OU History of Science Collections

Recently we made available a manuscript of an unpublished work on sundials by Bernardino Baldi that had been missing since 1783.

The OU History of Science Collections hold a second Baldi manuscript: his autograph copy of Cronica, a 16th-century history of mathematics, now digitized in its entirety and available from the Collections’ Online Galleries.

Baldi autograph, Cronica (ca. 1596); title page

The Cronica arranges its brief biographical entries as a genealogical account of the restoration of mathematics from Ancient Greece (first entry: Euphorbus) to contemporary Italy (final entry: Guidobaldo del Monte), including an impressive list of Arabic practitioners.  As such it was one of the first histories of mathematics written by a European (though not the first published), and perhaps the first to be written by a European mathematician.  It was an attempt to do for mathematics what Vasari had done for art.

Baldi autograph, Cronica (ca. 1596); Copernicus entry

The manuscript, we learn from internal evidence, was probably completed in 1596:  the final four mathematicians mentioned (Clavius, Aluigi, Magini, Guidobaldo del Monte) all have 1596 as their date. The entry for Guidobaldo mentions some books already printed, others not yet written – this confirms a date of composition between 1580 and 1600.

Baldi autograph, Cronica (ca. 1596); last entry

Here is a bibliographic description:

BALDI, Bernardino. Cronica de Matematici. Overo Epitome del Historia de le Vite Loro. Manuscript, brown ink, 22 lines per page. Folio [28 x 19 cm], (2) ff., 183 pp., (4) ff. 

Bound in 18th century half calf (stained green) and lacquered paper over boards, spine with raised bands and calf title label with tools of the Albani Library, covers slightly abraded. Albani shelfmark 631 on front endleaf. Unidentified private library stamp on leaf following title, a rather blurry cardinals hat with RA at bottom of escutcheon; some worming in blank gutter margin of title and the first few leaves (no loss); some minor toning, but generally a fresh copy, excellent.

We are grateful to Seth Fagen and Prof. Nick Wilding of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies (Columbia University) for the following description of the Cronica and its provenance:

The Cronica and the Vite

The manuscript appears to be the sole witness for the text in Baldi’s own hand, and most likely served as the basis for the printed edition, which like many of Baldi’s works, was only published posthumously (1707). A polymath of remarkable range who left a large corpus of writings, Baldi (1553-1617) was a serious mathematician and translator of mathematical works; he studied in Urbino with Federico Commandino and Guidobaldo del Monte (see previous post).
 
The printer’s motive for publishing the Cronica in 1707 was to prepare an audience for the more detailed – if less inclusive – two volume Vite [Lives] which never followed.  Rediscovered only in 1972, the voluminous Lives has meant that the less detailed Cronica has received little attention.  But as the printer Monticelli points out, rather than being merely an abridgment of the larger project, the Cronica, with 366 biographical entries, is over half again as large as the Vite and represents a different but related project for the construction of a history of mathematics.
 
Both the manuscript and printed version of the Cronica contain Baldi’s own description of the project: 


“For many mathematicians I have found so much written material that I have been able to piece together their Lives; for others who have had less luck I have not been able to gather together enough to let me write them up in full.  As both groups are my concern, I have put together the present Chronicle, in which I briefly touch on the times in which they flourished and the things they wrote…. May the present narrative be read by those who take pleasure in these studies, which, if I am not mistaken, will not be at all displeasing for its novelty.”

Crescimbeni described the work’s genesis in his biographical notice on Baldi, written about 1704, just before the publication of the Cronica:

“After finishing the Vite he noted that even before Thales there were mathematicians, whose lives could not be written due to the loss of sources, but whose names survived and were worth recalling.  Moreover, he thought that the vastness of the Vite he had written might make reading the work a little unwieldly and cumbersome, and lastly that after Clavius others had lived who were worth mentioning, so after a while he was persuaded to make a succinct chronology of these same Professors, starting with Euphorbus instead of Thales, and ending with Guidobaldo de’ Marchesi del Monte…. He certainly intended such a useful and beautiful work for the press, as we see both volumes [of the Vite] along with the Cronica carefully transcribed in his own hand, but, whether distracted by something else, or prevented by death, he left them unprinted.”

That the Cronica was Baldi’s own work, rather than an abridgment by later readers or printers is attested by Marcantonio Vergilii Battiferri who mentioned in his funeral oration for Baldi (1617) a manuscript he called ‘Cronology of dates and brief Eulogies [of all the mathematicians up to our own day].’  Again in 1621, we find the Cronica distinguished from the project of the Vite: in the first manuscript catalogue of Baldi’s own writings, drawn up by Fabrizio Scarloncino and published in his edition of Baldi’s In Mechanica Aristotelis Problemata Exercitationes, the one-volume Epitome is listed separately from the two-volume Lives.

