Clelia Grillo Borromeo Arese – mathematician and natural philosopher

Noble woman made an important geometrical discovery

Clelia Borromeo Arese was from an aristocratic
family but was also an eminent scientist

An aristocratic woman who was recognised as a brilliant mathematician and scientist of her time, Clelia Grillo Borromeo Arese, died on this day in 1777 in Milan.

Borromeo Arese had become known for her outstanding ability to solve difficult mathematical problems and she was also considered to be a natural philosopher, having made a study of how the world worked.

She was born in Genoa in 1684, the daughter of Duke Marcantonio Mondragone and his wife, Antonia. 

As young Clelia grew up she received a good education, at first from her mother, Antonia, and then at a convent that she attended. She became proficient in eight languages and was interested in geometry and how things worked.

In 1707 she married Count Giovanni Benedetto Borromeo Arese and they had eight children together. Her husband was the son of Carlo Borromeo Arese, one of the most wealthy and powerful men in Italy at the time.

Borromeo Arese often invited scientists to her home in Milan, both from Italy and abroad. A frequent visitor there was Antonio Vallisneri, who was  a physician, naturalist and a professor of Medicine at the University of Padua. 

His host was an avid reader of books and journals and visitors to her house were often struck by the breadth and depth of her extensive library.

She started her own academy at her home in 1717, which was called the Academia Vigilantium Cleli and she became famous for being able to solve any mathematical problem that she was given. Her academy also played a major role in the ongoing scientific debates of the time.

Among the Academy’s members were the mathematicians Giovanni Saccheri and Tomasso Ceva, and physicists such as Giovanni Crivelli and Alessandro Volta. The Academy played a prominent role in the dissemination of the physics of Newton and the philosophy of Leibnitz.

Scientist Alessandro Volta was a member
of Borromeo Arese's academy

In 1726, Borromeo Arese made an important discovery of her own in geometry. She identified a special kind of curve, on the surface of a sphere, which became known as the Clelia curve.

As an example, a path marked on the surface of a planet to correspond with an orbiting satellite's trajectory would follow a Clelia curve.

An independent woman, Borromeo Arese formed her own opinions and she chose to support Spain against Austria during the war in 1746, As a result, she had to leave Milan for a while, but when she was allowed to return home she was welcomed back as a heroine by the Milanese people.

Genoa, the city where she was born, honoured her contribution to geometry by awarding her a medal, which was inscribed with the words ‘Genuensium Gloria’, which means ‘The Honour of Genoa’.

After her death in 1777, Clelia Grillo Borromeo Arese was buried in the Church of Santa Maria Podone, a Greek Orthodox church in the centre of Milan.

The Italian monk and mathematician, Luigi Guido Grandi, who had also been a member of Borromeo Arese’s Academy, wrote about the Clelia curve in a book that he dedicated to her. He wrote that ‘Clelia curves are curves on the earth’s sphere for whose points there is a linear relationship between longitude and colatitude’. 

A colatitude is the complement of a given latitude. It is found by subtracting the latitude angle from 90 degrees. Instead of measuring distance up or down from the equator, it measures the angle down from the North Pole.

The striking black-and-white
facade of San Lorenzo Cathedral

Travel tip:

The port city of Genoa, where Clelia Grillo Borromeo Arese was born, is capital of the Liguria region. It has a rich history as a trading centre with wealth built on its shipyards and steelworks. It also has fine buildings, many of which have been restored to their original splendour. The Palazzo Ducale - the Doge's Palace - the 16th century Palazzo Reale, a lavish royal residence with frescoes, tapestries and a rooftop garden, and the Romanesque-Renaissance style San Lorenzo Cathedral, with its striking black-and-white façade, are three examples worth visiting.  At the heart of the city centre is the Piazza De Ferrari, which features a monumental bronze fountain and is flanked by the Palazzo Ducale, the Palazzo della Borsa and the Teatro Carlo Felice.  The area around the restored harbour area has some fascinating alleyways and squares to explore and it has been enhanced in recent years by the Genoa architect Renzo Piano. 

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Palazzo Borromeo is one of the finest 
examples of a Milanese patrician palace

Travel tip:

The Borromeo family of Milan, into which Clelia Grillo Borromeo Arese married, were rich nobles, who started out as merchants and then became bankers. They played important roles in politics, and as cardinals during the Counter-Reformation movement in Italy. Federico Borromeo, who was Archbishop of Milan, founded the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana in Milan, one of Europe’s first, free public libraries. The ancestral home of the Borromeo family in Milan is Palazzo Borromeo, a late 14th century palace in Piazza Borromeo, about 10 minutes’ walk from the Duomo. It was originally built as both the home and business headquarters of the family. They had moved to Milan after fleeing from San Miniato, outside Florence, when the head of the family, Filippo, was executed.  It contains an important fresco cycle from the 1440s and is one of the finest examples of a Milanese patrician palace from the early Renaissance. Parts of the building were badly damaged during Allied bombings in World War II but were reconstructed and restored to their original appearance. 

