| Summary: | Often reduced to the figure of Benedict XIV, the policy for the court of Rome concerning science during the Enlightenment underwent significant developments in the second half of the century, during the pontificates of Clement XIV (1769–74) and Pius VI (1775–99). The suppression of the Jesuits, imposed on the Holy See by the Catholic monarchs in 1773, effectively resulted in a genuine reconstruction of papal policy on the science and knowledge. The prelates were entrusted with this renewal and were called upon to play an increasing role in the Curia, involving Roman scholars from diverse religious orders, and benefitting from a number of foreign scientists passing through Rome as part of the Grand Tour. In the field of mechanical and astronomical sciences, Pius VI’s future secretary of state, François-Xavier Zelada, worked on the establishment of an observatory and an experimental physics cabinet in the Vatican, intentionally open to foreign scholars. It thus allowed the city of Rome to join in the epistolary construction of the new European space of astronomical data generated by the discovery of the planet Uranus. Zelada also took in hand the former Jesuit Collegio Romano, calling on it to teach scholars such as Father Minim François Jacquier, famous for his Latin commentary of Newton’s Principia. In the medical field Pius VI created, a new chair of obstetrics and surgery at the Sapienza, which led to an increase in the number of medical students at the famous Roman university. The pope’s doctor, Giuseppe Flajani, extended the collections of anatomical waxes and increased the number of dissection sessions at the Santo Spirito hospital in Sassia, opening them to foreign scholars. Finally, in the area of the human sciences, Stefano Borgia leveraged the network of missionaries to form anthropological collections connected to diverse civilizations of the world within the Collegio di Propaganda Fide in the town of Velletri. More related to Enlightenment encyclopaedism than to the eclecticism of cabinets of curiosities, these collections attracted many scholars from various European science academies.Finding its counterpart in the arts with the creation of the Museo Pio-Clementino, the science policy had the broad ambition of Catholic cultural reconquest. While violently rejecting the most radical expressions of Enlightenment culture, such as materialism and atheism, the papacy sought to appropriate its most measured aspects, particularly in the scientific field. Based on Vatican sources, the archives of religious orders and untold stories of travelling scholars, the proposed paper analyses the scope and limitations of the original consensus between Catholic culture and scientific culture.
|
|---|
