Buonanni, Filippo

(b. Rome, Italy, 7 January 1638; d. Rome, 30 March 1725)

natural sciences.

Buonanni, one of the most learned Jesuits of his time, was a pupil of Athanasius Kircher, and in 1680 succeeded his master as teacher of mathematics at the Collegium Romanum; in 1698, he was appointed curator of the Kircherian Museum, which he described in his Museum Collegii Romani Kircherianum (1709).

Erudite in a number of fields, including numismatics and ecclesiastical history (writing on both subjects), Buonanni made extensive studies in the natural sciences; he constructed his own microscope with three lenses (according to Tortona’s system), which proved to be an ingenious mechanism for continual observation. In his Ricreazione dell’occhio e della mente nell’osservazione della chiocciole (1681), a work valuable for its many illustrations of shells, he explicitly affirmed his belief in the spontaneous generation of mollusks and rekindled the controversy over generation that had flared in 1671 between Kircher and Francesco Redi. Buonanni’s position was anachronistic, since the Aristotelian theory of spontaneous generation had been disproved by Redi in his Esperienze intorno alla generazione degli insetti (1668) and by Marcello Malpighi, who had demonstrated the pathogenesis of oak galls from the development of fertilized insect eggs in his Anatome plantarum (1679).

Buonanni made no personal observations on the phenomenon of generation in the lower animals; neither had he understood the validity of Nicolaus Steno’s declaration that “the oysters and other shells originate from the eggs, not from putrescence,” or the statement of the English naturalist Martin Lister that “snails are generated by coition, which we observed often in many of their kinds.” He based his belief in the spontaneous generation of mollusks partly on the authority of Aristotle and Kircher and partly on a report by Camillo Picchi of Ancona that “the conches called ‘Ballani’ (mollusks of the kind Balanus) live only in some rocks and not in others,” but principally upon an anatomical error of his own; he was convinced, as he stated in his Ricreazione, that the mollusks had no hearts. If this were so, they had no blood; Aristotle had written that no bloodless animal is oviparous, and that “all conches are generated spontaneously by the mud—oysters by dirty mud, the others by sandy mud.” Convinced that the conches were heartless and bloodless, Buonanni believed that both observation and authority supported the idea of spontaneous generation.

Two years after the publication of the Ricreazione, Antonio Felice Marsili, archdeacon of Bologna, brought out his own Relazione sul ritrovamento dell’uova di chiocciole, in which he described and, indeed, provided drawings of the eggs of snails, some of which visibly contained minuscule snails. Redi, because of Buonanni’s opposition to his conclusions on the oviparous generation of insects, harshly criticized Buonanni in his Osservazioni (1684), pointing out his rival’s error regarding the absence of the heart in snails (the existence of which Redi demonstrated) and asserting, further, that all snails had hearts. He was ruthless in his exposure of Buonanni’s mistakes in methodology and ridiculed Buonanni’s attempts to demonstrate spontaneous generation of insects from putrefied hyacinth flowers and to establish that certain putrefied flowers or leaves generated only certain kinds of insects.

Buonanni replied (1691) to Redi’s criticism, but his reply was judged by contemporaries as inadequate, and indeed inane. On the other hand, it should be recorded that he did deny the existence of the mythical remora, the reality of which had been accepted from Aristotle and Pliny right down to Girolamo Cardano in the mid-sixteenth century. His rational classification of shells was novel and useful. The quality of his illustrations of various insects was excellent—particularly those of the fly, louse, mite, flea, and mosquito. Indeed, his drawings of the Culex pipiens (Common house mosquito) are the best of the seventeenth century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Buonanni’s works include Ricreazione dell’occhio e della mente nell’osservazione delle chiocciole (Rome, 1681); Recreatio mentis et oculi in observatione animalium testaceorum, the 2nd ed. of the Ricreazione (Rome, 1684); Observationes circa viventia quae in rebus non viventibus reperiuntur (Rome, 1691), which has as an appendix the Micrographia curiosa, sive rerum minutissimarum observationes, quae, ope microscopii recognitae, ad vivum exprimuntur a Patre Philippo Bonanni societatis Jesu sacerdote, containing some interesting observations on early microscopes and a precise description of his own microscope; and Museum Collegii Romani Kircherianum descriptum (Rome, 1709).

II. Secondary Literature. Works on Buonanni are J. A. Battarra, Rerum naturalium historia existentium in Museo Kircheriano edita iam a P. Phil. Bonanni, nunc vero novo methodo cum notis illustrata ac observationibus locupletata a Johanne Antonio Battarra, 2 vols. (Rome, 1773–1782); Ugo Faucci, “Contributo alla storia della dottrina parassitaria delle infezioni,” in Rivista di storia delle scienze mediche e naturali, 26 (1935), 136–193, which includes Kircher’s biological views (see note 29, p. 147, and note 30, p. 183); A. Neviani, “Un episodio della lotta fra spontaneisti ed ovulisti. II Padre Filippo Buonanni e l’Abate Anton Felice Marsili,” in Rivista di storia delle scienze mediche e naturali, 26 (1935), 211–232; and F. Redi, Osservazioni intorno agli animali viventi che si trovano negli animali viventi (Florence, 1684), pp. 58–88. The Buonanni microscope is illustrated in Clay and Court, History of the Microscope (London, 1932), pp. 41–44, 84–86.

Pietro Franceschini