Nature in the City

Roman Scientists and the Wonders of Creation

Renaissance Rome saw two great efforts to reform the study of plants, as well as that of minerals, insects, and other entities low on the scale of being. In the fifteenth century the systematic treatment of plants by Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus was translated into Latin by Theodore of Gaza, giving the whole field a new and systematic foundation. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, both the curia and other Roman institutions--like the Jesuits' Collegio Romano and the scientific society Accademia dei Lincei--became centers for the collection, observation, and investigation of every kind of natural curiosity. Roman "virtuosi" were just as curious--and just as insistent upon the importance of apparently insignificant things and creatures--as the more famous fellows of London's Royal Society. (John Evelyn, later a fellow, had a wonderful time examining the fossils and other curiosa that Roman colleagues had to show him.)

Theophrastus, De plantis, De causis plantarum (works on botany)
Translated by Theodore of Gaza, Dedicated to Nicholas V, Italy, Mid-fifteenth century
For sixteenth-century botanical collectors and authors, the works of Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus were both an important source of information and a stimulus to further contributions to knowledge. These treatises, unknown in western Europe before the fifteenth century, were first translated into Latin by Theodore of Gaza at the request of Pope Nicholas V. The translation was finished in 1453 or 1454 and dedicated to the pope. Despite its handsome title page, the text of this codex, unlike some manuscripts of herbals (such as those shown in the Botany room Numbers 1, 3, and 4 ), contains no illustrations to increase understanding of its scientific content.
Urb. lat. 250 fols. 1 verso-2 recto nature05 NAN.21
Francesco Stelluti, Melissographia
Printed sheet inserted in manuscript miscellany, of Stelluti's papers, Rome, 1625
Francesco Stelluti (1577-1652) was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei and a close friend of Prince Cesi, its founder. This engraving, which records Stelluti's microscopic observations of insects, combines the earliest illustration of a subject seen through the microscope with a Latin poem complimenting Pope Urban VIII. The illustration includes bees, which were the heraldic emblem of the Barberini family, to which the pope belonged. The engraving was presented to the pope.
Vat. lat. 9685 fol. 117 recto nature06 NAN.22
Fabio Colonna, Minus cognitarum stirpium pars altera
Rome: apud Iacobum Mascardum. 1616
Botany and natural history were subjects of considerable interest in early seventeenth-century Rome. Fabio Colonna, a leading botanist and botanical illustrator, was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei, founded in Rome by Prince Federico Cesi whose own botanical interest Colonna encouraged. Colonna's interest in describing and illustrating hitherto unknown plants extended to local as well as exotic specimens. He described the plant at left (p. 60) as growing copiously all around Rome. His work is dedicated to Cardinal Odoardo Farnese.
Stamp. Barb. M II 10 pp. 60-61 nature07 NAN.25
Michele Mercati, Metallotheca
Manuscript with inserted engravings, Rome, ca. 1589-93
Michele Mercati (1541-93) was the director of the Vatican botanic gardens and a keen collector of minerals. He endeavored to establish a systematically organized papal museum of minerals; his "Metallotheca" was intended to combine a comprehensive treatise on minerals with a catalogue of the collection. At the time of his death the "Metallotheca" was still unpublished; soon afterward, the collection itself was dispersed. Mercati's manuscript survived, however, and already contained completed engravings for the illustrations by Anthony Eisenhout; here, the sulphur mines of Pozzuoli near Naples. The "Metallotheca" was finally edited by the papal physician Giovanni Maria Lancisi and published in 1717, but by then the traditional science of Mercati was of merely historical interest.
Vat. lat. 7211 fols. 62 verso - 63 recto nature08 NAN.26

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