“The worship of God, best and greatest, and of his works
the constant contemplation of the universal machine of the world
the mind ever nourished by the writings and sayings of the wise […]
moved by the will to help and to relieve […]
These things are worthy of a man, of a nobleman, of a prince.
Federico Cesi, the prince of the Linceans, wished in this way

to admonish himself and his own, for ever.”

(Federico Cesi, Epitaph)

Umbria was the birthplace of the noble house of the Cesi, who came from a small hamlet near Terni and later became Dukes of Acquasparta. The sense of belonging to the Umbrian land and the attachment to its intimate religiosity were deeply rooted in the family and in Federico Cesi, the illustrious scientist who founded the Accademia dei Lincei. Gilberto De Angelis, in his studies on the biography of the Lincean Prince, recognizes the importance that Christian spirituality had for the scientist’s formation. In a glass vial his father kept the relic of the blood of Saint Francis, and the young Federico and his brothers were enrolled in the Confraternity named after that same saint. There, where noble churchmen and cobblers called one another “brothers”, he was able to witness a successful experiment in universal communion, one that accorded well with the teachings of his mother, Olimpia Orsini of Todi. She was an extraordinarily devout woman, whom her son liked to call “Heroina Romana” for her exemplary modesty. Federico Cesi’s project was undoubtedly grafted onto the Franciscan lesson, which taught enthusiasm for the contemplation of nature as God’s creation, and which kept alive, in an original synthesis, the Augustinian categories of “scientia”, the contingent knowledge of man, and “sapientia”, the immutable truth of God. Saint Bonaventure, the most celebrated Franciscan Doctor, refers scientific and philosophical knowledge to Wisdom: only by mastering human Science is it possible to turn to the knowledge of the Eternal. The Lincean motto “Sapientiae Cupidi” rests on these foundations, on the recognition of the limits of a knowledge that must transcend its own precariousness in order to be joined with God.
Always desirous of wisdom, Federico Cesi was self-taught in the sciences and a polyglot, skilled in Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Spanish. Educated even by an Arab tutor, his vision of knowledge could only be catholic, universal. In the study of the sciences his field of inquiry would be the whole of nature, including that of the “New World”, the America of Columbus that had thrown the natural science of the ancients into crisis. The bizarre exotic flora, which had never appeared in the works of Pliny, would later pour out in all its colors into the Lincean work Il tesoro messicano, a collective volume published only after the death of the Academy’s founder.
The founding of the Academy entered concretely into Cesi’s plans only when he found his own “frates” (as the Linceans liked to call themselves). From the very start it proved to be an unusual, modern body, so much so that it became a model for the future Royal Academy in London and for the Académie des Sciences in Paris. The Italy of the seventeenth century teemed with Academies, from that of the Insensati in Perugia to the Accademia della Crusca. All of them, however, were devoted to “cruscate”, that is, to playful jests, and when serious, to poetry or philosophy. That of the Linceans, by contrast, was a unicum, the first in the world to set itself the study of the “less cultivated sciences”, from astronomy to botany, and more generally the study of the whole of nature.
At first it was made up of Federico Cesi, of only two other young Italians, Francesco Stelluti and Anastasio de Filiis, and of Giovanni Heckius (Johannes van Heeck), a Catholic fleeing Calvinist persecution in the Netherlands. Heckius, after arriving in Italy, had graduated in Medicine at the University of Perugia. Soon disliked by the apothecaries for his innovative practices, he was treacherously attacked while riding on horseback and unjustly thrown into prison. He was freed only thanks to the intercession of Federico Cesi, who had learned of the affair. Brought to Acquasparta, the physician formed with his contemporary a sincere friendship that would lead to the creation of the Academy. But soon Cesi’s father, suspecting dangerous heretical tendencies, was displeased and decided to have “the foreigner” banished from Rome and to send Federico away on a journey to Naples, to keep him from home. Nevertheless, before earning the family’s final approval, the young men went on communicating by letter, replacing the signs of the alphabet with those of the zodiac.
In this device one can already see the serene openness of the young scholars to the occult sciences and to mysticism. As Eugenio Garin observed during the conference celebrating the fourth centenary of Cesi’s birth, the Accademia dei Lincei was a hybrid body, one that by virtue of this trait fostered dialogue between diverging points of view, in a context of general crisis of the universities and of freedom of thought. In it the new experimental method coexisted with the science of the Renaissance naturalists, steeped in alchemy and secrets. It should come as no surprise, then, that Giovan Battista della Porta, keeper of magical recipes and ancient superstitions, was a Lincean just as much as Galileo Galilei. The boundary between magic and science was then very faint: Descartes recounts premonitory dreams, and Kepler’s explanations would be pervaded by religious charge. What all the Linceans had in common, however, was the idea of a renewed science, faithful at last to direct observation and not to Aristotelian precepts. Federico Cesi wrote that science demands the study of the masters of antiquity, but that this is not enough, “for, in order to accomplish anything of our own, we must read well this great, truthful and universal book of the world; we must therefore visit its parts and train ourselves in observing and experimenting”.
These words date from 1616, five years after Galileo Galilei, the most faithful reader of the book of the world, entered the Academy as its sixth signatory. After his signing, the memberships multiplied: between 1611 and 1613 the Linceans grew to twenty. In 1613 the Academy published its first collective edition, Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari. It is significant that the first work to bear the Lincean symbol on its frontispiece was not the volume proposed by Heckius, a dissertation against the Protestants: by now the Academy meant to spend its resources exclusively in favor of rational science. The published text consists of the letters that Galilei sent to the Lincean Welser, in which he reports what he had been able to observe on the irregular surface of the photosphere. To the great dismay of the Church, Galileo strips the star, metaphorically coinciding with God, of its imperishable perfection.

