Club Medici: Natural Experiment and the Imagineering of "Tuscany"

. . . all the while maintaining peace, security, and opulence in their realms. ¹

Seventeenth-century Tuscany has never occupied a prominent place in political histories of early modern Europe. It has always been important, however, to histories of science and of Italy. In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, as every historian of science and every historian of Italy knows, a number of groups of men with an interest in natural experiment, including a Florence-based group known as the Accademia del Cimento, first constituted themselves as academies or societies. Although the work of the Cimento was short-lived and, by all accounts, sporadic, the experimental practices of the Medici court during this period have had a remarkably long and lively career as floating signifiers—practices onto which the Medici family, Medici courtiers, and countless academics have projected their own fantasies.

Nineteenth-century historians of Italy typically used the Cimento to situate Tuscany at the origins of modernity. Riguccio Galluzzi’s History of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany under the Rule of the House of Medici (Istoria del granducato di Toscana sotto il governo della casa Medici) of 1841 called the Cimento “certainly the first experimental academy in Europe” and one that “awoke in other nations the desire to investigate by means of experiments the most hidden arcana of nature.” ² Twentieth-century readings of the Cimento by historians of science have, for the most part, retained something of the flavor of those earlier narratives. Thus, Paolo Galluzzi’s important revisionist account in Quaderni storici in 1981 acknowledges the “cultural politics” at work in the Cimento’s experiments, but it does not jettison entirely the narrative of Tuscany-as-a-place-of-origin that has been central to the historiography of the Cimento for the past three centuries:

[I]t remains obvious that the Academy that will be called “the Cimento” began in 1657 with precise scientific plans and programs. For the illustrious promoters [of these plans and programs], it was a question of relaunching, in terms appropriate to the circumstances, the spirit and the letter of a politics of support for the new scientific ideas of which Galileo was the champion and the martyr. In addition to considerations of prestige and propaganda, the [Medici] princes were directed to this kind of undertaking out of profound sympathies for Galilean theories. ³

When the experimental practices of the Medici court have not been deployed to tell a story about modernity, they have most often served projects that wax nostalgic for a decidedly premodern moment in Florentine, Italian, or Western culture. These projects transport the reader to an ostensibly less-complicated time in history when absolutist rulers ruled absolutely, Florence occupied a privileged place as the cultural capital of cultural capital in the West, and scientific discourse, to paraphrase the subtitle of a recent article in Renaissance Quarterly, was downright playful. ⁴ To take the example that is probably most familiar to historians of science and historians of Italy: In the later eighteenth century, the prefect of the Hapsburg-Lorraine library in Florence, Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, made a spirited pitch for the revival of court interest in the sciences by publishing sixty years’ worth of “reports” from the library’s manuscript collection. In his three-volume edition of the reports, which he published in 1780 as the Reports on the Growth of the Physical Sciences in Tuscany over the Course of Sixty Years in the Seventeenth Century (Notizie degli aggrandimenti delle scienze fisiche accaduti in Toscana nel corso di anni LX. del secolo XVII), the Accademia del Cimento figured as the crowning achievement of a “truly Golden and, what is more important, most tranquil Century” in Tuscan history. ⁵

Figure 1.

Giovanni Vascellini’s late-eighteenth-century rendering of a mid-seventeenth-century gathering of the Accademia del Cimento, the Medici academy of natural experiment. Collections of portraits such as this were part of an elaborate visual program of socialization for members of Tuscany’s dominant culture throughout the early modern period. From Giovanni Vascellini, Serie di...