Accademia dei Lincei

The Accademia dei Lincei, anglicised as the Lincean Academy, was an Italian learned society active from 1603 to 1651. It was established in Rome in 1603 by Federico Cesi, an aristocrat from Umbria with a passion for natural history, who founded it with three friends, and it was named after the lynx, an animal whose sharp vision symbolizes the acuity that science requires. Galileo Galilei was its intellectual centre and signed himself Galileo Galilei Linceo. The academy met at the Palazzo Cesi-Armellini near Saint Peter and is described as replacing Giambattista della Porta's Academia Secretorum Naturae in Naples, which the Inquisition had closed. After Cesi died in 1630 it was dissolved in or before 1651, and later academies in the Papal States and in Italy revived the name.