J. L. Heilbron - The Incomparable Monsignor

O n Sunday, 30 April 1719, at 8:00 in the morning, a broken-down vehicle drawn by two exhausted carthorses left the Holy Roman Empire and entered the border town of Peri in the Republic of Venice. It carried a small bright teenage girl and a weary pregnant woman, who had the company, on foot, of a disheveled cavalier and a servant. Although they had been travelling nonstop for over forty-eight hours, the pious teenager insisted on going to church. The party then slept for a few hours in a cheap inn before again taking to the road. On the morning of 2 May they reached Bologna. The first business of the cavalier, one Charles Wogan, was to see to the recovery of his charges; the second, to visit the archbishops palace. He was admitted to the presence immediately. The archbishop: You are back even earlier than I expected. I knew the mission was hopeless. The cavalier: You are mistaken, Your Eminence. The princess is here. I beg you to find suitable accommodation for her in the city.

After a few days in Bologna the company set off for Rome. They arrived on 15 May, slowed by the press of people welcoming the princess along the way. Among the first to bring her the popes greetings after her arrival at the convent in which she would spend the next few months was the protagonist of our history, the incomparable Monsignor Francesco Bianchini. Why he? The answer fills most of this book. And who were Wogan and his princess and why were they in such a hurry? That too will be revealed.

Let us begin with the never sufficiently to be praised Monsignor, held by many of his contemporaries to have been the greatest Italian of his time, and by spokespersons from the generations that followed as the greatest man that Italy produced in the [eighteenth] century, or, if judged by his depth and breadth of mind, the greatest Italian ever. Among his accomplishments was writing a universal history from the creation to the fall of Assyria; recovering ancient calendars; discovering, excavating, and interpreting ancient buildings; designing a papal collection of antiquities later partially realized in the Vatican museums; undertaking a geodetic mapping of the papal states; confirming and publicizing Newtons theories of light and color; discovering several comets and a few variable stars; building the most beautiful astronomical instrument, and the most exact solar observatory in the world, in the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome; detecting the slow decline in the obliquity of the ecliptic and almost discovering the aberration of starlight (two key astronomical findings of the eighteenth century); and creating a map of nonexistent features on the invisible surface of Venus. His international reputation earned him election as a foreign associate (one of only eight) of the Acadmie royale des sciences of Paris and as a fellow (chosen on Newtons nomination) of the Royal Society of London.

All that was by no means all. As a trusted servant of Pope Clement XI, who reigned from 1700 to 1721, Bianchini helped execute the delicate balancing the papacy practiced during the War of the Spanish Succession, which pitted Britain, the Dutch Republic, and the Habsburg Empire against France and Spain. One of his assignments resulted in attachment to the cause and person of the Old Pretender, James III, the Stuart claimant to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Bianchini embedded memorials of his involvement in events of European significance in the pavement of Santa Maria degli Angeli at locations corresponding to the suns position on the dates on which they happened. This hard-copy history was a unique and, for those who can read it, extraordinary invention. Bianchini was subtle as well as clever. Although he accepted the Newtonian universe and the humanity of heretics, he managed to avoid the snares of conservative prelates and oppressive censors. He did not push against closed doors. No Galileo, he served his church and preserved himself, a little saint and every inch a courtier.