Francesco Algarotti

Francesco Algarotti (born December 11, 1712, Venice [Italy]—died May 3, 1764, Pisa) was a cosmopolitan connoisseur of the arts and sciences who was esteemed by the philosophers of the Enlightenment for his wide knowledge and elegant presentation of advanced ideas.

Algarotti was the son of well-to-do middle-class parents. He was educated in his native Venice and in Rome and Bologna. His youthful curiosity led him to travel extensively, and he visited Paris for the first time in his early 20s. There his urbanity, his brilliant conversation, his good looks, and his versatile intelligence promptly made an impression on such intellectuals as Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis and Voltaire. A year later Algarotti wrote Il Newtonianismo per le dame (1737; “Newtonianism for Ladies”), a popular exposition of Newtonian optics. Following an extended visit to Russia in 1738–39, chronicled in the lively and informative letters collected in his Viaggi di Russia (1769; “Travels in Russia”; Eng. trans. Letters from Count Algarotti to Lord Hervey and the Marquis Scipio Maffei), he received an invitation to Prussia from Frederick the Great, which led to his staying more than nine years in Germany as court chamberlain. In 1740 Frederick conferred on him the hereditary title of count, and he would eventually pay for the funeral monument to his memory in Pisa. Ill health eventually obliged him to return to Italy, first to Venice and then to Pisa, where he died of tuberculosis at age 52. His “novel” Il congresso di Citera (1745; The Modern Art of Love: or, The Congress of Cythera) amusingly compares English, French, and Italian attitudes toward love. In addition to his many entertaining letters, Algarotti’s writings include a number of elegant and stimulating essays on a wide variety of subjects, such as Cartesianism, rhyme, the French and Italian languages, national character and what forms it, the opera, architecture, and painting.