Maria Angela Ardinghelli

Maria Angela Ardinghelli during an attempt by Windler (1747, image detail)

Engraving in Petrus Joannes Windler: Tentamina de causa electricitatis , Naples 1747

Maria Angela Ardinghelli's translation of Emastatica o sia Statica degli animali esperienze under the pseudonym Sig.MAA (here a reprint from 1776)

Maria Angela Ardinghelli (born May 28, 1728 in Naples , Kingdom of Naples ; died February 17, 1825 in Naples, Kingdom of the Two Sicilies ) was an Italian scientist and translator .

Life

Maria Angela Ardinghelli was the daughter of Niccolò Ardinghelli and Caterina Piccillo. Niccolò Ardinghelli was disinherited from his family, originally from the Florentine nobility, because of his improper marriage and lost his noble privileges. Maria was therefore a commoner in a feudal society . Nevertheless, she received a class and contemporary training in Latin, rhetoric and poetry and wrote sonnets and elegies . She was trained in philosophy and geometry with Giovanni Maria della Torre (1710–1782) and in mathematics with Vito Caravelli (1724–1800). For the inauguration of the Biblioteca Tarsia in the Palazzo Spinelli di Tarsia in 1747 she was allowed to write one of the hymns, hers was the only one written in Latin.

After Petrus Joannes Windler opened his electromagnetic cabinet in Naples in 1747 and found his audience, the volume Tentamina de causa electricitatis was printed in Naples ; Ardinghelli was depicted as one of the test subjects on one of the engravings. She corresponded with members of the Paris Académie des Sciences , such as Alexis Claude Clairaut and Jean-Antoine Nollet , who visited her in Naples in 1749. In 1753, Nollet addressed the first letter of his defense against Benjamin Franklin Lettres sur l'électricité to Ardinghelli, making it widely known. She translated letters from Nollet and Buffon into Italian. Ardinghelli became known for her translation of two scientific writings by Stephen Hales on botany and chemistry from the French translation by François Boissier de Sauvages into standard Italian, which appeared from 1750.

In Paris, a medallion with her portrait, which Jean-Jacques Caffieri had created in 1755, hung in the conference room of the scientific academy, which was unusual because women were not actually allowed in it. For this reason, too, Bertucci (2013) counts her among the corresponding members of the Académie des sciences , even if this status could not be officially granted to her. She took part in the upswing of scientific life at the court of Kings Carlo di Borbone and Ferdinando I di Borbone . Jérôme Lalande visited her on his trip to Italy in 1765.

After 1765 Ardinghelli married the lawyer at the Real Camera di Santa Chiara Carlo Crispo (-1801) and from then on neglected her own scientific work in order to support him with her language skills in his legal work. In 1768 she wrote an eulogy on the occasion of the king's marriage to Maria Karolina of Austria . They left Naples during the revolutionary events in 1799. She returned during the Napoleonic rule and lived as a widow in Naples again into old age.

Fonts (selection)

• Stephen Hales: Emastatica, o sia Statica degli animali: esperienze idrauliche fatte sugli animali viventi dal signor Hales, ... tradotta dall'inglese nel french, e commentata dal signor De Sauvages, ... e dal french nuovamente trasportata nell'italiano idioma . Stamperia Giuseppe Raimondi, Naples 1750–1752
• Stephen Hales: Statica de 'vegetabili ed analisi dell'aria. Opera del signor Hales… Tradotta dall'inglese con varie annotazioni . Stamperia Giuseppe Raimondi, Naples 1756
• Contribution in: Pierre Augustin Boissier de Sauvages : Nosologia methodica sistens morborum classes, genera et species, juxtà Sydenhami mentem & botanicorum ordinem . Amsterdam: sumptibus fratrum De Tournes, 1763
• Observation sur une violente éruption du mont Vesuve le 23 Octobre. 1767, in: Mém.Par., 1767.
• Elegia . Nella Raccolta per F Apertura della Libreria del Sìgnor Principe di Tarsia. Naples, without a year

literature

• Paola Bertucci: The In / visible woman. Mariangela Ardinghelli and the Circulation of Knowledge between Paris and Naples in the Eighteenth Century. In: Isis . 2013, pp. 226–249
• Miriam Focaccia: Ardinghelli Maria Angela , at Scienza a due voci, University of Bologna (with a bibliography)
• Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie : Women in science: antiquity through the nineteenth century. A biographical dictionary with annotated bibliography . 3. Edition. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1991, ISBN 0-262-65038-X , p. 31
• Peter Johann Windler: Tentamina de causa electricitatis, quibus brevis historia de nonnullis auctoribus, qui hanc praecipue excolerunt materiam, praemissa est . Auctore D. Petro Joanne Windlero a Stortewagen. Title vignette engraved by Francesco de Grado. Ex Regia Typographia Seraphini Porsile, Naples 1747

Web links

Commons : Maria Angela Ardinghelli  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Maria Angela Ardinghelli in the bibliographic database WorldCat

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Della Torre, Giovanni Maria. In: Enciclopedie on line. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome.
2. ^ Caravelli, Vito. In: Enciclopedie on line. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Paola Bertucci: The In / visible woman. Mariangela Ardinghelli and the Circulation of Knowledge between Paris and Naples in the Eighteenth Century. In: Isis . 2013, pp. 226–249
4. ↑ bibliographical evidence at SUDOC
5. ↑ Maria Angela Ardinghelli , in: Frauen-Zimmer, 1700 - 1800 , University of Hamburg
6. ↑ MR Mancino: Grado, Francesco de . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 60, Saur, Munich a. a. 2008, ISBN 978-3-598-22800-1 , pp. 17-20.