Francesco Bianchini

Francesco Bianchini (1662 to 1729) was an Italian philosopher and scientist born into a noble family at Verona. Taught by Jesuits in Bologna and by the Paduan astronomer Geminiano Montanari, he studied comets at Padua while enrolled in theology, then went to Rome in 1684 as librarian to Cardinal Ottoboni, later Pope Alexander VIII, who made him papal chamberlain and a canon of Santa Maria Maggiore. He worked for the curia of three popes, served as secretary of the commission for the reform of the calendar on the method of calculating the date of Easter, and for Clement XI built a meridian line in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri in Rome. He deduced a rotation period for Venus from telescope observations, worked on the parallax of Venus and measured the precession of the Earth's axis. He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1706 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1713 on the proposal of Isaac Newton, and a lunar crater and an asteroid bear his name. He also worked as a topographer and archaeologist of ancient Rome.