CESALPINO, ANDREA. - Philosopher and naturalist, b. at Arezzo in 1519, d. at Rome on 23 February 1603. He taught medicine at the University of Pisa, directed the botanical garden of Padua and from 1592 held a chair at the Sapienza, called there by Clement VIII who also wished him as his personal physician. A versatile mind, he made his debut, like Cardano and Pomponazzi, in medicine, but he went beyond, like them, its limits, taking an interest in and also writing on philosophy, botany and mineralogy. As a philosopher C. is the subject of assessments that are not merely discordant but contradictory: some assert he was almost a pantheist and a precursor of Spinoza, some an Aristotelian anti-Scholastic, some an Averroist, some a Neoplatonist. One fact can be established, namely the influence of Pomponazzi, which explains certain of his ambiguous positions, particularly on the problem of personal immortality. In general one must be careful not to overestimate the philosophical importance of C., whose system is rather eclectic and not always coherent. His merits as a botanist, on the other hand, are undisputed.
He was the first, in De plantis (Venice 1571), to study the plant in the complex of its parts, seeking to define precisely its origins, functions and purposes; he classifies plants by choosing the organs of fructification as the principal criterion. In physiology too C.'s position is that of a pioneer; in his Quaestionum peripateticarum libri V (ibid. 1571) he describes the greater circulation, calling for the first time by the name of circulation the continuous motion of the blood from the veins to the right heart, from this to the lung, from the lung to the left heart and from the left heart to the arteries. C. sets out the experimental proofs of this discovery of his in the work Quaestionum medicalium libri II (ibid. 1593). He thus anticipated the demonstration by Harvey (1628), even though he appears in turn to have been preceded by Servetus (d. 1553).
Other works of C.: Daemonum investigatio peripatetica (Florence 1580); De metallis libri III (Rome 1596); Praxis medica (Treviso 1606), etc.
Bibliography4 works
Felicissimo Tinivella