Ardinghelli (Later Crispo), Maria Angela

Descendant of an ancient and powerful Florentine family, Maria Angela Ardinghelli (1730–1825, later Crispo) was born to Caterina Piccillo and Niccolò Ardinghelli in Naples, where she spent almost her whole life and made acquaintance with mathematicians, physicists, and natural philosophers belonging to the intellectual community of the city. As other women scientists of the eighteenth century such as Laura Bassi, Anna Morandi Manzolini, and Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Ardinghelli entered the national and international community thanks to her scientific competence. She became an appreciated Neapolitan scientist and was elected a member of the Accademia dei Fisiocritici in Siena, Italy. Ardinghelli maintained constant correspondence with Jean-Antoine Nollet, a distinguished experimental physicist and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. Her fame is mainly due to her translations of Stephen Hales’s two-volume Statical Essays (1731–1733), which she enriched with glosses, notes, and explanations so as to enhance the readers’ grasp of complex concepts. Her scientific contributions were so appreciated in Paris that her portrait medallion, sculpted by Jean Jacques Caffieri, appointed “sculpteur du Roi” to Louis XV, was hung in the meeting room of the French Academy of Sciences.