Scientific Academies
Royal Society of London
In 1690 St George Ashe (1658-1718), a mathematician and chaplain to the English ambassador in Vienna, Lord William Paget (1637-1713), wrote a letter to the astronomer Edmond Halley (1656-1742), bemoaning his unsuccessful attempts to find an officer in the Austrian imperial army capable of making new maps of the territories recently captured from the Turks. By the following year, however, Ashe was happy to report to Halley that he had since met Marsili and he enclosed a letter from Marsili addressed to the President and members of the Royal Society. Marsili, who had expressed his ambition to be admitted to the Royal Society to Ashe, wrote that he had been able to carry out geographical observations of the Kingdom of Hungary and newly conquered lands, owing to his extensive travelling on military campaigns and diplomatic missions, and claimed to have mastered the ‘anatomy’ of the Danube river. He wrote that he found every modern map he had seen of the region woefully inaccurate, which Ashe had concurred with from his own travels.[1]
Giovanni Fantuzzi, Memorie della vita del generale co: Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli dedicate all’Emo e Revmo Sig. Cardinale Lazzaro Opizio Pallavicini Segretario di Stato di N. S. (Bologna, 1780), frontispiece. Courtesy of Országos Széchényi Könyvtár (National Széchényi Library), Old Prints Collection.
Ashe was one of the founding members of the Dublin Philosophical Society established in 1683, together with the brothers William Molyneux (1656-98) and Sir Thomas Molyneux (1661-1733), and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1686. He left Dublin in the winter of 1688 due to the troubles preceding the Williamite War (1689-91) and became chaplain to Paget in 1689. Ashe stayed in contact with the Royal Society whilst in Vienna, and established contact with some of the most eminent scientists on the continent. He remained in Vienna until the end of 1691 and was appointed Provost of Trinity College Dublin in 1692.[2]
The Royal Society had been corresponding with scholars abroad and travellers in an attempt to expand scientific knowledge of the known world, by acquiring accurate information on history, natural history, geology, cartography, and astronomy in addition to gathering material for the society’s journal, Philosophical Transactions.[3] Territories that had been under the control of the Ottoman Empire for centuries had been inaccessible to western scientists and were ‘Terra Incognita’, so the prospect of receiving improved maps and an account of the Danube was greatly welcomed.
Ashe proposed to Halley that if the latter felt that Marsili would be deserving of admission to the Royal Society based on his commitment to supply the Society with reliable maps and information, then Halley should write to Marsili and inform him of his election, which would greatly encourage him in his future efforts. Marsili was duly proposed, balloted and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at a meeting on 25 November 1691.[4] Marsili travelled to London thirty years later in 1721 and met the elderly Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) who was President of the Royal Society. He attended a meeting of the Society and was formally admitted in person as a Fellow of the Royal Society on 14 December 1721.[5] Marsili was also a corresponding member of the Société Royale des Sciences de Montpellier that was founded in 1706 and he was elected a foreign member of the Académie des Sciences in Paris in 1715.[6]
Accademia della Scienze dell’Istituto di Bologna
De Bononiensi Scientiarum et Artium Instituto Atque Academia Commentarii (Bologna, 1731), i, title page (detail). Line engraving of the Palazzo Poggi, Bologna. Courtesy of Österreichisches Nationalbibliothek.
Marsili first began contemplating the establishment of a scientific institute or academy in Bologna devoted to experimental sciences in 1702, the same year he commissioned the construction of an astronomical observatory tower, known as a specola, to be added to his family’s Palazzo Marsili.[7] Marsili’s lodgings in the Palazzo Marsili had hosted the Accademia scientifica degli Inquieti, founded in 1690, since 1705 and he also made them available to the fine arts Academia Clementina when it was inaugurated in 1710.[8] Marsili decided after lengthy negotiations to donate his private collections of books, manuscripts, maps, scientific instruments, antiquities, natural history and artistic objects as well as material for the yet to be published Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus to the Senate of Bologna. The Senate in turn purchased the Palazzo Poggi to house the collections and to accommodate the newly formed Istituto delle Scienze e Arti Liberali, which was founded by Marsili in 1711 with the financial support of Pope Clement XI (1649-1721). It changed its name to the Accademia della Scienze dell’Istituto di Bologna in 1714 and the city’s science and fine art academies previously accommodated in the Palazzo Marsili merged with the new institute.[9] The addition of an astronomical observatory tower to the palace was completed in 1725. Marsili was frequently in dispute with the Senate of Bologna because he felt that the institute was not being run in accordance with the rules and regulations set out in its constitution.[10]
Marsili made a second donation to the institute in 1727, which consisted of books valued at 10,000 Dutch florins that were given to him in payment for the publication of Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus by its Dutch publishers.[11] Books from the sale of the library of Cardinal Guillaume Dubois (1656-1723) held at The Hague in 1725 that had once belonged to Jean Paul Bignon, Abbé de St. Quentin (1662-1743) were among the books he received.[12] The donation also included a large collection of natural history specimens from across the world that Marsili had purchased in the Netherlands in 1722.[13]
The Palazzo Poggi is now part of the University of Bologna and Marsili’s archive of correspondences, maps, and unpublished writings, bound in 146 volumes, are held in the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna.[14]
TEXT: Mr Antoine Mac Gaoithín, Library Assistant at the Edward Worth Library.
