Francesco Bianchini

Francesco Bianchini was an Italian philosopher and scientist, born at Verona in 1662 and active in Rome until his death in 1729. Educated by Jesuits in Bologna and then by the Paduan astronomer Geminiano Montanari, he studied comets at Padua while enrolled in theology, and that training fixed his commitment to the experimental and physical sciences. In 1684 he went to Rome as librarian to Cardinal Ottoboni, who as Pope Alexander VIII made him a papal chamberlain and canon of Santa Maria Maggiore, and he later served Clement XI, who put him in charge of forming a museum of Christian antiquities. He worked on the parallax of Venus, on a rotation period for that planet which later knowledge showed to be impossible to observe through its clouds, and on the precession of the Earth's axis. As secretary of the commission for the reform of the calendar he worked on the method of calculating the astronomically correct date of Easter, and he built a meridian line in the Roman basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri. He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1706 and to the Royal Society in 1713 on the proposal of Isaac Newton.