Filippo Bonanni

Life

Bonanni was born in Rome in 1638, and entered the Society of Jesus in 1654, when he was still 17 years old. After his novitiate, in 1656, he was sent to study at the Society's noted Roman College. There, he became a pupil of the German scientist, Athanasius Kircher. While a student there, he undertook the manufacturing of microscopic lenses. He used his lenses to create his own microscope and to develop scientific studies of a number of specimens. He also became a skilled copper plate engraver. The Roman College asked Buonanni to take on the project of publishing a catalogue of Kircher's museum. After ten years work, he published the Musaeum Kircherianum (1709), a large folio volume that listed all of the objects in the collection and illustrated many of them. Though he raised important questions—such as whether viewers through a microscope tended to see what they expected, rather than what was there—later writers tended to discount Bonanni as support for Aristotelianism waned.

Conchology Bonanni created the earliest practical illustrated guide for shell collectors, Recreatione dell'occhio e della mente (1681). The two-volume guide was the first treatise devoted entirely to molluscs and included numerous engravings. Bonanni's work is significant for his careful attempts to precisely describe shell morphology. Due to the printing and engraving process, the spirals shown on the shells were reversed from dextral to sinistral, a mirror image problem that later books avoided. Zoological taxonomies of the time were based on visual characteristics, and Bonanni paid special attention to both form and color, and showed details (sometimes fanciful) of the creatures inside the shells. Although his work predated the adoption of Linnaeus' system of binomial nomenclature (genus + species), Bonanni laid the foundation for the new discipline of conchology.

Lacquer Among other topics, Bonanni wrote of the ingredients craftsmen in China used to make the lacquer they used on porcelain, a popular import item for Europe at the time. Like other researchers of the day, he went on to experiment with various recipes to recreate the lacquer used on porcelain and furniture. In 1720, Bonanni published his studies in Trattato sopra la vernice detta communemente cinese (1720), or Treatise on the Varnish commonly called Chinese. This work was republished repeatedly over the next century in several languages, and was re-issued in 1994 in its original Italian version.

Publications