Agostino Scilla: A Baroque Painter in Pursuit of Science
Agostino Scilla (1629–1700), a disciple of Antonio Barbalunga in Messina and Andrea Sacchi in Rome, was a prolific painter, well-known numismatist, and the author of one of the most important publications on fossils in the seventeenth century. Scilla’s Va
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Agostino Scilla: A Baroque Painter in Pursuit of Science Paula Findlen
The judicious Scilla who surpassed the condition of the painter by philosophizing … (Vallisneri 1721, 58)
Abstract Agostino Scilla (1629–1700), a disciple of Antonio Barbalunga in Messina and Andrea Sacchi in Rome, was a prolific painter, well-known numismatist, and the author of one of the most important publications on fossils in the seventeenth century. Scilla’s Vain Speculation Undeceived by Sense (1670) helped to usher in a new understanding of fossils in the seventeenth century. Cited approvingly by Leibniz and to some degree plagiarized by John Woodward (who eventually acquired Scilla’s fossils and drawings), Vain Speculation added further weight to the argument that fossils were remnants or imprints of living beings. This article examines Scilla’s work as an important example of a painter’s understanding of nature in Baroque Italy. It explores Scilla’s claim to be a better interpreter of nature than any scholar in light of his relationship to the scientific communities in Messina and Rome, and his understanding of art and science in the works of Leonardo, Galileo, the Accademia dei Lincei and Accademia del Cimento.
Introduction In 1670 a curious treatise appeared in the city of Naples entitled Vain Speculation Undeceived by Sense. Its author Agostino Scilla (1629–1700) was a well-known and respected painter from Messina who had personally drawn all the illustrations for his book on fossils (Scilla 1670; Accordi 1977; Morello 1979; Di Bella 2001; and
P. Findlen (*) Department of History, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2024, USA e-mail: [email protected] O. Gal and R. Chen-Morris (eds.), Science in the Age of Baroque, International Archives of the History of Ideas 208, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4807-1_6, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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Fig. 6.1 “Vain Speculation Undeceived by Sense” (Source: Agostino Scilla, La vana speculazione disingannata dal senso (Naples 1670). Courtesy of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries)
Carpita 2006). Vain Speculation opened with an elegant frontispiece depicting the allegorical struggle between truth and error (Fig. 6.1). Sense, represented by the god of painting Mercury bearing the eye of reason in his chest and certainly an allegorical portrait of a young artist, holds up a fossilized echinoid for inspection. He gestures expansively to the ground below to demonstrate the ubiquity of such specimens and implicitly the transparency of his understanding of their nature. By contrast, Vain Speculation is an unpredictable shape-shifter. Her hair, curling repeatedly backward into the shape of an elongated cumulus, brings to mind the remarks of Emanuele Tesauro who, in his Aristotelian Telescope (1654), described clouds as the ultimate play
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of nature as they formed and reformed themselves (Tesauro 1654). Vain Speculation is an ethereal and unfinished figure not grounded in nature’s
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