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AUTHORS: Achillini, Alessandro Agricola, Georgius Alberti, Leone Battista Archimedes Aristotle Babington, John Baif, Lazare de Baldi, Bernardino Baliani, Giovanni Battista Barocius, Franciscus Benedetti, Giovanni Battista Berga, Antonio Biancani, Giuseppe Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso Borro, Girolamo Boyle, Robert Branca, Giovanni Buonamici, Francesco Buteo, Johannes Cardano, Girolamo Casati, Paolo Castelli, Benedetto Cataneo, Girolamo Ceredi, Giuseppe Ceva, Giovanni Cicero, M. Tullius Commandino, Federico Delfino, Federico Descartes, Rene Epicurus Euclid Fabri, Honore Foscarini, Paolo Antonio Galilei, Galileo Gassendi, Pierre Ghetaldi, Marino Giphanius, Hubert Guevara, Giovanni di Heron Alexandrinus Heytesbury, William Hutton, Charles Jordanus de Nemore Landi, Bassiano Lorini, Buonaiuto Lucretius Manuzio, Paolo Marci of Kronland, Johannes Marcus Mellini, Domenico Mersenne, Marin Monantheuil, Henri de Monte, Guidobaldo del Morelli, Gregorio Newton, Isaac Pacioli, Luca Pappus Alexandrinus Salusbury, Thomas Santbech, Daniel Schott, Gaspar Schreck, Johann Terrenz Stelliola, Niccolò Antonio Stevin, Simon Tartaglia, Niccolò Thomaz, Alvaro Thucydides Torricelli, Evangelista Valerio, Luca Varro, Michel Vitruvius Pollio Wolff, Christian von |
Baldi, Bernardino born on 5.6.1553 in Urbino, died on 10.10.1617 in Urbino, Italian mathematician and man of letters After receiving his first education in his city of birth he moved to Padua, where he studied Greek with Manuello Margunio and mathematics with Guido Ubaldo del Monte. From around 1570 Frederico Commandino was his mathematics teacher, and encouraged him to translate Heron of Alexandria’s Automata into Italian, although this translation was not published until 1589, as the foreword of a history of mechanics. At that time he also translated Aratos’ Phaenomena into Italian and wrote instructive poems about artillery and about the magnetic compass, but these were not published. In 1573 Baldi joined the faculty of the University of Padua, and in 1575 the critically ill Frederico Commandino told him his life story, which served as the basis for the Commandino biography written by Baldi. While he was writing this biography, Baldi decided to compile a collection of around 200 biographies of mathematicians, which he completed in 1588/89. When the university was closed because of the plague in 1576, he returned to his native city, but moved on to Mantua in 1580, where Don Ferrante II, Duke of Guastalla, had appointed him as court mathematician. After being ordained as a priest in 1585, Baldi was appointed abbot of Guastalla in 1586. In this year he also made his first trip to Rome, where the buildings of antiquity made a lasting impression on him. In his numerous literary works Baldi repeatedly describes architectural works with great expertise and empathy, and deals intensively with Vitruvius. In this period he also wrote his most important contribution to physics, his commentary on the mechanical problems of pseudo-Aristotle, although this was published posthumously in 1621. Along with Henri de Montheuil’s commentary on Aristotle’s mechanics, this commentary is considered to be the most important from the period. Baldi’s conceptions of the duration and constancy of movements appear to have been influenced by an earlier commentary by Alessandro Piccolomini. Baldi always bases his mechanical discussions on the concept of the centre of gravity, especially for his investigations of stable and instable balances. In 1601 Baldi returned to Urbino for a brief period in order to collect material for a biography of Federico di Montefeltro. In 1609 he resigned from his office in Mantua to become historian and biographer to the Duke of Urbino, who sent him as his emissary to Venice in 1612. A comprehensive work on geography he worked on in his final years remained unpublished, while many of his literary and poetic works were published during his lifetime. In 1616 Baldi published a Latin translation of Heron’s Belopoeica along with Heron’s Greek text and a biography of Heron, also written in Latin. A number of excerpts of the mathematicians’ biographies he collected were published for the first time in 1707; around forty of these biographies have been published in their entirety, but the majority exists only in manuscript form. As a poet and scholar, Baldi enjoyed great fame among his contemporaries. He is reported to have mastered twelve languages—some sources even speak of sixteen. Particular esteem fell to his instructive poem “La Nautica” and the eclogues in the “Versi e Prose” (Venice 1590).
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