Salvino degli Armati
Salvino degli Armati (also: Salviano d'Armati) is a fictional person who was considered the inventor of glasses from around 1684 to 1920 . This long-lived historical forgery is based on a publication by the Florentine artist Ferdinando Leopoldo del Migliore.
Stimulation and systematic forgery
Ferdinando Leopoldo del Migliore was inspired by another publication to systematically launch his forgery. In the so-called Lettera intorno all'invenzione degli occhiali (for example, 'Letter about the invention of glasses') by Francesco Redi from 1678, the Aretine quoted from the Cronica antiqua Conventus Sanctae Catharinae de Pisis about Father Alessandro della Spina. The Pisan Giordano da Rivalto, who preached in Santa Maria Novella , claimed that glasses were invented barely twenty years before della Spina, who may have died in 1313. But the latter did not want to reveal the name of the inventor of the ocularia .
A few years later, Ferdinando Leopoldo del Migliore, an expert on the Florentine families, quickly identified a "Salvino d'Armato degli Armati" as the unknown inventor. In his work Firenze città nobilissima illustrata (1684) the author claimed on page 431 that the tomb and an inscription were visible in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore until a few years ago . However, the tomb had fallen victim to their modifications a few years earlier. He claimed to have a copy, but no one else saw it:
QVI DIACE SALVINO D'ARMATO DEGLI ARMATI DI FIR. INVENTOR DEGL 'OCCHIALI DIO GLI PERDONI LA PECCATA ANNO D.MCCCXVII.
(Here lies Salvino d'Armato degli Armati from Florence, the inventor of the eye glasses. May God forgive his sins. Anno Domini 1317)
The amalgamation of reliable knowledge about the family who lived near the church, about the customs of the time and plausible explanations of the gaps was so convincing that Domenico Maria Manni fell for the fake and in 1738 a work Degli occhiali da naso inventati da Salvino Armati published, of which two editions appeared.
First criticism and refutation
At the end of the 18th century, criticism came for the first time from Ranieri Tempesti (1787), Stanislao Canovai (1791) and Cantini (1796). In 1841 a monument was even erected in Santa Maria Maggiore with the inscription and a bust crowned by a Roman head from the 2nd century. However, this bearded head was a representation of Herodotus, often referred to as the "father of history" . When it became apparent during a renovation that the form “la peccata” did not fit into the language of the 14th century, it was quickly changed to the verifiable form “le peccata”.
It was not until 1920 that Isidoro Del Lungo was able to prove that it was a simple fake. No one had noticed that the inscription should have included the word "inventor", a term that was not known in the vernacular of the 14th century. The name of the alleged inventor does not appear in any other source. Del Lungo did not want to rule out that Alessandro della Spina, the monk who was so happy that someone he knew only had invented glasses, was the inventor himself.
source
- Domenico Maria Manni : Degli occhiali da naso inventati da Salvino Armati , Florence 1738 ( online ).
literature
- Isidoro Del Lungo : Chi l'inventore degli occhiali? Vicende d'un'impostura erudita narrata e discussa . 2nd revised and expanded edition. Zanichelli, Bologna 1921.
- Edward Rosen: The Invention of Eyeglasses . In: Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 9, 1956, 2, ISSN 0022-5045 , pp. 183-218.