BUONARROTI, FILIPPO

BUONARROTI, FILIPPO. — Archaeologist, born in Florence in 1661, died there in 1733. Having come to Rome as a young man, he won the favor of Cardinal Carpegna, who placed him in charge of his library and museum. He published its rich numismatic collection (Rome 1698) in an exemplary manner. That same year he was appointed librarian of the Vatican Library, but later, compelled to leave Rome, he returned to Florence, where he assembled a museum rich in inscriptions, coins, and ivories.

He rendered important service to Christian antiquity with the book Osservazioni sopra alcuni frammenti di vasi antichi di vetro ornati di figure trovati nei cimiteri di Roma, Rome 1716, in which he discussed learnedly ancient garments and other customs, and especially the nimbus.

BUONARROTI, FILIPPO. – Revolutionary and organizer of secret societies, born in Pisa on 11 November 1761, died in Paris on 17 September 1837. Intellectually formed at the Pisan school of Sarti and Lampredi, and having essentially imbibed the vague Masonic-Rousseauian humanitarianism of the period, shortly after the outbreak of the French Revolution he went into exile in Corsica, where he attracted notice for the fervor of his Jacobinism and anticlericalism. Appointed national agent at Oneglia in April 1794, B. attempted to implement there, even after Robespierre’s fall, the latter’s policy and to induce the French leaders also to accept an Italian program of typically Jacobin unitarism.

Dismissed and imprisoned on 15 March 1795, he met Baltauf and other Jacobins in the prisons of Plessis; with them he would join the following year in the well-known conspiracy, whose program, aimed at the communal ownership of goods and labor, was in large part the work of B. himself. Condemned for this to deportation, he was able to resume his revolutionary activity only in 1806, when he was transferred to supervised residence in Geneva, and for an entire thirty-year period first in Switzerland (1806–23), then in Brussels (1823–30), and finally in Paris, where his life by then became identified with that of many secret organizations («Adelfi», «Su-