SOURCES
Cavazza, Marta, Settecento inquieto : Alle origini dell’Istituto delle Scienze di Bologna (Bologna, 1990).
Cavazza, Marta, ‘The Institute of Science of Bologna and the Royal Society in the eighteenth century’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 56, no. 1 (2002), 3-25.
Deák, Antal András (ed.), A Duna Fölfedezése. Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus. Tomus I, A Duna Magyarországi és Szerbiai Szakasza = The Discovery of the Danube. Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus. Volume I, The Hungarian and Serbian Section of the Danube (Budapest, 2004).
Deák, Antal András, ‘Marsigli, Luigi Ferdinando’, in Matthew H. Edney & Mary Sponberg Pedley (eds), The History of Cartography. Volume 4, Cartography in the European Enlightenment (Chicago & London, 2019), pp 920-922.
Dragoni, Giorgio, ‘Marsigli, Benedict XIV and the Bolognese Institute of Sciences’, in Judith Veronica Field & Frank A. J. L. James (eds), Renaissance and Revolution : Humanists, scholars, craftsmen and natural philosophers in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993), pp 229-237.
McConnell, Anita, ‘L. F. Marsigli’s Voyage to London and Holland, 1721-1722’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 41, no. 1 (1986), pp. 39-76.
McConnell, Anita, ‘A Profitable Visit: Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli’s Studies, Commerce and Friendships in Holland, 1722-23’, in C.S. Maffioli & L.C. Palm (eds), Italian scientists in the Low Countries in the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries (Amsterdam, 1989), pp 189-206.
McConnell, Anita, ‘L. F. Marsigli’s Visit to London in 1721, and His Report on the Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 47, no. 2 (1993), 179-204.
Real, Hermann J., ‘Ashe, St George (1658-1718)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).
Stoye, John, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730 : the life and times of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, soldier and virtuoso (New Haven & London, 1994).
Tega, Walter, ‘Luigi Ferdinando Marsili’s Science Institute and Its Academy’, in Luisa Cifarelli & Raffaella Simili (eds), Laura Bassi – The world’s first woman professor in natural philosophy : an iconic physicist in Enlightenment Italy (Cham, Switzerland, 2020), pp 1-34.
University of Bologna, ‘Luigi Ferdinando Marsili : Scientist, Scholar, Diplomat, General, Founder of the Istituto delle Scienze di Bologna (Bologna 1658 – 1730)’, Famous people and students.
[1] Deák, Antal András (ed.), A Duna Fölfedezése. Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus. Tomus I, A Duna Magyarországi és Szerbiai Szakasza = The Discovery of the Danube. Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus. Volume I, The Hungarian and Serbian Section of the Danube (Budapest, 2004), p. 137; McConnell, Anita, ‘L. F. Marsigli’s Visit to London in 1721, and His Report on the Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 47, no. 2 (1993), 179 ; Stoye, John, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730 : the life and times of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, soldier and virtuoso (New Haven & London, 1994), pp 109-111.
[2] Real, Hermann J., ‘Ashe, St George (1658-1718)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).
[3] Deák, The Discovery of the Danube, p. 137; McConnell, ‘L. F. Marsigli’s Visit to London in 1721’, 179 ; Stoye, John, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730, p. 110.
[4] McConnell, ‘L. F. Marsigli’s Visit to London in 1721’, 179 ; Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730, p. 111.
[5] McConnell, ‘L. F. Marsigli’s Visit to London in 1721’, 180 & 187; Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730, p. 293.
[6] Deák, The Discovery of the Danube, p. 131; McConnell, Anita, ‘A Profitable Visit: Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli’s Studies, Commerce and Friendships in Holland, 1722-23’, in C.S. Maffioli & L.C. Palm (eds), Italian scientists in the Low Countries in the XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries (Amsterdam, 1989), p. 190; McConnell, ‘L. F. Marsigli’s Visit to London in 1721’, 183.
[7] University of Bologna, ‘Luigi Ferdinando Marsili : Scientist, Scholar, Diplomat, General, Founder of the Istituto delle Scienze di Bologna (Bologna 1658 – 1730)’, Famous people and students.
[8] Cavazza, Marta, Settecento inquieto : Alle origini dell’Istituto delle Scienze di Bologna (Bologna, 1990), pp 32, 57-58 & 65; Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730, pp 256 & 278-279; University of Bologna, ‘Luigi Ferdinando Marsili’, Famous people and students.
[9] Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730, pp 277-282; University of Bologna, ‘Luigi Ferdinando Marsili’, Famous people and students.
[10] Dragoni, Giorgio, ‘Marsigli, Benedict XIV and the Bolognese Institute of Sciences’, in Judith Veronica Field & Frank A. J. L. James (eds), Renaissance and Revolution : Humanists, scholars, craftsmen and natural philosophers in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993), pp 234-237; Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730, pp 304-307; University of Bologna, ‘Luigi Ferdinando Marsili’, Famous people and students.
[11] Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730, p. 299.
[12] McConnell, ‘A Profitable Visit’, p. 198; Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730, pp 301 & 307.
[13] McConnell, ‘A Profitable Visit’, pp 198, 200-201; Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680-1730, pp 304 & 307.
[14] Deák, Antal András, ‘Marsigli, Luigi Ferdinando’, in Matthew H. Edney & Mary Sponberg Pedley (eds), The History of Cartography. Volume 4, Cartography in the European Enlightenment (Chicago & London, 2019), p. 921.