Andrea Cesalpino. An Introduction

In the Dictionaire historique et critique (1697), Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) included a short entry on Andrea Cesalpino that contains a few notes about his biography and intellectual significance. He wrote that Cesalpino “had been a highly skilled scholar in both philosophy and medicine. He was from Arezzo, and worked for a long period in Pisa, before becoming first physician of Pope Clement VIII. He died in Rome on February 23, 1603, aged 84 years.” Yet, he added something more. Influenced by Samuel Parker’s reading of Cesalpino and by the criticisms made by Nicolaus Taurellus (1547–1606), he wrote that Cesalpino “abandoned the way of ordinary Peripatetic scholars in many aspects and to put it bluntly he was a bad Christian with respect to his opinions. His principles barely differed from those of Spinoza,” while notin that “a modern author counts him among the greatest geniuses that has ever been seen.”