Aldrovandi, pioneer of modern naturalism and protégé of Italian princes and the Pope

He is, in his own way, "a star in Italy," notes Iolanda Ventura, associate professor of medieval Latin at the University of Bologna. His fame, certainly, does not reach that of Leonardo da Vinci or the astronomer Tycho Brahe, those iconic scholars of the Renaissance. But Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) remains a great naturalist figure. One of his portraits, attributed to the painter Agostino Carracci, shows us an already elderly man, with a white beard like Henry IV, drooping mustaches and a receding hairline, with an immense forehead that marks the intellectual.

"More than others, this scholar contributed to the renaissance of natural sciences by making them evolve towards modernity , " we can read on the website of the University of Bologna . " Instead of being content with books [he] went out into nature to study animals and plants. "

During the Renaissance, the works of ancient naturalists were still a reference, but were beginning to show their limitations. "The ^15th and especially the ^16th centuries marked a crucial moment in the evolution of natural sciences ," says Iolanda Ventura. "The legacy of Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, etc., was confronted with the rise of discoveries in zoology and botany, in Europe and the New World."

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