Guillaume Rondelet - Service With Cardinal de Tournon and Work On Marine Zoology

Service With Cardinal De Tournon and Work On Marine Zoology

Rondelet's fortunes revived when he gained a powerful patron, Cardinal François de Tournon, whom he attended as his personal physician. De Tournon and the Bishop of Montpellier, Guillaume Pellicier, had both stood as sponsors for Rondelet's twin children on their birth in 1538. Rondelet left Montpellier and travelled with de Tournon in the Cardinal's entourage, journeying widely around France, what is now Belgium and Italy and stayed in Rome for three months in 1549. His trip to Italy enabled him to meet many of the Italian scholars whom he knew through his correspondence, among them Luca Ghini at Pisa, Antonio Musa Brasavola at Ferrara, Ulysse Aldrovandi at Padua and Cesare Odo at Bologna. While in Italy he was able to indulge his interest in natural history by visiting the coast.

His rising status was confirmed in 1545 by his appointment to the post of Regius Professor of Medicine at Montpellier. He returned to his home town in 1551 on leaving the service of the cardinal and devoted two years to the writing of a great treatise on marine animals, titled Libri de piscibus marinis in quibus verae piscium effigies expressae sunt. It took him two years to write and, despite the title's reference to piscibus (fish), it covered all aquatic animals; like others of his time, he made no distinction between fish, marine mammals such as seals and whales, crustaceans and other invertebrates. He also tackled the question of whether freshwater sea creatures could live in marine environments and vice-versa.

His approach was broadly similar to that of Aristotle in that he focused on the functional aspects of a creature and examined why and how a particular feature or organ functioned. In the case of freshwater fish, for instance, he looked for and compared the swim bladders of freshwater and marine specimens. He dissected and illustrated numerous creatures; his anatomical drawing of a sea urchin is the earlier extant depiction of an invertebrate and he found important anatomical similarities between dolphins, pigs and humans. Published in 1556, the book was used as a standard reference work for many years afterwards and was translated into French in 1558 under the title L'histoire entière des poissons ("The complete story of fish").