Francesco Redi : A Scientist at the Medici Court

Francesco Redi (1626-1697) was a scientist and writer of highest level. He spent his career at Medicean Court, where he developed a profound literary and philological knowledge, but specialising in the life sciences. Redi brought together erudition and a genuine experimental spirit, being the first to apply the experimental method to the life sciences. It was above all during the reign of Ferdinando 2 that Redi could claim the necessary financial and logistic support for his research. Redi was a member of the Arcadia Academy and of the Crusca Academy, but he was the animating spirit of the famous Accademia del Cimento. The latter dedicated to experimental science, if of short existence, was nevertheless the Medicean Court’s institutional expression of its own image of scientific renewal of the period. Serving as the Court’s Archiater for all his long career, Redi developed many princely contacts, and not only those related to science or to his medical profession. He was part of movement in Europe according to which political power was obliged to measure itself against science in pursuing prestige and external image. The notion of experiment in 17 siecle was integrated with the exploration of the sensible and with the searching of sensational, a kind of sensory and theatrical spectacle. But Redi’s science was not only thus, a great part of his research was pursued for love of knowledge’s love, beyond the restrictions of the courtly life, as is the case in his morphological and anatomical researches. 1. REDI AND THE MEDICI COURT 2. REDI POLYEDRIC GENIUS 3. REDI EXPERIMENTAL AND THERAPEUTIC DOCTOR To distinguish the experimental from the therapeutic doctor is advisable to define his ambition to renewal in experimentalism (refusing baroque oddities) that however had to surrender itself to the Hippocratic and Galenic principles in the therapeutic practices, because of external to science reasons. 4. REDI BETWEEN EXPERIMENTALISM AND TEXTUAL SOURCES Redi achieved to combine his deep and vast learning with his true experimentalist ambitions, in a century during the which the auctoritates’s followers and the scientists who wanted to erase the tradition (and to rely only to experimentation) were in contrast each other.