Il natural desiderio di sapere - Pontifical Academy of Sciences

FEDERICO CESI, THE FIRST ACADEMY, AND UMBRIA 73in the inscriptions, that is in the judgments and admonitions that Cesihad engraved in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew on the walls and on the framesof the doors and windows in the various rooms of the Palace; ideals effectivelyand synthetically summed up in the epigraph above one of thedoors in the room dedicated to the ‘Genealogy of the Cesi Family’, homeof the meetings of 1609, right after the end of the diaspora of thefounders; ideals and precepts that were later taken up again and continuallyreconfirmed in the institutional speculations and the writings of thePrince and his companions. 101To be sure, these considerations of a biographical, and, more generally,of a historico-geographical nature are not the only ones which weintend to recall here to justify the placement of Cesi’s writings at the heartof the Umbrian tradition of scientific-literary culture. There are morecogent reasons for this choice which demonstrate, together with the precedingones, a further connection between Umbria, Cesi, and theAccademia dei Lincei, a peculiarly cultural connection related to the factthat among the initial group of the Academy’s founders the most numerouscomponent was composed of Umbrians and Marchigiani and, aboveall, to the fact that Jan Heckius, ‘the true cultural spirit of the fourfounders’ of the first Academy, ‘emblematic figure of the Renaissance naturalist’,took his degree in medicine from the University of Perugia in1601 at the age of 22. Heckius was ‘the only one among the four foundersin possession of a university education’, and ‘he determined the intellectualcurvature of the first phase of the Accademia dei Lincei’. Heckius constitutesthe ‘principal channel through which the astronomic investigations,the botanical research, and the philosophical orientations cultivatedat the University of Perugia reached the Lynceans and penetrated theirinitial attempt to delineate a new investigative approach to natural reality’.It is through Heckius thatthe models of naturalistic investigation and the medico-astrologicalconceptions circulating in the Perugian institution flowed directlyinto the foundation of the first scientific academy in the world. 102101 This question is discussed more fully in C. Vinti, L’epigrafe di Acquasparta e gli idealidella ‘studiosa compagnia’, in G. Sapori, C. Vinti, L. Conti, Il Palazzo Cesi diAcquasparta e la rivoluzione scientifica lincea, op. cit. pp. 41-56.102 L. Conti, Sotto il segno degli astri: lo studio perugino e i Lincei, in G. Sapori, C.Vinti, L. Conti, Il Palazzo Cesi di Acquasparta e la rivoluzione scientifica lincea, op. cit.,pp. 57, 63.