Provenance

The present manuscript of the Cronica was sought out by the members of the Royal Society of London in the 1670s as being of especial interest.  The French astronomer Adrien Auzout (1622 – 1691) almost succeeded in buying the manuscript for the Society’s secretary Henry Oldenburg in 1673, stressing that the version he had seen was ‘the original in the hand of Baldus.’ 
 
It seems that when the work was printed in 1707, it was from the present autograph copy, or one  derived from it: there are occasional additions to the main body of the text (in one case consisting of an entire biographical entry) that correspond precisely to the printed version.  There is one correction in a hand that is not Baldi’s, of Commandino’s mother’s surname; this correction is also found in the printed text.
 
Most of Baldi’s manuscripts were acquired shortly after his death by the Albani Library, founded by Orazio Albani and consolidated by his grandson Gianfrancesco, who became Pope Clement XI in 1700. It is possible that the present manuscript left the Albani collection at the time of its printing and never returned, for while it bears the binding shelfmark (no. 631) of the Albani library, and is cited in Crescimbeni’s early  eighteenth century Life of Baldi as being in Clement’s XI’s library, it did not pass with the other Albani Baldi manuscripts into the Boncompagni collection when that collector purchased them in 1857/8. 
 
The two Boncompagni manuscript catalogs mention a manuscript of the Cronica, and that of 1892 even refers to the Albani shelfmark, but both entries make it clear that they are referring to a copy of this manuscript, probably made in the mid-seventeenth century by Orazio Albani.  Boncompagni’s Baldi collection, including this copy and both the originals as well as copies of the Vite, were bought by Luigi Celli in 1898 and bequeathed by him in 1939 to the Istituto della Carita Antonio Rosmini in Rome, where they were rediscovered independently in 1972 by Bronislaw Biliński and Paul Rose.  Biliński makes it clear that the manuscript of the Cronica now in Rome (ms 68), which corresponds precisely to ms 68 of the 1892 Boncompagni catalogue, is a seventeenth-century copy (Rose is incorrect in claiming that it is the original).  A comparison of these manuscripts would clarify the work’s printing history. The work was later reprinted along with other printed works as Versi e Prose Scelte di Bernardino Baldi (Firenze, Le Monnier, 1859).
 
Just what happened to the autograph manuscript between its printing and the present day is unknown.  As yet unidentified shelfmarks show that it might well have travelled for part of its life alongside the newly discovered Novae Gnomices Libri Quinque, and De Firmamento et aquis opusculum, which were also in the Albani library but did not enter the Boncompagni collection.  Further research is required to establish its later provenance. 

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We thank Antonio Becchi, a historian of Bernardino Baldi, for his further comment on the dispersion of the Baldi manuscripts:

Between 1797-1799, part of the Albani collection was requisitioned by
Napoleon’s experts (great experts, they chose the best, very carefully) and was moved to France. Some of these manuscripts (also Baldi’s manuscripts) are now in the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris) and in the Library of the École de Médecine in Montpellier. Some years later (beginning of the 19th century) another part went to Naples and is now there in the Biblioteca Nazionale. Other manuscripts – probably some of the most interesting ones – were purchased by the German government (advised by Theodor Mommsen) in 1862 and were then sent to Berlin, through Hamburg. Unfortunately the ship carrying the 1,800 manuscripts of the Albani Collection never reached its destination, but sank in the ocean in August 1863. We don’t even have a catalogue of these manuscripts. Other manuscripts were, at beginning of the 18th century, in the library of the lawyer Alessandro Rivani who then donated them to the Colombaria Library (Florence). They were lost in the night between the 3rd
and 4th of August 1944 when the building was set fire by the Germans. Other manuscripts were sold privately from the heirs of the Albani family – it is impossible to know exactly what and when. In 1928 there was the last big sale: 10,000 printed books and several manuscripts of the Albani Collection went to the Catholic University of America (Washington D.C.), where they still are.

