Andrea Cirino

Andrea Cirino (Messina, 1618–Palermo, 6 September 1664) was a Theatine cleric, preacher, antiquarian, and compiler of works encompassing sacred exegesis, classical philology, natural history, and Roman antiquities. Early Theatine biographers describe him as belonging to a noble Messinese family. He entered the Congregation of the Clerics Regular while still an adolescent and made his solemn profession at Messina on 5 July 1634. His intellectual formation joined the scholastic and scriptural disciplines required by his order to an unusually extensive reading of pagan antiquity. Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts repeatedly emphasize his capacious memory, facility in retrieving passages from the Fathers and classical authors, and ability to employ this accumulated learning in preaching. Such testimony is conventionally encomiastic, but it corresponds closely to the conspicuously compilatory structure of his surviving publications.

Cirino’s religious career was associated particularly with Messina and with the Theatine house of San Giuseppe in Palermo. He acquired a reputation as a preacher and was remembered for addressing the Palermitan populace during a period of civic disorder, urging the restoration of tranquillity. His earliest identified publication is the funeral oration delivered for Cardinal Giannettino Doria, archbishop of Palermo, printed there by Decio Cirillo in 1643. A devotional discourse for the Messinese feast of the Madonna della Lettera followed at Monteleone in 1649. These works place him firmly within the public culture of the seventeenth-century religious orator, in which sermons and ceremonial addresses served simultaneously as instruments of pastoral instruction, civic representation, and learned display.

His most distinctive contribution, however, lay in the immense antiquarian compilations devoted to hunting and animals. The Variarum lectionum, sive De venatione heroum libri duo, printed at Messina by the heirs of Pietro Brea in 1650, examined the origins, practices, and cultural meanings of hunting through an accumulation of testimonia drawn from classical, Christian, historical, and mythographical literature.

This enterprise was enlarged in the De venatione et natura animalium libri quinque, issued at Palermo by Giuseppe Bisagni in 1653. The publication is bibliographically complex, comprising separately titled sections, among them the extensive De natura et solertia canum and a book on fishes. Its title advertises the consultation of approximately thirty thousand passages from earlier authors, an assertion characteristic of Cirino’s conception of scholarship as the ordered recovery of an encyclopaedic textual inheritance. The work treats animals not solely as physical creatures but also as scriptural signs, medical substances, political and moral exempla, objects of legal or ritual practice, and witnesses to the customs and migrations of ancient peoples. Its woodcut illustrations and multipart organization also give it a notable place among the scientific and antiquarian books produced by the Palermitan press in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Although sometimes classified as natural history, its governing method is more accurately described as sacred and classical erudition than as experimental zoology.

Cirino’s interests extended beyond animal lore. His Historia delle cause et effetti della peste, published at Genoa in 1656, addressed the epidemic through the medical, historical, providential, and moral categories available to a learned cleric of his age. In 1657 he published at Naples a life of the Theatine Francesco Olimpio. He is also associated with the account of the festivities held in Naples for the birth of Philip Prospero, Prince of Asturias, an example of the richly illustrated festival literature generated within the dominions of the Spanish Habsburgs. His work thus moved between several characteristic forms of Baroque print culture: the occasional oration, devotional biography, civic and dynastic celebration, epidemic history, and large-scale Latin compilation. Modern scholarship has also drawn attention to his connection with the mathematician and natural philosopher Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, describing Cirino as a friend and supporter within the intellectual environment of seventeenth-century Messina and Rome.

At his death Cirino left a substantial body of unpublished material. Theatine bibliographers record commentaries on the Apocalypse and other books of Scripture, together with writings on duties, Epictetus and constancy, Platonic philosophy, medicine, prodigies, and apparitions of the Cross.

The present whereabouts or survival of all these manuscripts cannot be securely established. His principal posthumous publication was the Variarum lectionum de urbe Roma eiusque conditore Romulo liber singularis, printed at Palermo by Agostino Bossio in 1665 under the supervision of his confrère Francesco Maria Maggio. Devoted to Rome and its founder, it applied Cirino’s characteristic method of cumulative textual comparison to chronology, foundation legends, institutions, religion, and the antiquarian problems surrounding Romulus. The work subsequently entered wider European antiquarian circulation when Albert-Henri de Sallengre included it in the second volume of his Novus thesaurus antiquitatum Romanarum, published at The Hague in 1718.

Cirino died in the Theatine house at Palermo after prolonged illness, attributed by early biographers to incessant preaching and study. The best early evidence places his death on 6 September 1664, although some later accounts give 7 September. His posthumous reputation rested less upon an original system of natural or historical explanation than upon the amplitude and organization of his learning. He belongs to the learned ecclesiastical culture of Spanish Sicily in which biblical interpretation, patristics, classical antiquities, civic history, medicine, and natural lore remained mutually permeable fields. His books are consequently important not only for their particular subjects—especially hunting, dogs, fishes, and Roman origins—but also as material witnesses to the compilation, illustration, and printing of encyclopaedic scholarship in seventeenth-century Messina and Palermo.