Ulisse Aldrovandi was an Italian Renaissance naturalist and physician noted for his systematic and accurate observations of animals, plants, and minerals. He is considered the founder of modern Natural History. Aldrovandi is a typical representative of those “universal” and multifaceted minds which seem to have been characteristic of the Renaissance.
Background
Aldrovandi was born on September 11, 1522 in Bologna to a noble family. He was the son of a nobleman, Teseo Aldrovandi, a notary who served as secretary of the Senate of Bologna, and of Veronica Marescalchi, also of a noble family. His mother was a first cousin of Pope Gregory XIII, a circumstance that was helpful to Aldrovandi later in his life, for Bologna was then a papal state.
Education
As a young man, Aldrovandi first studied mathematics under Annibale della Nave, a famous mathematician of the period. After the voyage to Spain, which had been replete with adventures and perils, Aldrovandi returned to Bologna, where he enthusiastically studied Latin under Giovanni Gandolfo, one of the most distinguished humanists of the period.
Aldrovandi’s mother, now a widow, wanted him to become a jurist, and he readily applied himself to studying law. Within seven years he was on the verge of receiving his degree, which would have qualified him to practice law, but instead of completing the work he dedicated himself to philosophy.
After having studied under the best philosophers of Bologna, he decided, about 1545, to go to Padua to complete his preparation there. This decision had a major influence on his life, for at Padua he began to study medicine and, with the aid of Pietro Catena, again took up mathematics.
Career
Aldrovandi reputedly began his natural history museum on a trip to Rome in 1549, having been summoned there to face trial for heresy. With half a dozen other Bolognese men, he awaited his doom only to be granted amnesty by incoming Pope Julius III. According to some accounts, he insisted a trial still be held just so he could prove his innocence. Whatever the case, while most of his cellmates immediately headed home to Bologna, Aldrovandi lingered in Rome, ogled antiquities, and befriended fish enthusiast Rondelet, who put him in the habit of collecting and studying his own piscine specimens. He was obliged to go to Rome to exonerate himself, and there, after proving his innocence, he became interested in the archaeological discoveries in which the city abounded. Later he collected his observations in a book, but perhaps more important, at Rome he met Guillaume Rondelet, who was there as the personal physician of Cardinal Tournon.
Rondelet was then gathering material for his work on fishes. Aldrovandi, who accompanied the French physician to fish markets in order to study the various species, finally decided to study natural history, and began collecting specimens for his own museum.
Upon his return to Bologna, Aldrovandi met Luca Ghini, who then held the professorship of pharmaceutical botany at the university. When Ghini moved to Pisa, Aldrovandi followed him in order to attend his lectures.
In 1551 he went as far as Monte Baldo, which he climbed with Luigi dell’Anguillara and Luigi Alpago, who were well-known botanists of the period. In later years he was frequently accompanied on these expeditions by his pupils, who went with him to study botany and to collect samples of fossils and minerals to enrich his “museum” with specimens from every part of Italy.
After taking his medical degree, which he received on 23 November 1553, on 14 December, at a solemn ceremony, he was admitted to the Collegio dei Dottori of Bologna, a membership that entitled him not only to practice medicine but also to teach in the university. Thanks to the support given him by an uncle who was a senator, he was also appointed a teacher of “logic” in the University of Bologna. Teaching, however, was merely an easy way of earning an income that would enable him to devote himself entirely to the study of the natural sciences. During vacation periods, Aldrovandi went on long trips, to study nature firsthand and to enrich his knowledge and collections.
Aldrovandi embarked on a botanizing expedition in the Sibylline Mountains of Italy, in 1557, the first such expedition of its kind in Europe.
As a direct result of his intense scientific activity, the Senate appointed Aldrovandi professor of the history of “simples” (which study Aldrovandi had extended to embrace what would now be called natural sciences, including animals and minerals, as well as plants, whether they were of medicinal value or not). His appointment to this professorship was important for the development of natural history, for until then, lectures had been confined to the concise illustration of some single specimen of medicinal value. He was so successful in arousing a lively interest in the more systematic study of natural science, however, that his lectures were attended by an increasing number of students. At the request of the students themselves, the chair was finally declared a full professorship on 11 February 1561.
