Giustiniano Nicolucci

Giustiniano Nicolucci (12 March 1819 – 15 June 1904) was an Italian anthropologist, ethnologist and archaeologist.

A professor at the University of Naples, he founded the Italian School of Anthropology and the Museum of Anthropology in Naples. His essay On the Human Races, published in two volumes in 1857, configured the first Italian treatise on anthropology and palethnology. He was the first to theorize the cataloguing of human beings according to their somatic characteristics, studying and collecting, in particular, human skulls.

Biography

Giustiniano Nicolucci was born at Isola del Liri into a wealthy family. He studied at the Collegio Tulliano in Arpino and then moved to Naples. At the first Neapolitan university he graduated in medicine in 1845. Setting aside his interest in physiology, a field in which he initially gave private lessons, he decided to return to his hometown to practice medicine.

In Isola del Liri, too, he continued his studies and research, however, decisively shifting his interest to anthropology. Thus, after a trip to Europe (1852), through which he was able to activate with the leading scholars of the time, including the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, discoverer of Troy, an exchange of information, knowledge and materials, he began his own craniological collection. And it was in this direction that he debuted, in 1857, by publishing the ethnological essay entitled On Human Races. Here, in fact, having absorbed the evolutionary influence professed by Lamarck and the need for a multidisciplinary methodology, combining physiology with anatomy, ethnology with philology, he "proposed a classification of the human race based on craniological and linguistic criteria." Antonio Garbiglietti, who had similar research under way, after favorably reviewing Nicolucci's treatise, moved in the same direction, founding the Museum of Craniology in Turin in 1861.

With the Unification Nicolucci ran for office and was elected deputy of the Kingdom of Italy until 1865, when he lost the election in the Pontecorvo constituency. In the meantime, however, he had also shifted his research to archaeology, publishing essays on a number of lithic finds in southern Italy. After all, archaeological evidence was indispensable to support his examinations of skulls and, consequently, the interpretation underlying the cataloguing of human beings. In this sense, between 1867 and 1873, Nicolucci published three important studies related, respectively, to the anthropology of Greece, Etruria and Lazio, which received wide acclaim, not to mention the prominence that had the study of Dante's skull, through which the island anthropologist traced the somatic characters of the supreme poet to the Tuscan tipus, refuting the assertion of those who wanted him Roman.

Despite his notoriety and the studies he conducted, which moreover allowed him to give the inaugural address (in French) at the first Congress of Prehistoric Archaeology and Anthropology held in 1871 in Bologna, in 1869 he was preferred to Paolo Mantegazza for the first chair of anthropology established in Italy, in Florence. Nicolucci had to wait until 1880 before he obtained the teaching of the discipline, in the equal chair established at the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery in Naples. In the following years, with the establishment of the Cabinet of Anthropology (1881), the chair was transferred to the Faculty of Mathematical, Physical and Mathematical Sciences, where the scholar from Isola del Liri would remain. In the new location, Nicolucci paid tribute to authoritative research by members of the Italian scientific scene who had previously taught there, including Giuseppe Saverio Poli and Stefano delle Chiaje.

In 1894 he founded in Naples, attached to the Institute of Anthropology, the Museum of Ethno-Anthropology, which he curated until his death (1904) and to which he donated part of his collection, on which Mantegazza and Luigi Pigorini, among others, wrote several times.

Nicolucci was a member of the Academy of the Forty, as well as the Italian Association of Anthropology and Ethnology, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.

