439 



VOLPATO, GIOVANNI. 



YOLTA, ALESSANDRO. 



440 



last publication appeared the same year, a tract which he dedicated to 

 the Asiatic Society, entitled L'Alphabet Europden applique" aux 

 Langues Asiatiques.' He also read to the Academy, in 1819, a' Dis- 

 cours sur 1'Etude Philosophique des Langues ;' and the collection of 

 '(Euvres Completes,' published in 8 vols. 1820-1826, contains two 

 letters to M. le Comte Lanjuinais, 'Sur I'Antiquite" de 1'Alphabet 

 Phdnicien,' dated also in that year. The last work he preparedjfor the 

 press was an octavo volume, entitled, ' L'He'breu simplifie,' which 

 appeared immediately after his death. All his acknowledged writings 



. 1 !.:_ j _ . n _vt A nnnn< mi + itlarl *Vima \JruivpliAa Bill" 



lected works. But he was also a considerable contributor anony- 

 mously to the ' Moniteur' and the ' Revue Encyclope"dique.' 



Volney died on tho 23rd of April 1820. The above facts are chiefly 

 abstracted from an excellent though somewhat partial memoir of him, 

 in the ' Biographie Universelle,' by M. Durozoir. 



VOLPA'TO QIOVA'NNI, a distinguished Italian engraver, was 

 born at Bassano in 1738. He was first employed in tapestry em- 

 broidery, an art which he learnt from his mother ; but he at the same 

 time occasionally occupied himself with engraving, which he acquired 

 without instruction, and he published some prints under the assumed 

 name of Renard. The success of these prints was sufficient to induce 

 him to adopt engraving as a profession, and he accordingly fixed him- 

 self in Venice, where he became the pupil of the celebrated Bartolozzi. 

 Volpato engraved many good prints after several Venetian masters, 

 but his best works were engraved after Raffaelle and other masters at 

 Rome, where he finally settled. He was employed as its principal 

 engraver by a society of dilettanti which undertook to re-engrave all 

 the works of Raffaelle in the Vatican. Volpato engraved on a large 

 scale seven of the great works of Raffaelle in the so-called stanze ; an 

 eighth, ' The Mess of Bolseua,' was engraved by his pupil and son-in- 

 law Raphael Morghen. The prints were published coloured as well as 

 plain, and are a very valuable set of engravings. He published in the 

 game style the Farnese Gallery of Annibal Carracci ; and many other 

 celebrated works of the great Italian masters. He published also 

 many coloured landscape etchings of Roman views, &c., in partnership 

 with P. du Cros. Another of his great works is a set of fourteen 

 views of the galleries of the Museo Clementine, with all its works of 

 art. He engraved also two prophets and two sibyls from those of 

 Michel Angelo in the Sistine Chapel. His prints are remarkably 

 numerous considering their scale and the style in which they are exe- 

 cuted. Huber, who wrote before the death of Volpato, enumerates, 

 as his principal works, 166 engravings. He and his aon-in-law Morgheu 

 were the best engravers in Italy at the end of the 18th century. 

 Volpato died at Rome in 1803. 



VOLPI, GIAN ANTONIO, born at Padua in 1686, studied in his 

 native town, and became a good Latin and Greek scholar. In 1717 he 

 and his brother Gaetano Volpi established a printing-press in their 

 house for the purpose of bringing out correct editions of classic 

 authors, and they engaged for their assistant the printer Giuseppe 

 Comino. This press known by the name of Volpi-Cominiana, pro- 

 duced among others a valuable edition of Catullus with copious notes. 

 The edition was much commended by scholars, and the city of Verona 

 struck a gold medal, which was presented to Volpi : the title is, ' Caius 

 Catulus Veronensis et in eum Jo. Antonii Vulpii novus Commentarius,' 

 4to, Padua, 1737. Volpi afterwards edited Tibullus and Propertius. 

 He translated from the Greek into Italian the dialogue of Zacharias 

 Scholasticus ; he wrote a disquisition on the satire of the Romans : 

 1 Liber de satyrse Latinso natura et ratione, item paraphrasis perpetua 

 et comnientarius uberrimus in X satyram Juvenalis,' Padua, 1744 ; 

 he edited the poems of Sannazaro, with a biography of the author ; he 

 published a new edition of Dante ; and he wrote three books of Latin 

 poems, to which he added those of his ancestor and namesake Gian 

 Antonio Volpi, the elder, who was bishop of Como and was one of the 

 Fathers of the Council of Trent. Volpi was for many years professor 

 of philosophy and of rhetoric in the University of Padua. In his old 

 age he became blind, and he died in 1766. His brother Gaetano 

 Volpi edited Sal lust in 1722, and he was an active assistant to his 

 brother at the press. He wrote an account of their joint labours : ' La 

 Libreria dei Volpi e la Stamperia Cominiana.' Giuseppe Comino having 

 died in 1752, his son Angelo Comino continued to carry on the 

 business. Another brother of Volpi, named Giuseppe, undertook the 

 continuation of Cardinal Corradini's great work, ' Vetus Latium pro- 

 fanum,' which he completed. 



VOLTA, ALESSANDRO, was born at Como in 1745, of a noble 

 family, and was educated in that city. In 1774 he was appointed 

 professor of natural philosophy in the University of Pavia, and while 

 he held that chair he made the discoveries which have immortalised 

 his name. 



