26 Facts About Lucilio Vanini

Lucilio Vanini, who, in his works, styled himself Giulio Cesare Vanini, was an Italian philosopher, physician and free-thinker, who was one of the first significant representatives of intellectual libertinism.

Lucilio Vanini was among the first modern thinkers who viewed the universe as an entity governed by natural laws.

Lucilio Vanini was an early literate proponent of biological evolution, maintaining that humans and other apes have common ancestors.

Lucilio Vanini was obliged to flee to England in 1612 but was imprisoned in London for 49 days.

Lucilio Vanini then left Paris, where he had been staying as chaplain to the Marechal de Bassompierre, and began to teach in Toulouse.

Lucilio Vanini was born in 1585 in Taurisano, Terra d'Otranto, Italy.

Lucilio Vanini's father was Giovan Battista Vanini, a businessman from Tresana in Tuscany, while his mother was the daughter of a man named Lopez de Noguera, a customs contractor of the Spanish royal family's lands in Bari, Terra d'Otranto, Capitanata, and Basilicata.

In 1603 Giovan Battista Lucilio Vanini is reported for the last time in Taurisano.

Lucilio Vanini, now come of age, was recognised by a court in the capital as heir of Giovan Battista and guardian of his brother Alexander.

In 1608, Lucilio Vanini moved to Padua, a town under the rule of Venice, to study theology at that university.

Consequently, the Prior General of his order, Enrico Silvio, commanded him to return to Naples, where he would have been disciplined, probably severely, but instead Lucilio Vanini sought refuge with the English ambassador to Venice in 1612.

Lucilio Vanini then fled to England, along with his Genoese companion Bonaventure Genocchi.

In Paris, in the summer of 1614, Lucilio Vanini subscribed to the principles of the Council of Trent, to prove the sincerity of his return to the Catholic faith.

Lucilio Vanini then journeyed to Italy, going first to Rome, where he had to face the difficult final stages of the process in the court of the Inquisition, then to Genoa for a few months, where he found his friend Genocchi and taught philosophy to children of Scipio Doria for a time.

Lucilio Vanini therefore, fearing the same fate, ran away again to France and headed to Lyon.

Insufficiently assured, Lucilio Vanini decided not to return to Italy, and instead cultivated connections with prestigious elements of the French nobility.

In 1616, Lucilio Vanini completed the second of his two works, De Admirandis, and got it approved by two theologians at the Sorbonne.

Now, unwelcome in England, unable to return to Italy and threatened by some circles of French Catholics, Lucilio Vanini saw his room for manoeuvre shrinking and his chances of finding a stable place in French society failing.

Lucilio Vanini disputed, in the physical and biological world, finality and the hylomorphic Aristotelian doctrine, and, reconnecting Epicureanism with Lucretius, prepared a new mechanistic-materialistic description of the universe where bodies are likened to a watch, and conceived a first form of universal transformation of living species.

The works of Lucilio Vanini have been extensively reviewed and revalued by contemporary critics, revealing originality and insights sometimes well ahead of their time.

Lucilio Vanini was considered an atheist, but his first work, published in Lyon in 1615, Amphitheatrum, indicates otherwise.

Lucilio Vanini thought in fact that the creators of the three monotheistic religions, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, were nothing but impostors.

The thought of Lucilio Vanini is quite fragmented and reflects the complexity of its origins, as he was a religious figure, a naturalist, but a doctor and in part a magician.

In 1624, the monk Marin Mersenne returned to attacking the philosophy of Lucilio Vanini, analyzing some statements in chapter X of his L'Impiete des Deistes, Athees et Libertins de ce temps, combatue, et renversee de point en point par raisons tirees de la Philosophie, et de la Theologie, in which the theologian expresses his judgment of the works of Girolamo Cardano and Giordano Bruno.

An unpublished manuscript in the municipal library of Avignon preserves Observations sur Lucilio Vanini written by Joseph Louis Dominique de Cambis, Marquis de Velleron, but provides only uncertain information on the philosopher, largely rectified by recent studies.

In 1730, the press in London was given a biography of Vanini with an extract of his works, entitled The life of Lucilio Vanini, burnt for atheism at Toulouse.