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LUIGI FERDINANDO MARSIGLI, FOUNDATION OF THE INSTITUTE
OF SCIENCE OF BOLOGNA ST URBAIN, Ferdinand de: Italy, 1731, Bronze, 60 mm Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658-1730) was a
naturalist as well as an Italian soldier and scientific writer. He was born
and studied in Bologna, and although he did not complete his formal
schooling, he accumulated a vast knowledge of history, politics, geography,
and the natural sciences. As a young man in Rome, he was employed by Queen
Christina (of Sweden). Later he traveled through Turkey, collecting data on
military organization and natural history. Marsigli served under Emperor
Leopold and fought with distinction against the Turks. In 1679 he was
appointed Venetian ambassador in Constantinople and was held by the Turks as
a prisoner in the 1680s. Subsequently he took part in the War of the Spanish
Succession (1701-1714). He was court-marshaled after surrendering to the
Duke of Burgundy but later was acquitted of blame. Marsigli devoted a good
part of his life to scientific investigations. Among his other interests, he
appears to have been a born cartographer, mapping everything he dealt with.
He left behind a collection of more than a thousand maps, many of them his
own work. He also undertook the exploration of the structure of mountains
and the natural condition of the sea, lakes, and rivers, and in 1724 he
published the first treatise on oceanography, Histoire physique de la mer.
In 1712 he founded the Academia delle Scienze dell'Istituto di Bologna,
which under his influence, immediately became an active center of scientific
research, consisting mainly of the exploration of the natural history of the
area around Bologna. Marsigli gave his vast collection and his house to the
city, where it formed the nucleus of the Bologna Institute of Science,
founded in 1714, which is depicted on the reverse of this medal. |
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