Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc

French scholar, jurist, and writer

• Born: December 1, 1580
• Birthplace: Belgentier, France
• Died: June 14, 1637
• Place of death: Aix-en-Provence, France

Peiresc was a wealthy judicial official in southern France, a well-known patron of the arts and sciences, a Humanist scholar of encyclopedic interests, and perhaps the most indefatigable letter writer in Europe of the time.

Early Life

The son of Raynaud de Fabri, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (nee-koh-law-klowd fah-bree deh peh-rehsk) belonged to a prestigious family of nobles, at once munificent, cultured, and dedicated to the promotion of the French crown, which family members served as judicial officials (conseillers du roi) in the provincial court (parlement) at Aix-en-Provence.

Having graduated from the Jesuit college at Tournon, Peiresc (the name he took in 1624, after he inherited an alpine estate of that name from his mother) left Aix-en Provence at age nineteen to study law at Padua. Although a serious student, he spent more time in the next three years touring Italian cities, making friends, and seeking out correspondents than he did reading law. Also in Italy, he began collecting ancient books, manuscripts, gems, medallions, coins, mummies, fossils, and objets d’art, each of which he treated as a source for the reconstruction of the fading past. He was particularly enamored with ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and the non-European cultures of the Mediterranean and Near East.

He sought out Galileo in Padua, and in Rome, he became friends with Maffeo Barbarini (later Pope Urban VIII ), with whom he would intercede in the 1630’s on Galileo’s behalf. Most important, he met Jean-Vincent Pinelli, a Paduan of encyclopedic humanistic interests, who inspired Peiresc’s obsession with all-encompassing scholarship.

Peiresc had been planning a trip to Constantinople and the Levant when his father called him home to study law more seriously and to consider marriage. Although dubbed Prince d’Amour at a royal court celebration held in Aix in 1593, Peiresc’s only real love was learning, and his only helpmate was an enormous income sufficient to realize the projects of his clever mind. Turning aside an arranged marriage, the prince of love devoted himself to many passionate interests among the arts and sciences, thereby earning Anatole France’s more apt ascription, prince des bibliophiles (prince of book lovers). Determined on celibacy, he even contemplated joining the Capuchines, but he reconsidered. Religiously speaking, he remained sincerely Catholic, but he was a voice of toleration, too, in a dogmatic age. He befriended Protestants, Muslims, and Jews.

Life’s Work

At Montpellier in 1604, Peiresc completed his law courses and succeeded to his uncle’s position in parlement. The following year, however, he again went traveling, this time to Paris as secretary to writer Guillaume du Vair, first president in parlement. After two years in Paris, he sailed for England as part of the mission of de La Broderie, the French ambassador. In London, he met King James I and a number of English scholars, William Camden, Robert Bruce Cotton, and John Barclay among them. He returned home through the Netherlands, visiting colleagues of Pinelli and adding new names to his growing address book of international contacts.

At Aix in 1607, Peiresc took up astronomy, and three years later he read Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius (1610; The Sidereal Messenger, 1880). Peiresc became, with Joseph Gautier, one of the first Frenchmen to observe the four moons of Jupiter. Around the same time, he made deep-space observations, discovering the Orion Nebula in 1610. He later investigated the phases of Venus (an important piece of evidence for Earth’s rotation) and lunar eclipses, and he used observations of the moons of Jupiter to help determine longitudes.

In 1616, Vair again recruited Peiresc to travel to Paris in his entourage. In the next seven years, Peiresc immersed himself in the intellectual life of the capital, which centered on private, informal academies such as that of the cabinet of brothers Pierre Dupuy and Jacques Dupuy, historians and librarians. Surrounded by thousands of books and the brilliance of learned fraternity at the Dupuys’, he encountered most of the city’s leading thinkers, among them Marin Mersenne, a Minim friar, natural philosopher, and music theorist.

After his return to Provence, Peiresc resumed his position as arbiter of French and Italian culture. He harbored deep affection for the Italian people, from whom he was descended, and for their artistic heritage, which he had studied firsthand as a student. In Italy, he had seen the works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Caravaggio. He bought many canvasses, including several by Sir Anthony van Dyck , who painted Peiresc’s portrait; by Tintoretto; and by Peter Paul Rubens , the Flemish master he had met during his second trip to Paris. Peiresc helped Rubens choose the subjects for the monumental series of propagandistic tableaux dedicated to the life of Marie de Médicis. Her marriage by proxy to King Henry IV in Florence in October of 1600, represented by the tableaux, was witnessed by Peiresc.

