Niccolò Gualtieri

Conus aulicus , from the Index Testarum Conchyliorum 1742

Niccolò Gualtieri (born July 9, 1688 in Florence ; † February 15, 1744 ibid) was an Italian doctor and naturalist. He is best known for his book on conchylia .

Life

Gualtieri's father Lorenzo came from Orvieto or Urbino and came to Florence with the court of Vittoria della Rovere when she married Ferdinando II de 'Medici in 1634. In 1708, Gualtieri went to Pisa to study philosophy and medicine with Giuseppe Zambeccari (1665–1728) study with the degree in 1713. After that he was a doctor in Florence. He became the personal physician of Violante Beatrix of Bavaria , then first deputy and then personal physician (archiater) of Giovanni Gastone de 'Medici . After his death in 1737 he lost his position as court doctor and went to Pisa as a professor at the university. He died in Florence in 1744 and is buried in the Chiesa de 'Padri del Carmine.

He also had an extensive collection of conchylia , the catalog of which he published in 1742 with 110 panels with lifelike images of mollusc shells, including one of the first images of paper boats . The illustrations are by Giuseppe Menabuoni (1708–1745) and Antonio Pazzi (1706–1768) and there is also a portrait of Gualtieri von Pazzi in the book. Some copies have hand-colored illustrations. In his collection there were also specimens from that of the Dutch malacologist Georg Eberhard Rumpf .

He started collecting around 1731, when the Tuscan government sent him to Portoferraio on Elba to fight an epidemic. There he collected minerals, conchylia and fossils.

He was later a professor in Pisa and his collection is at the Natural History Museum in Pisa (Museo di storia naturale e del territorio dell'Università di Pisa) after Franz von Lorraine bought it in 1747. Carl von Linné used many of the copies in the collection as type copies for his Systema Naturae. Gualtieri was also interested in botany and in 1716 a founding member of the Botanical Society of Florence (Socièta Botanica Fiorentina), with Giuseppe Gaetano Moniglia (1688–1750), Sebastiano Franchi and Pier Antonio Micheli (1679–1737). Soon after, he left the company with Moniglia due to a dispute with Franchi and Micheli, but rejoined in 1732. The society was probably the oldest botanical society in Europe. He also drew and wrote poetry.

In 1725 he published a book in which he countered Antonio Vallisnieri's forward-looking thesis that springs are fed by rainwater (he advocated the sea as a source). However, it was so badly received that his patroness Violante Beatrix von Bayern forbade him from further publications.

Fonts

• Index Testarum Conchyliorum, quae adservantur in Museo Nicolai Gualtier, Florence: Caetano Albizzini 1742, digitized, SUB Göttingen

literature

• Giuseppe Manganelli, Andrea Benocci: Niccolò Gualtieri (1688–1744): biographical sketch of a pioneer of conchology, Archives of Natural History, 38, 2011, pp. 174–177, first page