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More reading:

Federico Borromeo, the Archbishop of Milan who founded the Biblioteca Ambrosiana

Saint Charles Borromeo and the movement to combat the spread of Protestantism

Luigi Guido Grandi – monk, philosopher and mathematician

Also on this day:

1923: The murder by Fascist thugs of Catholic priest Don Giovanni Minzoni

1943: The birth of bass player and composer Pino Presti 

1945: The birth of teenage singing star Rita Pavone

1974: The death of psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli 

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Giovanni Aldini - physicist

Professor thought to have given Mary Shelley the idea for Frankenstein

Giovanni Aldini picked up the mantle of his uncle, Luigi
Galvani, in his experiments with bioelectricity

The physicist and professor Giovanni Aldini, whose experiment in trying to bring life to a human corpse is thought to have inspired Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, was born on this day in 1762 in Bologna.

The nephew of Luigi Galvani, who discovered the phenomenon that became known as galvanism, one of Aldini’s goals in life was to build on his uncle’s work in the field of bioelectricity.

Galvani’s discovery that the limbs of a dead frog could be made to move by the stimulation of electricity sparked an intellectual argument with his rival physicist Alessandro Volta that he found uncomfortable. When he was then removed from his academic and public positions after Bologna became part of the French Cisalpine Republic in the late 18th century, Galvani was unable to progress his experiments as he would have liked.

Aldini essentially picked up his uncle’s mantle and was determined to discover whether the effect of an electrical impulse on the body of a frog could be reproduced in a human being.

Aldini conducing experiments in galvanism, as
depicted in a 19th century book

His most famous experiment came in 1803, when he was given permission to test his electrical equipment on the corpse of George Forster shortly after he had been hanged at Newgate Prison in London, following his conviction for the murder of his wife and daughter, whose bodies were found in the Paddington Canal not long after the last sighting of them alive at the nearby Mitre Tavern.

Aldini had chosen to conduct this experiment in England because most other European countries carried out executions by beheading, and he felt needed a corpse that was fully intact.

Forster’s body was taken directly from the gallows to a nearby house, where Aldini conducted experiments using conducting rods and a battery, the existence of which, ironically, he owed to his uncle’s rival, Volta.

In front of an audience of surgeons, Aldini successful made the corpse’s facial muscles contort, causing his jaw to twitch and one eye to open. He was then able to cause the dead body to raise his right arm with a clenched fist, and to produce movement in the thighs and lower legs.

The future Mary Shelley would have been only five at the time yet as she grew up she learned all about Galvani, Volta and Aldini through two friends of her father, Humphry Davy (famously the inventor of the Davy safety lamp) and William Nicholson, who were leading electrical researchers.

Mary Shelley, as portrayed in a miniature
painting by Reginald Easton in 1857

During the summer of 1816, it is known that Mary Shelley was in Geneva with her future husband, the poet Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, and that among the topics of their conversation was the potential for re-animating a corpse with electricity.

At around the same time, the three friends, along with another writer, John Polidori, decided they would have a competition to see who could write the best horror story.  Mary came up with a tale of a young scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who creates a grotesque, monstrous but humanoid creature, which he brings to life with electrical charges.

The brother of Count Antonio Aldini, a statesman, Aldini followed Galvani in becoming professor of physics at the University of Bologna.

He devoted himself to his scientific work, which was mainly focussed on galvanism, anatomy and its medical applications, along with the construction and illumination of lighthouses, and with experiments for preserving human life and material objects from destruction by fire.

He died in Milan in 1834, bequeathing a considerable sum to found a school of natural science for artisans at Bologna.

A courtyard at the historic Palazzo Poggi in Bologna

Travel tip:

The University of Bologna, the oldest university in continuous use in the world, has sites dotted around the centre of Bologna.  Its headquarters are in the Palazzo Poggi, in Via Zamboni, about 1km (0.62 miles) northeast of the Fountain of Neptune just around the corner from Piazza Maggiore. The palace is adorned with many frescoes painted by Mannerist and early Baroque artists, including Prospero Fontana, Pellegrino Tebaldi and Niccolò dell'Abbate.