It appears that in his youth he had a taste for letters, and among 

 his effusions is a poem, in Italian, on Saussure's journey to Mont 

 Blanc : he also composed one in Latin, which treats of the principal 

 phenomena of chemistry. This taste did not however continue, and 

 the bent of his mind was afterwards decidedly in favour of the sciences 

 connected with electricity. 



In 1777 Volta made an excursion into Switzerland, and three years 

 afterwards he travelled through Tuscany. During the latter journey 



he observed and drew up a description of the flame which appears to 

 issue from the ground about 40 miles from Florence, on the road to 

 Bologna. In 1782 he travelled through Germany and Holland, and 

 made a visit to England, where he became known to Sir Joseph Banks 

 and the most distinguished philosophers of the country. He returned 

 through France, and he is said to have then introduced into Lombardy 

 the culture of the potato, which he had observed in Savoy. 



When Bonaparte first entered Italy, in 1796, Volta was one of the 

 persons appointed by his fellow-citizens to solicit the protection of 

 that general, who afterwards took every opportunity of conferring 

 honours upon him. He caused him to be named a deputy from the 

 University of Pavia to a congress which was held at Lyon for the 

 purpose of electing a president of the Italian republic; and in 1801 

 he invited him to Paris, in order that he might repeat before the mem- 

 bers of the Institute his experiments with the pile which he had 

 invented. On this occasion that learned body presented Volta with a 

 gold medal, and elected him one of its foreign associates. Bonaparte 

 also make him a member of the Legion of Honour, and conferred on 

 him the order of the Iron Crown, with the titles of count and senator 

 of the kingdom of Italy. He had been elected a Fellow of the Royal 

 Society of London in 1791. 



In 1804 Volta was allowed to resign his professorship ; and, giving 

 up his studies, he spent the rest of his life at his native town, Como. 

 Here he was seized with a fever, which, after an illness of only two 

 days, terminated fatally on the 5th of March 1826. He married iu 

 1794, and by his wife he had three children, whose education he him- 

 self superintended. His life was one of uniform piety, and he died 

 sincerely lamented by every friend of science, particularly by his 

 fellow-citizens, who struck a medal and erected a monument to his 

 memory. 



In proof of the inclination of Volta in favour of the physical 

 sciences, it may be observed, that when he was only eighteen years of 

 age he corresponded with the Abbe" Nollet on the subject of electrical 

 phenomena, and that six years afterwards (1769) he addressed to 

 Beccaria a dissertation in Latin, entitled ' De Vi Attractiva ignis 

 ElectricL' In 1775, while pursuing some experiments on the non- 

 conducting property of wood when impregnated with oil, he was led 

 to the construction of his ' electrophorus,' an instrument consisting of 

 two circular plates of metal having between them one of resin : the 

 upper plate was furnished with an isolating handle of glass, by which 

 it was to be raised from the plate of resin; and the latter being 

 excited by friction, the whole constituted a kind of electrical machine. 

 An account of it was given in Kosier'a ' Journal de Physique ' for 1776, 

 and Dr. Ingenhouz afterwards explained its principles on the Franklin 

 theory of positive and negative electricity. ('Phil. Trans.,' 1778.) 



The efforts of Volta to improve the electrophorus led him in 1782 

 to the discovery of the instrument which he designated an electrical 

 condenser. This is rather a variation of the former instrument, a 

 plate of marble or varnished wood being substituted for the resiu 

 between the conductors. A wire being brought to the upper con- 

 ductor from the object in which a faint degree of electricity exists, 

 after a time the conductor, on being lifted up by the glass handle, is 

 found to have received from the object a considerable quantity of elec- 

 tricity. An account of this instrument was given by Volta himself, in 

 the ' Philosophical Transactions ' for the same year (vol. Ixxii.) ; and 

 it is there stated that he had succeeded in ascertaining by it the exist- 

 ence of negative electricity in the vapour of water, in the smoke of 

 burning coals, and in the gas produced by a solution of iron in weak 

 sulphuric acid. With this instrument Volta employed an electrometer 

 consisting of two pieces of straw suspended in a glass jar, from the 

 stopper ; these diverged from each other on bringing an electrified 

 body in contact with a ball of metal connected with the stopper ; and 

 by means of a graduated scale, the intensity of the electricity was 

 measured. 



In 1777 Volta invented the elegant apparatus which is called the 

 hydrogen lamp ; it is constituted by a stream of hydrogen gas, which 

 is made to issue through a small aperture by means of the pressure of 

 a column of water, and the gas is fired by the spark from an electro- 

 phorus placed below it. About the same time he discovered a process 

 for determining the proportions between the two gases, oxygen and 

 azote, which constitute common atmospherical air ; this is accom- 

 plished by introducing a given quantity of hydrogen gas into a glass 

 tube with a certain quantity of atmospherical air, and tiring it by the 

 electrical spark : the quantity of oxygen was indicated by the dimi- 

 nution of the volume. He also invented the instrument which has 

 been called the electrical pistol. 



But the discovery by which the name of Volta is chiefly distinguished 

 is that of the development of electricity in metallic bodies. A series 

 of experiments judiciously devised and skilfully conducted led him to 

 the knowledge of this principle, the applications of which have since 

 produced such important consequences. 



Galvani had given the name of animal electricity to the power 

 which caused spontaneous convulsions in the limbs of frogs when the 

 divided nerves were connected by a metallic wire [GALVANI] ; but 

 Volta observing that the effects were far greater when the connecting 

 medium consisted of two different kinds of metal, inferred from thence 

 that the principle of excitation existed in the metals, and not in the 

 nerves of the animal ; and he assumed that by their contact there was 





