1A, 00186 Roma RM, Italy
After his novitiate, in 1656 Filippo Bonanni was sent to study at the Society's noted Roman College.
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1702
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1709
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1720
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1722
educator priest scientist writer collector
Filippo Bonanni was born on January 7, 1638, in Rome, Papal States (now Italy).
As a Jesuit, in 1656 Bonanni was sent to study at the Society's noted Roman College. There he became a pupil of the German scientist, Athanasius Kircher. While a student there, he undertook the manufacturing of microscopic lenses. He used his lenses to create his own microscope and to develop scientific studies of a number of specimens. He also became a skilled copperplate engraver.
From Rome, Filippo Bonanni was sent to teach in the Jesuit Colleges of Orvieto and Ancona. Upon Kircher's resignation of the post of Professor of Mathematics at the Roman College, Bonanni was chosen to succeed him. In 1698, he was appointed a curator of the Kircherian Museum, which he described in his Museum Collegii Romani Kircherianum (1709).
Erudite in a number of fields, including numismatics and ecclesiastical history (writing on both subjects), Buonanni made extensive studies in the natural sciences; he constructed his own microscope with three lenses (according to Tortona’s system), which proved to be an ingenious mechanism for continual observation. In his Ricreazione dell’occhio e della mente nell’osservazione della chiocciole (1681), a work valuable for its many illustrations of shells, he explicitly affirmed his belief in the spontaneous generation of mollusks and rekindled the controversy over generation that had flared in 1671 between Kircher and Francesco Redi. Buonanni’s position was anachronistic, since the Aristotelian theory of spontaneous generation had been disproved by Redi in his Esperienze intorno alla generazione degli insetti (1668) and by Marcello Malpighi, who had demonstrated the pathogenesis of oak galls from the development of fertilized insect eggs in his Anatome plantarum (1679).
Bonanni made no personal observations on the phenomenon of generation in the lower animals; neither had he understood the validity of Nicolaus Steno’s declaration that "the oysters and other shells originate from the eggs, not from putrescence," or the statement of the English naturalist Martin Lister that "snails are generated by coition, which we observed often in many of their kinds." He based his belief in the spontaneous generation of mollusks partly on the authority of Aristotle and Kircher and partly on a report by Camillo Picchi of Ancona that "the conches called "Ballani" (mollusks of the kind Balanus) five only in some rocks and not in others," but principally upon an anatomical error of his own; he was convinced, as he stated in his Ricreazione, that the mollusks had no hearts. If this were so, they had no blood; Aristotle had written that no bloodless animal is oviparous, and that "all conches are generated spontaneously by the mud - oysters by dirty mud, the others by sandy mud." Convinced that the conches were heartless and bloodless, Bonanni believed that both observation and authority supported the idea of spontaneous generation.
Two years after the publication of the Ricreazione, Antonio Felice Marsili, archdeacon of Bologna, brought out his own Relazione sul ritrovamento dell'uova di chiocciole, in which he described and, indeed, provided drawings of the eggs of snails, some of which visibly contained minuscule snails. Redi, because of Bonanni’s opposition to his conclusions on the oviparous generation of insects, harshly criticized Bonanni in his Osservazioni (1684), pointing out his rival’s error regarding the absence of the heart in snails (the existence of which Redi demonstrated) and asserting, further, that all snails had hearts. He was ruthless in his exposure of Bonanni’s mistakes in methodology and ridiculed Bonanni’s attempts to demonstrate spontaneous generation of insects from putrefied hyacinth flowers and to establish that certain putrefied flowers or leaves generated only certain kinds of insects.
Bonanni replied (1691) to Redi’s criticism, but his reply was judged by contemporaries as inadequate, and indeed inane. On the other hand, it should be recorded that he did deny the existence of the mythical remora, the reality of which had been accepted from Aristotle and Pliny right down to Girolamo Cardano in the mid-sixteenth century. His rational classification of shells was novel and useful. The quality of his illustrations of various insects was excellent - particularly those of the fly, louse, mite, flea, and mosquito. Indeed, his drawings of the Culex pipiens (common house mosquito) are the best of the seventeenth century.
Filippo Bonanni is remembered as a clergyman, professor of mathematics at the Roman College, collector, and director of Kircher Museum, whose many works included treatises on fields ranging from anatomy to music. He created the earliest practical illustrated guide for shell collectors in 1681, for which he is considered a founder of conchology. He also published a study of lacquer that has been of lasting value since his death.
Filippo Bonanni was a Jesuit Father, who entered the Order of the Society of Jesus in 1654 at the age of seventeen.
Filippo Bonanni followed Aristotle in believing in theories of spontaneous generation. In critiquing the experimental work of Francesco Redi, Bonanni defended the Aristotelian view. Though he raised important questions - such as whether viewers through a microscope tended to see what they expected, rather than what was there - later writers tended to discount Bonanni as support for Aristotelianism waned.
Nonetheless, in early writing about the nature and origins of fossils, Bonanni admitted doubts about whether theories of transport could account for the numbers and distribution of fossils. He later speculated that fossils could be divided into two groups - the remains of organisms, and the "products of natural powers." Such interpretations were consistent with the new and challenging idea that the earth must have undergone "extraordinary alterations" to explain the diversity of types and locations of fossils.
