Refracting Apis

Francesco Stelluti (1577-1652) was a mathematician and founding member of the Accademia dei Lincei (Academy of Linxes - sharp eyed creatures were chosen to engender discovery) along with its leader and backer, Federico Cesi. This much seems certain.


Somewhere along the line, probably in 1624, Galileo who was also a member of the Academy, submitted the first compound(?) microscope for evaluation by his peers. The following year, Stelluti made the first scientific use of the instrument. (This is in dispute)


He observed and drew bees, as you see scattered about the page. There were a couple of notable publications associated with his drawings (he may have done the engravings himself - of this I'm not sure). It appears that Cesi had both the initial drawings plus all known information about bees issued in a large quarto format.


Stelluti refashioned the initial drawings and they were republished in ~1630 with an adjacent latin poem that was obsequiously dedicated to Pope Urban - the bee was the Pope's family emblem.


The small images here were culled from Apiarium, the publication that included all the information about bees; and the dedication to the Pope is called Melissographia (that's the large image).

The 2 works are extrememly rare and they are exhibited by the Instituto E Museo Di Storia Della Scienza Biblioteca Archivi in Florence in a partial flash interface with annoying frames (again) but the zoom is great; however there is no english, unfortunately.

The following are a sample of the documents I waded through to learn about this little episode in the history of science..

• National Library of Scotland page I, page II (which has one scan of what was probably the original 1625 drawing).
• Another image of the original 1625 drawing - (I'm imagining that a different scanning technique was used here).
• A natural history paper by Stephen J Gould.
• Short Clendening commentary.
• Short amicros commentary.
• A History of the the Ecological Sciences Part XIII - 2/3 of the way down the page.
• Another engraving by Stelluti (I would think that there are more around, but I really got sick of all the poster selling sites getting in the way of deeper searching)
• Clement Kent article - minor mention.
• This is a link to a reasonable-sized jpeg of Melissographia without the interface, that took me ages to steal lovingly propagate under fair use principles.