Federico Cesi’s Mycological Codex and its copies

Abstract

According to documents of the time, Federico Cesi, founder of the Lincean Academy in 1603 [Editorial Note: "Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei" is the official name of this Academy, and its members are called "Lincei"], appears to have been the first to study mushrooms with scientific technology, even if no such publications on this topic have come down to us. In 1896, an anonymous mycological codex in two volumes preserved in the library of Kew Gardens (London) was attributed to Cesi, and considered the only derivative of his scientific work on the subject. Until recently, very little was known about the ground-breaking studies of fungi of this scientist. In 1980, the original mycological codex by Federico Cesi was identified, in three volumes, preserved in Paris, in the library of the Institut de France: this is a clear testimony of the first mycological observations made by Cesi through the microscope and of his intuition about the great diversity of fungi. Again, Cesi proves to have been a forerunner of the scientific development that took place in the later period of the Enlightenment. New evidence regarding the scientific influence of Cesi has now been found. Some mycological drawings by Bruno Tozzi (1656–1743), kept in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, when compared with both the similar drawings made by Tozzi and kept in the National Central Library of Florence and the Cesi originals in Paris, are clearly shown to be copies of Cesi’s mycological images. They give further confirmation of the correctness of the attribution of the codex in the library of Kew Gardens. There are suggestions in the modern literature on Cesi’s mycological codex that Pier Antonio Micheli used Cesi’s drawings, but this opinion cannot be confirmed.