Francesco Cupani’s Panphyton Siculum. The rediscovery of a copy with handwritten corrections by his pupil Antonio Bonanno

Abstract

Francesco Cupani, a pre-Linnaean Sicilian botanist, would have liked to produce a volume of “Natural History” of Sicily. Since 1692 he had been preparing the drawings and the engravings that were destined to constitute the illustrations of Panphyton Siculum. This particularly ambitious work was not completed partly because of the author’s premature death. During the eighteenth century a number of attempts were made to complete and publish this work, but none succeeded. The various exemplars of these limited trial editions were made up of collections of variously collated printed papers with differences of layout and content. At present, few exemplars of Panphyton are known to exist. The aim of this article is to indicate the presence in the Civica and A. Ursino Recupero joint Libraries of Catania of a hitherto unregistered four-volume copy, which reveals significant handwritten annotations. The comparison with the one volume edition, which is kept in the same library, with the one volume edition in the Palermo Municipal Library and with that of the Catania Regional University Library allows us to eliminate the uncertainties of the literature concerning a hypothetical Panphyton in four volumes. Moreover, it provides us with useful elements for reconstructing the history of the book after Cupani’s death. This copy is of particular importance in that it constitutes documentary proof of the re-elaboration of Cupani’s work on the part of Antonio Bonanno, his pupil, in an attempt to bring about its definitive publication.