Santi Bartoli. The book was rediscovered by William Wotton of the Royal Society in 1696 and an English summary became widely available. Scilla was apologetic about being but an untrained artist and the style of writing was commented on by Wotton as lacking art. Scilla argued that his training gave him a painter's eye with the ability to probe into nature and interpret things better, and depict nature without mediation. Scilla argued that fossils were not lusus naturae, whimsical simulacra of animals and plants created by God or divine Nature. He termed fossils as "jokes of time, not of nature." Athanasius Kircher had claimed that inanimate nature could produce pictures and sculptures that resembled living things. Girolamo Cardano claimed in his On the Subtlety of Things (1550) that he owned a piece agate that had the face of the Roman emperor Galba in it. Scilla dismissed Cardano's claim. Scilla may have seen fossil collections in Rome belonging to Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597–1679) and his secretary Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657). Scilla had also been influenced by Giovan Pietro Bellori (1613–1696) who had lectured on the role of the artist in inquiry. Bellori besought artists to go deep into a subject just as they examined the squaring of the circle and explored anatomy below the skin of the nudes they depicted, as depicted in Carlo Maratta's Tanto che basti (1682). Maratta had been a student of Sacchi alongside Scilla. Scilla gained reputation as a scientific illustrator and worked for Marcello Malpighi. Scilla is considered to have been the first to use dotted lines to indicate reconstructions in paleontological illustration. John Ray made use of some of Scilla's fossil illustrations. Scilla's fossil collection was acquired by John Woodward (1665–1728), an English physician, in 1717. These went into the University of Cambridge and became the nucleus of the collections of the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences. Dorsum Scilla on the Moon is named after him. See also List of Italian painters References External links La vana speculazione disingannata dal senso (1670) – digital facsimile from the Linda Hall Library Scan from the Biodiversity Heritage Library on the Internet Archive 1629 births 1700 deaths 17th-century Italian painters Italian male painters Italian Baroque painters Painters from Messina