ANDREA CESALPINO. — Philosopher and naturalist, born at Arezzo in 1519, died in 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 in Rome, whither he had been called by Clement VIII, who also appointed him his personal physician. A versatile mind, he began, like Cardano and Pomponazzi, in medicine, but soon surpassed its limits by taking an interest in and writing on philosophy, botany, and mineralogy.
As a philosopher, C. is the subject of evaluations that are not only discordant but contradictory: some almost regard him as a pantheist and precursor of Spinoza, others as an Aristotelian anti-scholastic, others as an Averroist, and others as a Neoplatonist. One fact may 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, however, are beyond dispute.
In his De plantis (Venice 1571), he was the first to study the plant as a whole, seeking to define its origins, functions, and purposes; he classified plants by choosing as his principal criterion the organs of fructification. In physiology, too, C.’s position is that of a pioneer; in his Quaestinum peripateticarum libri V (ibid. 1571), he describes the greater circulation, for the first time calling by the name of “circulation” the continuous movement of the blood from the veins to the right heart, thence to the lungs, from the lungs to the left heart, and from the left heart to the arteries. C. sets forth the experimental proofs of this discovery in the work Quaestinum medicalium libri II (ibid. 1593). He thus anticipated the demonstration of Harvey (1628), even if he himself seems to have been preceded by Servetus (d. 1553).
Other works by C.: Daemonum investigatio peripatetica (Florence 1560); De metallis libri III (Rome 1596); Praxis medica (Treviso 1606), etc.