Pier Andrea Saccardo (23 April 1845 in
Treviso,
Treviso – 12 February 1920 in
Padua) was an Italian
botanist and
mycologist. He was also the author of a color classification system that he called Chromotaxia. He was elected to the
Linnean Society in 1916 as a foreign member. His multi-volume Sylloge Fungorum was one of the first attempts to produce a comprehensive treatise on the fungi which made use of the spore-bearing structures for classification.
Life
Saccardo was born in the wine growing region of Selva di Montello to Elena Vidotto and engineer Francesco di Selva. He studied at gymnasium of the Venice seminary, the Lyceum in
Venice, and then at the Technical Institute of the
University of Padua from 1864. Even at the age of fourteen, he had already put together a herbarium and had made collections of the insects of Treviso. He visited the Kew gardens in 1862. He received a
doctorate in 1867 and in the same year married Eleonora Zava. He became an Assistant to
Roberto de Visiani (1800-1878) an Italian botanist, naturalist and scholar.[1] Then in 1869, he became a professor of
Natural History in Padua. In 1876 he established the mycological journal Michelia which published many of his early mycological papers. In 1879 he became a professor of
Botany and director of the
botanical gardens of the university until 1915. He accumulated around 70,000 fungal specimens encompassing over 18,500 different species for his
herbarium now stored at the university.[2][3]
Saccardo's scientific activity focused almost entirely on
mycology. He wrote his first book in 1864 (when he was 19 years old), Flora Montellica: an introduction to the flora Trevigiana. In 1872, he published Mycologiae Venetae Specimen, in which he described some 1200 fungi species.[4] He published over 140 papers on the
Deuteromycota (imperfect mushrooms) and the
Pyrenomycetes. He was most famous for his Sylloge, begun in 1882, which was a comprehensive list of all of the
names that had been used for
mushrooms. Sylloge is still the only work of this kind that was both comprehensive for the
botanical kingdomFungi and reasonably modern. Saccardo also developed a system for classifying the
imperfect fungi by spore color and form, which became the primary system used before classification by
DNA analysis. Saccardo was the most prolific author of fungal species, having
formally described 6052 species in his lifetime.[5]
Chromotaxy scale
Saccardo proposed a
color scale in 1894, for standardizing color naming of plant descriptions.
Selected publications
Indispensable in the history of mycology is his master work Sylloge fungorum omnium hucusque cognitorum (Padua 1882–90, in nine volumes) followed by the 1931 edition in 25 volumes.[6]
Books
Prospetto della Flora Trivigiana (Venice 1864)
Bryotheca Tarvisina (Treviso 1864)
Della storia e letteratura della Flora Veneta (Milan 1869)
Sommario d'un corso di botanica (3rd ed., Padua 1880)
Musci Tarvisini (Treviso 1872)
Mycologiae Venetae specimen (Padua 1873)
Mycotheca Veneta (Padua 1874–79)
Michelis, commentarium mycologicum (Padua 1877 to 1882, 2 volumes.)
Fungi italici autographie delineati et colorati (Padua 1877–86, with 1,500 tables)
Personal life
He had a son, Domenico Saccardo (1872 - 1952) and daughter, Neffe Francesco Saccardo (1869 - 1896).[1] His son-in-law Alessandro Trotter was involved in the posthumous completion of several of volumes of the Sylloge fungorum.
Eponyms
Saccardo was honoured in the naming of various genera and species;
SaccardoaTrevis. 1869, (Lichenes), synonym of PseudocyphellariaVain., 1890
^Lücking, Robert (2020). "Three challenges to contemporaneous taxonomy from a licheno-mycological perspective". Megataxa. 1 (1): 78–103 [85].
doi:
10.11646/megataxa.1.1.16.
Davis, J. J. (August 1920) "Pier Andrea Saccardo" Botanical Gazette 70(2): pp. 156–157
Dörfelt, Heinrich and Heklau, Heike (1998) Die Geschichte der Mykologie (The History of Mycology) Einhorn-Verlag E. Dietenberger, Schwäbisch Gmünd,
ISBN3-927654-44-2