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Science in Rome, 1675–1700, and the Accademia Fisicomatematica of Giovanni Giustino Ciampini

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

W. E. Knowles Middleton
W. E. Knowles Middleton
Affiliation:
Apartment 2406, 2020 Haro Street, Vancouver V6G IJ3, Canada.
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Extract

In Italy the physical sciences had several decades of prosperity during the first half of the seventeenth century, largely because of the genius of Galileo Galilei and the efforts of a small constellation of his talented followers. But Galileo died in 1642, and before the end of the 1640s three of the most gifted of his disciples, Castelli, Renieri, and Torricelli, had also gone to a better life, to use the favourite euphemism of the time. Thereafter Tommaso Cornelio at Naples, Giovanni Alfonso Borelli at Messina and later at Pisa, as well as some lesser men, carried on the new science, and in 1657 the scientific enthusiasm of the Grand Duke Ferdinand II of Tuscany and his talented brother Leopold led to the short-lived Accademia del Cimento (1657–67), whose clear-cut and totally empirical programme of experimentation, reported on in 1667 but carried out mainly before 1662, was the last Tuscan flame to rise from the Galilean embers. Physiology and anatomy continued to develop, and north of the Apennines there was activity in astronomy and in optics, but the last was an isolated spark in the general gloom.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , July 1975 , pp. 138 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1975

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References

The research for this paper was carried out with the aid of a grant from the Canada Council, which is gratefully acknowledged. I also wish to acknowledge the kindness of many people in Rome, especially Father Charles Burns of the Archivio Segreto Vaticano and Father Edmond Lamalle of the Archivio Romano della Compagnia di Gesú.

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6 In the manuscript records that survive, this spelling is constantly used, probably because of a personal choice by the secretary.

7 It was usually referred to as Accademia fisico-matematica.

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35 Christina was always referred to in this way.

36 Vat. Lat. 11757, f. 8r.

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54 See note 45, above.

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58 Costantini, Claudio, Baliani e i Gesuiti (Florence, 1969), pp. 21–2Google Scholar. This valuable work, while dealing with the first half of the century, nevertheless makes these internal struggles very clear.

59 Ibid., p. 108.

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63 Thorndike, , A history of magic and experimental science (8 vols., New York, 1923–1958), vii. 667Google Scholar. I followed this in The experimenters, op. cit. (1), p. 324.Google Scholar

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65 Rome, Jesuit Archives, Gal. 74a, ff. 148r–149v.

66 Ibid., f. 149r.

67 Ibid., ff. 150r–150v.

68 Sommervogel, no. 26. A second, enlarged edition in two volumes was published in England, at Colchester, in 1672, and, according to Sommervogel, was promptly placed on the Index.

69 Rome, Jesuit Archives, Gal. 74a, ff, 170r and 172r.

70 See Gérin, C., Louis XIV et le Saint-Siège (2 vols., Paris, 1894).Google Scholar

71 Rome, Jesuit Archives, Gal. 74a, ff. 154r–154v.

72 Florence, Archivio di Stato, Medici del Principato 5508, f. 101r (draft).

73 Medici del Principato 5509, f. 181r.

74 See Saccenti, Mario, Lucrezio in Toscana. Studio su Alessandro Marchetti (Florence, 1966)Google Scholar. See also Maugain, Gabriel, Étude sur l'évolution intellectuelle de l'Italie de 1656 à 1750 environ (Paris, 1909), pp. 137–9.Google Scholar

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76 The letter was published by Favaro, A., in his Miscellanea Galileiana inedita. Studi e ricerche (Venice, 1887), pp. 143–4.Google Scholar

77 Middleton, , op. cit. (1), chapter 7.Google Scholar