To discuss these implications Cesi and Galileo exchanged many letters, especially concerning the thorny question of heliocentrism. When Cardinal Bellarmine unexpectedly announced the prohibition against professing Copernicanism, the Academy courageously supported Galileo’s position, specifying in a note that scientific results were to be considered as opinions and not to be taken as dogmas. The consequent defection of Luca Valeri, frightened by the possible reprisals of the Church, was condemned without exception by the whole association of scientists gathered in special assembly. In 1618 Federico Cesi even wrote a letter to Bellarmine, urging him to abandon the “ancient thickets of the ancient texts and to turn to the direct observation of nature”. Despite this honest intellectual intransigence, after 1616 the Academy preferred to occupy itself with subjects other than astronomy, and especially with the sciences of nature.
The occasion for a great work presented itself in 1623, when Maffeo Vincenzo Barberini was elected pope, a man close to the Linceans and to Galileo. To celebrate him, Cesi produced a great synoptic table on bees, the symbol of the pontiff’s house. The Apiarium contained very important naturalistic information, but also poetic references and allusions of moral significance. Luigi Guerrini notes how Cesi regards the bee as a genuine mediator between the earthly world and the celestial one: to the little insect falls the task of gathering the celestial humors deposited on the flowers and of transforming them into honey. The Apiarium was to be part of a monumental naturalistic work that the Lincean Prince never brought to completion, the Theatrum totius Naturae. Cesi’s purpose, hidden behind the attempt to create a synthesis of all natural phenomena, was to attain an encyclopedic knowledge, of medieval stamp, to which philosophers were still bound (and which they would soon be forced to abandon in favor of the controversial specialization of the disciplines). Nevertheless, at the Institut de France in Paris, there have recently been discovered more than a thousand preparatory papers drawn up by Cesi for his Theatrum, which even today prove to be of singular importance. Among these are preserved the precious drawings of the “imperfect plants” studied by the Princeps. By this category he meant fungi, ferns and fossils, “mutilated” bodies that lacked the features typical of other forms of life and that proved difficult to classify. These organisms were interesting above all because they lacked a visible reproductive apparatus by which their genesis might be explained. To investigate what he considered a mysterious secret of nature and of life, Federico used an instrument that had come to him from Galilei, the microscope. This “little eyeglass”, which did not suit the gaze of Galileo, in those years turned to the sky, fitted perfectly the research of the other academicians, interested above all in biology.
The eye of the Lynx, from whose sharpness the Academy itself took its name, farsighted, did not draw back before the possibility of surpassing its own limits. Thanks to the microscope, whose name was coined by the Linceans themselves, Cesi discovered the sori, the sites where fungi produce spores, although this credit has often been attributed to the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus.

Federico’s premature death, at the age of forty-five, would cut short these researches and halt the activity of the Academy, which the Lincean Stelluti struggled to keep alive and which he himself then dismissed. One would have to wait a century for the first rebirth of the Academy, which thanks to the original force of its ideas has managed to survive to the present day.
Three years after the eclipse of the Princeps came also the condemnation of Galilei. The Pisan physicist could no longer count on Lincean patronage for the publication of Il dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi dal mondo, the work that would force him to recant, and he found himself deprived of the tenacious mediator between Science and Church that Cesi had been. Strong in a spirit of conciliation to which he had been bound in order to smooth over family discords, he had always tried to restrain Galilei’s polemical vein, inviting him to spend all his energies on the study of the Sciences.
What always distinguished the figure of the Princeps was this conciliatory and never servile spirit, which was necessarily accompanied by a tendency toward realism, political and philosophical, in a time marked by the desire for escape (in the very year of the founding of the Accademia dei Lincei there appeared La città del Sole by Tommaso Campanella). Cesi displayed an early but marked Enlightenment spirit, still vivid in the discourse Del naturale desiderio di sapere, a statement of intent addressed to the Linceans. There an equal intellectual potential is claimed for all men, starting from the premise that the will to know is universally innate. Yet this kind of innatism does not coincide with a sort of predestination. Idleness is the first antagonist of the natural human inclination to study. This requires great dedication, and “the sweetness and usefulness of knowledge are beheld as if from afar and as if detached from us by the harshness of the long labor set in between”. Then the desire for wealth stands in the way of man’s learning, since it does not spur him to investigate what is deemed useless. Lastly there intervene the barriers of an economic and cultural kind that hinder the young in the exercise of knowledge. Cesi realistically notes that for “the sick and the poor, those occupied in necessary business” it is impossible to devote oneself to the study of the sciences. The Academy, which was meant to spread far and wide, takes upon itself the responsibility “of supplying all the aforesaid defects and shortcomings, removing all obstacles and impediments and fulfilling this good desire”, anticipating the Enlightenment policies that underlie today’s civil societies. An advocate of an idea of knowledge never separated from ethics, one to reflect upon today more than ever, Cesi finally pronounces on the need to pursue a knowledge that can never harm men. The eye of the lynx, clairvoyant, shuns the creation of instruments harmful to human dignity, and looks instead to a Science useful for the spread “of peace, of goodness and of worth”.

Costanza Coloni studies Philosophy at the University of Bologna. Alongside her studies she pursues her research in the field of photography.