Il natural desiderio di sapere - Pontifical Academy of Sciences

FEDERICO CESI, THE FIRST ACADEMY, AND UMBRIA 59history outlined above, but above all in the necessity for an effectiverenewal of the pursuit of knowledge, a renewal that presupposes newmethods and new subjects, indeed a renewed vision of the very idea of thefunction of the researcher and the scholar. In Cesi the figure of the scholarfinds a balance, though difficult and delicate, between profound moraland religious motivations and new methodological and epistemologicalconvictions. This balance is not simply the product of external behaviorin conformity with the rules imposed by a wise prudence but rather thatof a mature and modern consciousness of the plurality of perspectivesand the levels of human behavior, of the distinction of the spheres andmethods which are the very foundation of the autonomy and freedom ofscientific research, of philosophizing ‘in naturalibus’.To be sure this difficult and delicate balance, in a moment in whichconflicts seem to have reached the point of a dramatic explosion, upsettingand calling into question the whole range of human experience andenterprise, will not survive the death of Cesi, with devastating consequencesnot only for the life of the institution, which will look on helplesslyduring the drama of Galileo.This does not compromise, on the contrary it exalts, the utopian andrevolutionary modernity of Cesi’s ideal and program, the still contemporaryessence of his community of scholarship that makes science theentire aim of its existence.4. Cesi and 17th Century UmbriaOne final point remains to be addressed, namely the relationshipsbetween Cesi and his academy and the Umbrian roots of the enterprise. Isit not perhaps true, as more than one critic has affirmed, that Cesi’s biographicaland intellectual experience, along with that of the birth and thebrief parabola of the Accademia dei Lincei, is a completely Roman episode,or at any rate independent of the cultural context of Umbria in that period?Our response is rooted in the opposite conviction, perhaps alreadyexplicit in what has been said up to now, especially in the first section:Acquasparta, and with it some of the most significant places in Umbria,the entire horizon – historical, geographical and also cultural – of Umbriaat that time constitute points of reference which are indispensable, evenessential to an understanding of the nature and the peculiarity of theevents in question. There exists, to use Gabrieli’s expression, ‘a Cesian andLyncean Umbria’, to be understood in a double and dynamic conception: