It is hard to disagree with the astronomers. They clearly felt that naming a single lunar crater after Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc in 1935 was insufficient and, in 1993, honoured him again, this time with an asteroid. But astronomy is only part of the story, for Peiresc was the very model of an early modern intellectual – even so far as acquiring a monastic stipend late in life that enabled him to focus on his unbounded quest for knowledge.
Peiresc’s beginnings were prosperous, if not entirely propitious: his parents were forced out of Aix-en-Provence by plague, settling in Belgentier, near Toulon, where Nicolas-Claude was born. Initially educated by Jesuits, Peiresc was seduced by archaeology during his studies as a lawyer. He pursued that interest through France, Switzerland, and Italy, where he also became an early admirer of Caravaggio’s paintings. In London, he met the antiquarian William Camden; in the Netherlands, the humanist Hugo Grotius – foundational theorist of modern international law – and the Calvinist classical historian Joseph Justus Scaliger. Notwithstanding his Counter Reformation upbringing, Peiresc was notably free of dogma, as later underlined by letters he wrote in defence of Galileo and Tommaso Campanella against charges of blasphemy.
In the early 1600s, Peiresc replaced his uncle as a prominent legal official for the regional government in Aix, but still made time to pursue astronomical researches, discovering the Orion Nebula in 1610. Having disappeared back into the ferment of Paris, he resumed a career in Provençal politics in 1623. By now receiving income from the Benedictine abbey of Guîtres, Peiresc was able to make his rural retreat at Belgentier into a stunning repository of ancient sculpture and contemporary art, of fossils, manuscripts, and perhaps 18,000 medallions and coins.