In natural philosophy, or science, Peiresc developed particular affection for geology, archaeology, astronomy, and biology. Between his urban villa in Aix (the Hotel Callas) and his country estate, Belgentier, he kept the third largest garden in France and even had something of a zoo, complete at various times with alligators, antelopes, and tigers. Indoors, he kept smaller felines, Angora cats. He was purportedly the first to have imported them to the kingdom. The cats lounged about in uneasy coexistence with the many vases, statues, and other fragile antiquities he had carefully collected.

He kept his bedroom stocked with songbirds to cheer his days and to lull him to sleep after labors that kept him at work until late in the night; he once wrote forty-two letters in a day. Tireless in the acquisition of scholarly treasures of the Levant and North Africa, he did business with virtually anyone who had something important to sell. He even made deals with pirates—the enterprising middlemen in the commerce of ideas and objects on the Mediterranean—when he believed God had chosen to deliver “learned booty” into his hands through those very pirates.

Unfortunately, his interests were paralyzing in their universality: Wanting to know everything, he published nothing. Most of the more than one hundred volumes of his notes, essays, and letters (totaling more than 100,000 pages) remain unpublished. Peiresc, however, patronized those who did publish (Pierre Gassendi and Mersenne being the most famous examples) with subsidies and sinecures, grants to hire copyists and to defray printing costs, and gifts and loans from his library of more than fifty-four hundred books and more than two hundred manuscripts (a collection his hungry Angoras helped preserve from the ravages of mice and rats).

Peiresc encouraged Hugo Grotius to publish what became groundbreaking reflections on international law, and in the 1630’s, he invited Gassendi into his home, where Gassendi produced some of his greatest work. Peiresc also encouraged William Harvey’s work on the circulation of blood, and before his death in 1637, he helped to free the utopian writer Tommaso Campanella from the clutches of Spanish authorities in Italy, gave him asylum at Belgentier, and found him refuge in Paris.

Dictated to his secretaries, Peiresc’s letters numbered at minimum ten thousand (seven thousand are extant) and were even more voluminous than those of Mersenne, whose correspondence network intersected his own to form a vast international learned journal in manuscript. After Peiresc’s death, his brother, Palamede de Fabri de Valence, preserved his letters faithfully. Valence’s death in either 1645 or 1646, however, was very nearly catastrophic for these precious records of Peiresc’s lifework, for the letters, books, and manuscripts passed to his unsavory nephew, Claude Fabri de Rians, who auctioned them to pay bad debts. Cardinal Jules Mazarin bought many of the ancient manuscripts, and they then passed to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1668. Some of the letters eventually found refuge at libraries in Carpentras and Mejanes in Aix. Because of the foolishness of Rians’s daughter, Suzanne de Fabri, many letters were destroyed, used as kindling for her hearth or for silkworm nests.

Significance

Living on the marches between two great periods of intellectual change, Peiresc was a revered scholar and antiquarian. After his death, however, he was soon forgotten, partly because he never published. Although brilliantly supportive of early modern science, he was not in its vanguard. He is more properly regarded as an exemplar of an antiquarian style of scholarship passing from favor in the seventeenth century. Yet his sensitivity to non-Western cultures would echo in the works of eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophes, as would his religious toleration. His esteem for cultural artifacts and sources that are not written continues to resonate with modern historians and anthropologists.

Moreover, his correspondence was so intellectually expansive and geographically far-reaching that it could be compared to the scope and reach of the Internet and World Wide Web of the late twentieth century. Above all, however, Peiresc’s Epicurean love of friendship, his extraordinary generosity, and his inexhaustible curiosity to know everything there is to know has inspired in scholars a sense of awe and admiration.

Bibliography

Duncan, David Allen. “Campanella in Paris: Or How to Succeed in Society and Fail in the Republic of Letters.” Cahiers du Dix-Septieme: An Interdisciplinary Journal 5 (Spring, 1991): 95-110. Examines Peiresc’s intellectual and historical “rescue” of Campanella.

Jaffe, David. “The First Owner of the Canberra Rubens, Nicholas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637) and His Picture Collection.” Australian Journal of Art 5 (1985): 23-45. Explores Peiresc’s life as an art collector and art patron.

Miller, Peter. “An Antiquary Between Philology and History: Peiresc and the Samaritans.” In History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, edited by Donald R. Kelley. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1997. Examines Peirsec’s scholarship in the context of how knowledge was defined and classified in seventeenth century Europe.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000. The indispensable study of Peiresc as Humanist and antiquarian.

Sarasohn, Lisa. “Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc and the Patronage of the New Science in the Seventeenth Century.” Isis 84 (1993): 70-90. Explores Peiresc’s support of scholars such as Mersenne and Gassendi.

Tolbert, Jane. “Peiresc and Censorship: The Inquisition and the New Science, 1610-1637.” Catholic Historical Review 89 (2003): 24-38. Discusses Peiresc’s strategy for remaining orthodox while evading censorship.