In the wake of his first success, Aldrovandi, after long and bitter battles, also established at Bologna a botanical garden, of which he was named curator. This new appointment aroused further opposition and envy, and shortly afterward new quarrels arose when he was assigned the task of preparing an Antidotario, an official pharmacopoeia. It was to be authoritative in the state of Bologna and would fix the exact characteristics of the drugs and medicinal substances that druggists would be required to use in filling prescriptions.
The variety of tasks, the public and semipublic positions he held, and the conflicts and disputes (which his somewhat obstinate character served only to embitter) were responsible for Aldrovandi’s recurrent disagreements with his colleagues on the medical faculty of Bologna. They did not, however, seriously interfere with his truly prodigious studies in natural history. Aldrovandi also had the support of Pope Gregory XIII, who granted him, as a token of his benevolence and esteem, a large sum of money to aid him in the publication of his works.
At his death, Aldrovandi bequeathed to the city of Bologna his museum, his library, and the manuscripts of his unpublished works. During his life he had been able to publish only four folio volumes, illustrated with beautiful copperplates; other volumes were published after his death. His manuscripts are preserved in the libraries of Bologna.
In embryology, Aldrovandi was able to carry out, within certain limitations, studies in which he excelled and which influenced the work of Volcher Coiter, the Flemish scientist considered one of the founders of embryology. He and Coiter were the first to examine, as Aristotle had suggested, the development of the chick in the egg day by day, opening the eggs successively on each day of the incubation period, in order to describe minutely the changes that take place in the embryo. By this method it became possible for him to show that the heart of the embryo is formed in the “sacco vitellino” and not in the albumen, as other writers had maintained. He also showed that, just as Aristotle had correctly stated, the formation of the heart in the embryo precedes that of the liver, which Galen had incorrectly stated as taking place at the start of the embryonic development.
Aldrovandi also deserves credit for having carried out, in this area of studies, keen observations of a teratological nature, tracing the cause of the morphological changes of the chick to corresponding chemicophysical changes in the substance of the egg yolk.
Even if, from a practical viewpoint, his work and his observations did not contribute greatly to the progress of embryology, they unquestionably had the merit of recalling to the attention of scholars the method of direct observation of natural phenomena. Aldrovandi’s studies in this field paved the way for work along the same lines by Fabrizio (Fabricius ab Aquapendente), Malpighi, and Harvey.
Not surprisingly, Aldrovandi desperately wanted to see the New World, too, but by the time he was offered the opportunity, he was 65. He thought himself too old and frail to survive the trip, but he might have made it after all; he lived nearly 20 more years. When he did travel in later years, he was accompanied by assistants, including an artist to draw the sights and a secretary to record his observations.
Views
Aldrovandi carried out studies in several fields of natural history: botany, teratology, embryology, icthyology, and ornithology. He has been criticized for having included in his works information and legends devoid of any scientific basis - material that he derived largely from the works of Pliny and that would have been better confined to a medieval bestiary than included in scholarly works.
The period in which Aldrovandi lived and studied was one of transition, however. Science was then being born through the labors of men who, like Aldrovandi, wrote of distant lands but were still obliged to base their accounts almost entirely on secondhand information, gleaned from texts and accounts of travelers. Very often the authors of these accounts were not men of science, but merchants and adventurers whose chief interests had nothing in common with science.
On the other hand, science assumes the existence of a critical, experimental mind, which the men of the Renaissance (Aldrovandi among them) were striving to achieve; it also assumes the inheritance of knowledge, already critically evaluated and classified, with which to compare and test new knowledge as it is acquired. It would therefore be mistaken to ridicule the minute descriptions that Aldrovandi gives us of the sirens, or of other fabulous animals and things.
How fossils formed puzzled naturalists during Aldrovandi's life and long after his death. He rejected the Noachian flood as an explanation for the formation of fossils, but he believed that some fossils formed in situ, making him partially right and partially wrong in understanding fossilization. Although he misinterpreted many body fossils (noting their lack of preserved internal structure to conclude they hadn't been animals), he did correctly interpret some trace fossils, for instance, the rocky remains of ancient bivalve burrows. He also identified some plant fossils.
Personality
Restless by nature and eager to see new things, new countries, and new people, Ulisse ran away from home on several occasions. At the age of just 12, Aldrovandi visited Rome on his own.