PEIRESC, NICOLAS-CLAUDE FABRI de. — Polymathic humanist. Born at Beaugensiers on the Var on 19 Dec. 1590, died at Aix in Provence on 24 June 1637.
He travelled throughout Italy as far as Malta, Germany, Austria, Greece, Turkey, Egypt and Asia Minor; then to England, Holland and Flanders. In 1607 he became a magistrate and subsequently a member of the Parlement of Aix. He was a collector of coins, manuscripts, minerals, copies of inscriptions and sarcophagi, including Christian ones; he possessed a substantial library, dispersed after his death, as were his collections. He concerned himself with every branch of learning and maintained correspondence with the leading scholars of his day. Ph. Tamizey de Laroque published seven volumes of his correspondence in the *Collection de documents inédits sur l’histoire de France* (Paris 1888–98).
The Bibliothèque nationale in Paris preserves many drawings collected by him, especially in ms. fr. 9530 and ms. lat. 958. He discovered at La Gayolle the celebrated Christian sarcophagus (Wilpert, *Sarcofagi*, I, p. 7 and pl. 1, 3), later re-used for the burial of a Syagria, and another sarcophagus used for Ennodius Felix, son of Magnus, consul in 460, which P. acquired and which has since been lost (L. Chaillan, in *Bulletin archéologique du Comité*, 1913, p. 317, pls. 25–26).
The chalice of Suger from the abbey of St-Denis, taken to the Louvre and stolen there in 1804, was identified in the collection of J. E. Widener in Philadelphia by Seymour de Ricci by means of the description and drawing of P. (*Un calice du trésor de St-Denis*, in *Comptes rendus de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres*, 1923, pp. 335–39). P. described to Girolamo Aleandro, librarian of the Vatican (cod. Barb. lat. 2154, ff. 104–109), the now lost codex containing the Chronography of 354 (v.), which he had borrowed from Cristoforo d’Assonville of Arras and not returned; the letter dated 18 Dec. 1620 from Paris was published by T. Mommsen (MGH, *Auctores antiquissimi*, IX, 1, Berlin 1892, pp. 19–29); the drawings of the Calendar preserved partly in that codex and partly among the papers of G. Marini (cod. Vat. lat. 9135) were edited by J. Strzygowski (*Die Kalenderbilder des Chronographen vom Jahre 354*, in *Jahrbuch des deutschen archäologischen Instituts*, Berlin, 1 [1888]).