Carlo Pollonera
Carlo Pollonera (Alexandria, Egypt, March 27, 1849 – Turin, June 17, 1923) was an Italian painter, particularly of landscapes, and also an important malacologist.
[5] In 1865, the family had moved to Turin, where Pollonera began studying painting with Alberto Maso Gilli.
[6][2] In January 1875, he travelled with his close friend Carlo Stratta to Paris, where he studied under Thomas Couture and was influenced by the Barbizon school.
Pollonera's first publication was a monograph on Italian slugs in conjunction with his younger half-brother Mario Lessona,[17] but subsequently he was always the sole author.
However, the section below on taxa named after Pollonera provides many examples of generous cooperation with other scientists, sometimes authoring species descriptions in other's papers or drawing the plates.
One particularly important aspect of his research is that he dissected the animals to provide extra anatomical characters; this has since become standard but was "cutting-edge" at the time.
[16][20] This approach is particularly valuable in studying slugs, which was the group that he published most on, although others of his papers concern terrestrial snails and occasionally freshwater and fossil faunas.
Carlo Pollonera died on 17 June 1923 after a short stay in the San Giovanni hospital in Turin.
Marziano Bernardi summarised his character as, "silent and a loner by nature, a rebel and intransigent" ["un silenzioso e un solitario per temperamento, un ribelle e un intransigente"].
The list of taxa that have been named after Pollonera documents not only the esteem in which he was held but also the milieu of his scientific contacts as his influence spread.
[24] In 1884, the geologist Federico Sacco named a Pliocene freshwater snail Viviparus pollonerae, dedicated to this "kind and talented malacologist" ("al gentile quanto valente malacologo").
In 1886, Sacco named a species of slug known only from its fossil shell (Miocene) as Limax pollonerae after his colleague who "so lovingly deals with the study of Limacidae" ("con tanto amore si occupa dello studio dei Limacidi").
A year later Sulliotti named a marine bivalve from Sardinia Tapes Pollonerianus in honour of Pollonera "to whom we owe the most recent and best study of the malacological fauna of Piedmont, and with whose friendship I am honored".
[38][39] The Swedish malacologist Carl Westerlund in 1892 named a soil-living snail from Malta Cionella pollonerae;[40] this is today considered a synonym of Cecilioides acicula.
[41] Two expeditions led by Borelli to Paraguay and Argentina yielded mollusc collections that Giuseppe Paravicini (of Milan) and then César Ancey (working in Algeria) wrote up in 1894 and 1897.
In 1897, the cleric and malacologist Pietro Arbanasich (using the pseudonym Fra Piero) authored the description of a species of semi-slug from Sardinia under the name Vitrina Polloneriana.
