Emilie Du Châtelet and Antonio Conti. The Italian translation of the Institutions physiques

This paper focuses on a neglected aspect of the Institutions physiques’ reception in Italy and presents unpublished, manuscript sources testifying the contacts between Émilie Du Châtelet and Antonio Conti. By sending a copy of her Institutions fresh off the press to an elderly abbé Conti, Madame Du Châtelet was addressing her work to an eclectic, well connected intellectual, since long a familiar figure both in French literary circles and in British scientific assemblies. A translator of Voltaire’s tragedies, as well as a member of the Royal Society where he had been introduced in his youth by Newton himself. Still at an older age he kept abreast of the latest scientific debates in Europe, just as eager as he always had been to enliven the learned discussions and to promote wider dissemination of experiments and scientific knowledge throughout Italy. The evidence gathered here suggests that Conti may have had both the motive and the occasion to play an active role in arranging for the Italian translation and publication of the Institutions. Part of this evidence is circumstantial: besides his direct testimony of receiving the Institutions, an analysis of the translation itself shows that it had been initially composed based on the text of the first edition of this work. This would be the edition sent directly to Conti by Émilie Du Châtelet. Only later, the preliminary Italian translation was to be adapted, revised, and updated with the new texts, in conformity with the changes introduced in the second edition. And when the Instituzioni di fisica were printed in 1743, they would come out of the printing press in Venice by Giambattista Pasquali, that same typographer who was publishing Conti’s works. As for the textual evidence: the intellectual profile of Émilie Du Châtelet emerging from the Institutions’ pages appeared to Conti’s eyes to be intriguingly at odds with her portrait as a Newtonian scholar, displayed in Algarotti’s Il newtonianesimo per le dame. Conti deemed that she had become “tutta leibniziana” and admired both the clarity and the depth she showed in conveying the principles of Leibnizianism. Of the Institutions’ metaphysical foundation, though, he would remain mockingly skeptic, even when he paid an explicit tribute to this work in his Dialoghi filosofici. There, a series of themes and conceptual points betray an influence of, and possibly a debt to, Du Châtelet’s work. Broadening the scope to shift from the Venetian context to the Italian reception, it must be acknowledged that a thorough mapping of the Institutions’ fortune in Italy still waits to be drawn. Here just very few instances of the impact exerted by this original work, as well as by its Italian translation, will be investigated. These hints show that Émilie Du Châtelet’s work became part of a wider debate about Leibnizianism and this enabled the Institutions to contribute not just to the strictly scientific debates in within the academies, but to influence the learned public discussions and the literary culture more in general.