Works

• Delle razze umane. Saggio etnologico (1857; 2 volumes)
• Di alcune armi ed utensili in pietra rinvenuti nelle provincie meridionali dell'Italia e delle popolazioni ne' tempi antestorici della penisola italiana (1863)
• La stirpe ligure ne' tempi antichi e ne' moderni (1863)
• Sull'antropologia della Grecia (1867)
• Studi antropologici. Raccolta di memorie (1863-1867) (1867)
• Antropologia dell'Etruria (1869)
• Sopra un cranio preistorico rinvenuto presso Isola Liri (1870)
• L'âge de la pierre dans les provinces napoletaines (1871)
• Antropologia del Lazio (1873)
• Strumenti in pietra delle provincie calabresi (1879)
• Sul peso del cervello dell'uomo (1881)
• Crania pompeiana, ovvero Descrizione dei crani umani rinvenuti fra le ruine dell'antica Pompei (1882)
• Su gli elefanti fossili della Valle del Liri (1882)
• I primi uomini. Studio antropologico (1883)
• I crani de' Marsi. Studio antropologico (1883)
• Antropologia dell'Italia nell'evo antico e nel moderno (1887)
• I Semiti: quel che furono e quel che oggi sono. Schizzo storico-antropologico (1890)
• Gli Aryi e le origini europee (1891)
• I Celti e la formazione delle odierne nazionalità francese, spagnola ed inglese. Saggio storico-antropologico (1891)
• L'uomo e le scimmie (1891)

References

Barsotti, Edoardo Marcello (2020). "Race and Risorgimento: An unexplored chapter of Italian history," Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Vol. XXV, No. 3, pp. 273–94.

Barsotti, Edoardo Marcello (2021). At the Roots of Italian Identity: 'Race' and 'Nation' in the Italian Risorgimento, 1796-1870. Abingdon: Routledge.

Calani, Aristide (1861). Il Parlamento del Regno d'Italia, Vol. 2. Milano: Giuseppe Civelli, pp. 938–40.

Carbone, Arduino (1971). Giustiniano Nicolucci e la sua patria. Isola del Liri: Comune di Isola del Liri.

Fedele, F.G. (1985). "Giustiniano Nicolucci e il sorgere dell'antropologia a Napoli," Antropologia Contemporanea, Vol. I, No. 8, pp. 19–29.

Fedele, F.G.; Baldi, A. (1988). Alle origini dell'antropologia italiana. Giustiniano Nicolucci e il suo tempo. Napoli: Guida.

Garbiglietti, Antonio (1859). Delle razze umane. Saggio etnologico del dr. Giustiniano Nicolucci. Torino: Tip. Favale.

Giuffrida-Ruggeri, V. (1918). "A Sketch of the Anthropology of Italy," The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. XLVIII, pp. 80–102.

Giustino, Enzo (2006). Gli assi portanti, le radici e il domani, Vol. 3. Napoli: Guida.

Loffreda, Enzo (2017). Da borgo medievale a città moderna: lo sviluppo urbanistico-architettonico di Isola del Liri (secc. IX-XX). Isola del Liri.

Mantegazza, Paolo (1905). "Commemorazione di Giustiniano Nicolucci," Archivio per l'Antropologia, l'Etnologia e la Psicologia comparata, Vol. XXXV, pp. 412–15.

Nicolucci, Giustiniano (1877). Catalogo della Collezione di oggetti preistorici dell'età della pietra posseduti da Giustiniano Nicolucci in Isola del Liri. Napoli: Tip. Editrice già del Fibreno.

Pigorini, Luigi (1871). Bibliografia Paleoetnologica Italiana dal 1850 al 1871. Parma: Tip. Rossi-Ubaldi.

Puccini, Sandra (1985). "Giustiniano Nicolucci e gli studi demo-etno-antropologici italiani dell'Ottocento," La Ricerca Folklorica, No. 12, pp. 131–35.

Romani, Antonella (2016). "Giustiniano Nicolucci: antropologo y prehistoriador de la Italia postunitaria. Los ibero-ligures y otros pueblos de Italia antigua," Boletín del Museo Arqueológico Nacional, No. 36, pp. 113–36.

Quine, Maria Sophia (2019). "The Destiny of Races ‘Not Yet Called to Civilization’: Giustiniano Nicolucci’s Critique of American Polygenism and Defense of Liberal Racism." In: Richard McMahon, ed., National Races: Transnational Power Struggles in the Sciences and Politics of Human Diversity, 1840–1945. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 69–104.

Spencer, Frank (1997). History of Physical Anthropology: An Encyclopedia, Vol. 1. New York & London: Garland Publishing.