Outside of universities and schools, there were also other places where natural philosophy was cultivated, particularly in academies and learned societies. Even in literary societies such as the Accademia Fiorentina (1541), patronized by Duke Cosimo de’Medici and his descendants, scientific matters (e.g., alchemy or spontaneous generation) were occasionally debated, often in the context of commentaries on the poems of Dante and Petrarch. The Accademia dei Lincei, founded in 1603, on the other hand, was exclusively interested in the sciences: as their statute dictated, the Lincei had no interest in any controversy which was not scientific or mathematical, and they avoided involvement in political matters. The Accademia dei Lincei, like the Accademia del Cimento after it (1657), was founded and patronized by members of the aristocracy, but never became as well-grounded as other learned societies, such as the Royal Society (1661) or the Académie Royale (1666), which were directly sponsored by the state (the Académie Royale even received financial support from the treasury). Both of these latter institutions developed out of more informal associations and they encouraged collaboration among their members; they also explicitly endorsed the open and public exchange of ideas, as opposed to the secretive practices of groups like the Lincei. Their members gave public demonstrations of their work, and the secrecy which had characterized scientific pursuit for centuries was eventually abandoned in favor of a new empirical approach.