Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc

Peiresc's father was a higher magistrate and city surgeon in Provence from a wealthy noble family, who with his wife fled their home town of Aix-en-Provence to avoid the plague raging there, settling in Belgentier in Var.

[1] Peiresc's position as a great intellectual at the time of the Scientific Revolution has led to his being called a "Prince of the Republic of Letters".

Peiresc was an avid art collector and relied on Finson's contacts in Italy to acquire two works of Caravaggio from the Pasqualini family of Rome.

[3] Peiresc's house in Aix-en-Provence was a veritable museum, and held a mix of antique sculptures, modern paintings, medals, books and gardens with exotic plants.

He owned over 18,000 coins and medals, and was also an archaeologist, amateur artist, historian (he demonstrated that Julius Caesar's invasion of Britain set out not from Calais but from St Omer), Egyptologist, botanist, zoologist (studying chameleons, crocodiles, the elephant and the alzaron, a sort of Nubian gazelle with a bull-like head, now disappeared), physiologist, geographer (put on the project of linking Aix to Marseilles), and ecologist.

In 1610 du Vair purchased a telescope, which Peiresc and Joseph Gaultier used for observing the skies, including Jupiter's moons; his courtly suggestion that individual names from the Medici family be applied to these "Medicean stars" was not taken up.

With Gassendi's support, notably financially, he and the engraver Claude Mellan began to produce a map of the Moon's surface, but again Peiresc died before completing it.