The Basilica of San Petronio, with its half-finished facade

Travel tip:

Bologna is a progressive, left-leaning city with a lively student population and considerable history and culture. Italians regard it as one of the country’s most beautiful cities and has the advantage of being not nearly as busy as Rome, Florence and Venice, which tend to the the magnets for overseas visitors.  The Piazza Maggiore, the medieval Asinelli and Garisenda towers and the Basilica of San Petronio, with its half-finished facade - pink marble at the bottom with bare bricks above - are among the main sights.  Another advantage, apart from the lack of crowds, in the summer months are the 45km of porticoed walkways.

More reading:

Luigi Galvani, the father of bioelectricity

Alessandro Volta and the world's first battery

The death of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley


Also on this day:

1926: Airship leaves Rome on mission to North Pole

1991: The Moby Prince ferry disaster


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Alessandro Volta – scientist

Invention sparked wave of electrical experiments

Alessandro Volta as depicted in a painting
by an unknown artist

Alessandro Volta, who invented the first electric battery, died on this day in 1827 in Como.

His electric battery had provided the first source of continuous current and the volt, a unit of the electromotive force that drives current, was named in his honour in 1881.

Volta was born Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta in 1745 in Como.

He became professor of physics at the Royal School of Como in 1774. His interest in electricity led him to improve the electrophorus, a device that had been created to generate static electricity. He discovered and isolated methane gas in 1776, after finding it at Lake Maggiore and was then appointed to the chair of physics at the University of Pavia.

Volta was a friend of the scientist Luigi Galvani, a professor at Bologna University, whose experiments led him to announce in 1791 that the contact of two different metals with the muscle of a frog resulted in the generation of an electric current.

Italy's 10,000 lire note used to have an image of Volta
on the front and the Tempio Voltiano on the reverse

Galvani interpreted that as a new form of electricity found in living tissue, which he called animal electricity.

Volta felt that the frog merely conducted a current that flowed between the two metals, which he called metallic electricity. He began experimenting in 1792 with metals alone and found that animal tissue was not needed to produce a current.

This provoked much controversy between the animal-electricity adherents and the metallic-electricity advocates, but Volta won the argument when he unveiled the first electric battery in 1800.

Known as the voltaic pile, or the voltaic column, Volta’s invention led to further electrical experiments.

Within six weeks, English scientists William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle used a voltaic pile to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen, thus discovering electrolysis and creating the field of electrochemistry.

In 1801 in Paris, Volta demonstrated the way his battery generated an electronic current in front of Napoleon, who made Volta a count and a senator of the Kingdom of Lombardy.

A statue at the University of Pavia
commemorates Volta's work

Francis I, Emperor of Austria, made Volta director of the philosophical faculty at the University of Padua in 1815.

Volta retired in 1819 to his estate in Camnago, a frazione of Como, which is now named Camnago Volta in his honour. He died there on 5 March 1827, just after his 82nd birthday, and he was buried in Camnago Volta.

He is commemorated with a statue at the University of Pavia and another in Piazza Volta in Como. A house in the Via Brera in Milan in which he lived in the early part of the 19th century is marked with a plaque.

Travel tip:

Como, where Volta was born and died, is a city at the foot of Lake Como. It has become a popular tourist destination because it is close to the lake and has many attractive churches, gardens, museums, theatres, parks and palaces to visit. The Villa Olmo, built in neoclassical style there in 1797 by an aristocratic family, has hosted Napoleon, Ugo Foscolo, Prince Metternich, Archduke Franz Ferdinand I and Giuseppe Garibaldi, to name but a few of the eminent people who have stayed there.

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The Tempio Voltiano by Lake Como houses a museum
dedicated to the life of Alessandro Volta

Travel tip:

The Tempio Voltiano is in a public garden near the side of the lake in Como and houses a museum dedicated to the life and work of Alessandro Volta. The museum has a collection of scientific instruments used by the inventor, including his early voltaic piles, and some of his personal belongings and awards he received. A picture of the temple used to be featured on the back of a 10,000 lire banknote, with Volta’s portrait on the front.

More reading:

How Luigi Galvani appeared to give new life to a dead frog

The transatlantic message that marked a breakthrough for Marconi

Paolo Gorini's technique pioneered preservation of corpses

Also on this day:

1696: The birth of Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo

1834: The birth of 19th century opera star Marietta Piccolomini

1922: The birth of controversial writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini

(Picture credits: Volta statue by Nemo_bis; Tempio Voltiano by Christophe.Finot; via Wikimedia Commons)


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