Page 10 - January 2009

ATHANASIUS KIRCHER’S PHONURGIA NOVA:
THE MARVELOUS WORLD OF SOUND DURING THE 17TH CENTURY
Lamberto Tronchin
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Energetica, Nucleare e del Controllo Ambientale (DIENCA)-Centro Interuniversitario di Acustica e di Ricerca Musicale (CIARM) University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
“Kircher’s Phonurgia expresses a wish to enrich and widen the knowledge already existing in the field of architectural and musical acoustics. Written in Latin, the Phonurgia is an original mixture of Baroque aesthetics and sonic enquiry that could be called in Italian “meraviglia” or in English, “wonder,” and yet only a few studies of this fascinating work exist.”
Athanasius Kircher
Athanasius Kircher
(Geisa, Germany; 2
May 1602– Rome, Italy;
27 November 1680) became a
Jesuit in 1628 in Mainz,
Germany (Fig. 1). He taught in
Würzburg, Germany in 1629
and in Avignon, France in
1631. Afterwards, in 1633, he
was invited to Vienna, Austria
to take up Kepler’s former post
as Mathematician at the Court
of Ferdinand II. However, dur-
ing his journey across
Northern Italy, Pope Urbano
VIII (Barberini) called Kircher
to Rome, where he moved and
is known to have taught
Mathematics and Hebrew at the Collegium Romanum (Fig. 2). After eight years, he was released from teaching, and he
focused exclusively on study- ing hieroglyphs. At this time he began to collect many items from all over the world, and in 1651 founded his Kircherian Museum.
At his time he was consid- ered a homo universalis, since he studied many different top- ics starting from a single point of view. He studied geology (volcanoes), medicine (he understood that plague is caused by germs and he was the first to use the micro- scope), history (he invented a theory for translating the Egyptian hieroglyphs using Coptic manuscripts) anthro-
pology, astronomy, mathematics, magnetism, optics, mineral- ogy, exploration, archaeology and many other various topics.
Fig. 1. Athanasius Kircher in 1664, at the age of 62.
Fig. 2. The Roman College in the 17th Century.
As a typical Baroque academic, Kircher used astrology and trusted the existence of griffins and sirens while at the same time debating against the followers of Christian Rosenkreutz (1378–1484), the Rosicrucians. Kircher’s intel- lectual contemporaries such as Boyle and Newton likewise trusted in alchemy, but whereas these names are celebrated in the history of science, Athanasius Kircher’s name is not. His works were considered too much a patchwork of both fantas- tical and scientific worlds, and despite writing to more than 760 people, including two Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire and scientists such as Leibniz, Torricelli, and Gassendi. Kircher, doctor centium atrium, was completely ignored in
Kircher’s Phonurgia nova 9