Fish and the Birth of Early Modern Ichthyology

Synonyms

Water animals

Definition

History of ichthyology from Pierre Belon (1517–1564) to Pietro Artedi (1705–1735).

Origins: Birth and Development of Early Modern Ichthyology as Science

For about 1800 years, the history of ichthyology was dominated by Aristotle’s revolutionary investigations on fish, especially in his Historia animalium and De partibus animalium However, in spite of this, for a long time, ichthyology was far from being constituted as a science. Things began to change only during the Renaissance when, for the first time, a tradition of commentaries on Aristotle’s biological writings arose. Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), who was the first to comment the De partibus animaliumin Bologna in 1521–1523, as well as some others, felt the necessity, after the exhausting controversy on the immortality of the soul, to integrate knowledge of Aristotle’s corpus with the study of his biological thought. Nevertheless, it soon became clear that it would have been impossible to find...