One of the main difficulties in writing the biography of a figure like Angelo Secchi, Jesuit and pioneer of astrophysics, is to distinguish between history and rhetoric, namely to ensure that the biography does not become a hagiography. The circumstances of Secchi’s life and the historical period in which he lived would make a fine plot for a novel, and it is difficult to avoid the risk of making this scientist a martyr or a romantic hero. Moreover, Secchi’s Jesuits companions at the Collegio Romano, who were among his first biographers, were often biased and used contradictory sources, so that reliable biographies are often hard to find.
To avoid this risk, this book is conceived as a sort of “autobiography” by Secchi himself, in the sense that it is a biography that is mostly written in his own words. The continual references to quotations of his texts, publications, letters, or diaries aim to give the reader a well-rounded portrait of the Jesuit scientist, letting him tell the story of his life himself. His beautiful prose allows the biographer to have just to provide a frame, to set the scientific and historical context of the time.
Although this book examines Secchi’s main scientific contributions, especially to astrophysics, the reader will not find detailed scientific content or complicated technical language: the book is deliberately written for a non-specialist audience, one having only a basic background in physics and astronomy.
Finally, it must be stated that this biography does not purport to be comprehensive, as it is beyond the scope of this work to provide an encyclopedic survey of all the questions in which Secchi was involved. The complexity of the figure of Secchi would require considerably more time and expertise to be analyzed in such depth. There are many aspects of his life and scientific work that remain unexplored, while others are only mentioned briefly here. There are plenty of documents and sources (manuscripts, publications, and bibliographies, especially those written by Jesuits) that have not yet been fully examined. The extended archives on Secchi at the Gregorian University, which have been the starting point for this biography, are still largely unexplored, especially the immense corpus of his correspondence, which would deserve to be examined in detail. Secchi’s relationships with physicists and meteorologists are mostly uninvestigated, as well as some aspects related to his religious life and his influence on Catholicism. Hence the intention of this book is to stimulate scholars to study the figure of Secchi in a wider context. The bicentennial of his birth represents a good opportunity to highlight lesser-known interdisciplinary aspects of this protagonist of nineteenth-century science.