Taking Newton on Tour

Although he failed in his first bid to be Royal Society President, Folkes continued to promote Newtonianism abroad. Folkes took a Grand Tour from 1732/3 to 1735, recording the Italian leg of his journey from Padua to Rome in his journal. Chapter five examines Folkes’s travel diary to analyse further his Freemasonry, his intellectual development as a Newtonian and his scientific peregrination in which he used metrology to understand not only the aesthetics but the engineering principles of antique buildings and artefacts, as well as their context and place in the Italian landscape. For Folkes, natural philosophy and antiquarianism went hand in hand. Using Folkes’s diary of his journey, and letters to/from natural philosophers such as Francesco Algarotti, Anders Celsius and Abbé Antonio Conti, this chapter analyses to what extent Folkes’s tour established his reputation as an international broker of Newtonianism as well as the overall primacy of English scientific instrumentation to Italian virtuosi.