Джованни Антонио Скополи: Жизнь и научные труды итальянского натуралиста

Italian physician and naturalist

Giovanni Antonio Scopoli (sometimes Latinized as Johannes Antonius Scopolius) (3 June 1723 – 8 May 1788) was an Italian physician and naturalist. His biographer Otto Guglia named him the "first anational European" and the "Linnaeus of the Austrian Empire".

Scopoli was born at Cavalese in the Val di Fiemme, belonging to the Bishopric of Trent (today's Trentino), son of Francesco Antonio, military commissioner, and Claudia Caterina Gramola (1699 1791), a painter from a patrician family from Trentino. He obtained a degree in medicine at University of Innsbruck, and practised as a doctor in Cavalese and Venice. Much of his time was spent in the Alps, collecting plants and insects, of which he made outstanding collections. He spent two years as private secretary to the bishop of Seckau, and then was appointed in 1754 as physician of the mercury mines in Idrija, a small town in the Habsburg realm, remaining there until 1769. In 1761, he published De Hydroargyro Idriensi Tentamina on the symptoms of mercury poisoning among mercury miners. Scopoli spent time studying the local natural history, publishing Flora Carniolica (1760) as well as a major work on the insects of Carniola, Entomologia Carniolica (1763). He also published a series of Anni Historico Naturales (1769–1772), which included first descriptions of birds from various collections.<! the following footnote ref. is dropping out the succeeding paragraph: His last work was Deliciae Flora et Fauna Insubricae (1786–1788), which included scientific names for birds and mammals in northwestern Italy described by Pierre Sonnerat in the accounts of his voyages. Scopoli corresponded with Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist who laid the foundations of modern taxonomy. Scopoli is frequently mentioned by Gilbert White in his The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.