From his arrival in Lisbon, in September 1722, until his death on April 1750, the Neapolitan Jesuit Giovanni Battista Carbone was, in the court of King João V (r. 1707-1750) of Portugal, the pivot of a significant scientific, political and diplomatic activity. His journey to Lisbon, with fellow Jesuit Domenico Capacci, was motivated by a mapping mission to Portuguese America but, since the monarch became impressed by Carbone’s personal qualities, the Jesuit mathematician never left the Portuguese mainland. In the summer of 1722 he and Capacci had studied at the Roman College with the holder of the chair of mathematics Orazio Borgondio. In Portugal, reflecting the new enlightened spirit of rigor and quantification cherished by the king (the espri géometrique, as Fontenelle called it), the 1720s were dedicated to precise astronomical observations in order to find Lisbon’s exact geographical coordinates. This chapter shows that in the biography of the Jesuit and royal mathematician the two facets, the scientific and the diplomatic, were inextricably intertwined. Carbone’s action represented the embodiment of a symbiotic relationship established between diplomacy and the sciences/technics in the modern age.
...MoreBook Ana Simões; Marta Lourenço; José Alberto Silva (2021) Ciência, Technologia, e Medicina na Construção de Portugal. 2: Razão e Progresso (Séc. XVIII) (Science, Technology and Medicine in the Construction of Portugal: Reason and Progress. 18th Century, volume 2).
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