Background
Pier Antonio Micheli was born on December 11, 1679, in Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany (now Toscana, Italy)to the family of Pier Francesco Micheli, a laborer, and Maria Salvucci.
Piazzale degli Uffizi, 6, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy
Statue of Micheli among the gallery of famous Tuscans in the Loggiato of the Uffizi, sculpted by Vincenzo Costiani.
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1754
Botanist educator mycologist scientist
Pier Antonio Micheli was born on December 11, 1679, in Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany (now Toscana, Italy)to the family of Pier Francesco Micheli, a laborer, and Maria Salvucci.
Micheli had only the most elementary schooling (Haller, in 1772, described him as “illiteratus et pauper”). He was, however, interested in plants from childhood, and his native talent won him the respect of, and eventually a prominent position among, the botanists of his time. He taught himself Latin and began the study of plants at a young age under Bruno Tozzi.
Micheli obtained the patronage of both the Grand Duke Cosimo III de' Medici and his successor Gian Gastone de' Medici; the generosity of these two men permitted him to devote himself completely to his studies. Micheli was nonetheless hampered by the lack of an academic degree and never held a post worthy of his talents. He was obliged to content himself with modest positions in the botanical gardens of Pisa and Florence, although he enjoyed considerable contemporary fame among both Italian and foreign botanists and conducted an extensive correspondence with them. Nevertheless, in 1706 he was appointed botanist to Cosimo III de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, director of the Florence gardens, and a professor at the University of Pisa. He was further influential in founding, with a group of friends, the Società Botanica Fiorentina in 1716 and in the tutelage of a student of great ability, Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti.
Micheli was a lifelong and tireless collector of plants. His travels for this purpose took him to the provinces of Venetia, Emilia-Romagna, Lazio, Abruzzi e Molise, the Marches, Campania, and Puglia; he was also extremely active in his native Tuscany. In 1708 and 1709 he made collecting expeditions to the Tirol, Austria, Bohemia, Thuringia, and Prussia.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the concept of species was crucial to the great botanical task of classification. Micheli’s views on species were in large part derived from those of Joseph de Tournefort, but even more than Tournefort, Micheli realized the need for great caution in the problem of definition. Micheli’s attitude was, in fact, quite close to that of Linnaeus, who expressed his admiration for him. His concern is evident in the first part of his Nova plantarum genera of 1729. In this work, Micheli considered some 1,900 species, of which nearly 1,400 were new. The greater number of these new species were thallophytes - fungi, lichens, liverworts, and mosses - which Micheli classified for the first time. Using two primitive microscopes, he was able to observe, again for the first time, such notable anatomical details as the antheridia and the archegones of mosses and the spores of fungi. He thus discovered, too, the generative function and the anatomy of the mycelium; for this discovery, among others, he may properly be considered the founder of mycology.
The Nova plantarum genera remained unfinished at the time of Micheli’s death, and a considerable amount of the data that he had gathered - particularly material relating to algae, which attracted him as much as did fungi - was therefore never incorporated into it.
In 1710, while he was botanizing in Campania, Micheli noticed the similarity of the rocks on the islands of Ischia and Procida to those of Vesuvius and realized that the islands were, in fact, extinct volcanoes. In 1722, recalling this earlier observation, Micheli concluded that the hill of Radicofani in Tuscany and a number of outcroppings in nearby Lazio might also be extinct volcanoes; in 1734 he reached the same conclusion about Monte Amiata, also in Tuscany. His intuition proved to be correct; Micheli’s suggestion represented the first recognition of an extinct volcano far from regions still active volcanically.
Some sources also to Micheli as a Catholic priest but there are no details of where and when was he ordained and he is mostly known as a botanist.
Never involved in politics, Micheli nevertheless used protectorate of the Tuscan statesmen, most notably Grand Dukes Cosimo III de' Medici and Gian Gastone de’ Medici.
In addition to his botanical studies, Micheli was also concerned with zoology, paleontology, and geology.
Micheli was a founding member of the Florentine Botanical Society.
Quotes from others about the person
"He was perspicacious and possessed a talent made expressly for natural history, and particularly for botany; his eye was so keen that as soon as he reached a meadow or other place full of grasses, he could immediately distinguish the rarest or most worthy of observation. He was also gifted with an acute critical capacity, so that he could tell in an instant why other illustrious botanists had been in error, confusing one species with another, or multiplying them." - Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, Italian botanist, a pupil of Micheli
There is no information on Pier Antonio Micheli ever being married or having any children.