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Sources:

• Baldi, Bernardino, Cronica de Matematici overo Epitome dell’Istoria delle Vite Loro (Angelo Antonio Monticelli, Urbino, 1707)
• Baldi, Bernardino, Le Vite de’ Matematici (edizione annotata e commentata della parte medievale e rinascimentale, a cura di Elio Nenci, Francoangeli, Milano, 1998)
• Serrai, Alfredo, Bernardino Baldi – La vita, le opera, (La biblioteca Milano, Edizioni Sylvestre Bonnard, 2002)
• Crescimbeni, Giovan Mario, La vita di Bernardino Baldi Abate di Guastalla (a cura di Ilaria Filograsso, Quattroventi, Urbino, 2001)
• Paul L. Rose, The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics: Studies of Humanists and Mathematicians from Petrarch to Galileo (Geneva, Droz, 1975), esp. 243-79.
• Biliński, Bronislaw, Prolegomena alle Vite dei Matematici di Bernardino Baldi (1587 – 1596) (Wroclaw, 1977)
• Menso Folkerts and Ron B. Thomson, “Boncompagni Manuscripts: Present Shelfmarks,” Beta Version 1.4 (October 2010)

History of Science Collections Online Galleries:

• Bernardino Baldi, Novae Gnomices (ca. 1592)
• Bernardino Baldi, Cronica (ca. 1596)

Bernardino Baldi (1553-1617), a celebrated Italian polymath, is known to have written a treatise on sun dials and timekeeping. However, this treatise was never published and, since 1783, it has been considered lost. Now we are happy to announce that it has been recently acquired by the History of Science Collections, digitized in high resolution, and made available for study in the Collections’ Online Galleries.

Antonio Becchi, a Bernardino Baldi historian at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, sent us the following note on receiving news of this acquisition:

As you probably know, almost the entire scientific community still thinks that the manuscript of the Novae gnomonices libri quinque is lost. You have one of the most wanted of Baldi’s writings. In the next weeks and years everyone interested in Baldi and in the Albani Collection will put the Library of the University of Oklahoma on his personal map of the most important libraries in the world. Congratulations! And my colleagues will soon discover that the importance of your Library is not only dependent on this missing jewel.

Here is a description of the manuscript itself:

Novae Gnomonices Libri Quinque (1590-92). Guastalla, 26 April 1592. Manuscript written on paper in ink in a cursive hand, c. 30 lines per page. Small folio [28 x 18.5 cm](183) ff., including c. 250 geometrical diagrams and more finished drawings of instruments.

The first 6 leaves are a self-contained quire on the theory of the sphere tipped-in; it is unclear whether they are integral or not. Bound in 18th-century quarter calf and paper boards stained red, with raised bands on spine gilt with alternating star and honeycomb (?) tools. Spine of binding wormed. Several paste-on cancels, numerous ratures with interlinear or marginal corrections in the same hand. Some minor water staining in gutter of scattered leaves; some inconsequential foxing on a few others. Generally a fresh, unsophisticated copy.

Mordechai Feingold, a distinguished historian of science at the California Institute of Technology, commented on this manuscript after its discovery:

Important unpublished autograph manuscript on dialing, evidently unique and extensively illustrated. A long-lost treatise that provides, for the first time, incontrovertible evidence of Baldi’s considerable mathematical proficiency, hitherto inferred mainly from his Lives of the Mathematicians and commentary on Aristotle’s Mechanica. Rose refers to the present manuscript as one of only two original mathematical works by Baldi — in distinction to his translations or his famous history of mathematics. Writing in 1975, Rose considered both manuscripts “lost” (Italian Renaissance of Mathematics, p. 245 & n. 25). The only reference he gives for the manuscript is its listing in Ireneo Affò’s life of Baldi, where the latter claims to have seen it (Vita di Monsignore Bernardino Baldi da Urbino, primo Abate di Guastalla, nella Vita e nella Opere. Parma, 1783, pp. 196, 203). Rose was an extremely thorough scholar, and his mastery of the literature on 16th-century mathematicians from their own time until the date he published his work was exemplary. Given the absence of any record of the manuscript since Affò, we infer that no one has seen the present manuscript since 1783. Its rediscovery offers an important new document for our knowledge of Italian mathematics and precision instruments during the first third of Galileo’s career.

Baldi acquired his knowledge of mathematics and mechanics during the 1570s through private study in his native town of Urbino with Federico Commandino and, following the latter’s death in 1575, with Guidobaldo del Monte [the History of Science Collections hold important works by both Commandino and Guidobaldo del Monte]. It was probably owing to del Monte’s recommendation that Baldi was appointed in 1580 mathematics tutor to Ferrando Gonzaga, lord of Guastalla, who rewarded Baldi six years later with the abbacy of Guastalla. However, Baldi’s determination to assert the ecclesiastical rights of the abbey embroiled him in bitter controversy with the magistrate and inhabitants of Guastalla — at one point Baldi even excommunicated the entire town! —thereby souring Baldi’s relations with Gonzaga himself. He ultimately resigned in 1592.

Against such a volatile backdrop the composition of the Novae Gnomonices took place. Baldi may have been a reluctant cleric. He took holy orders only shortly before he was made an abbot in 1586, and it appears that his scholarly temper was somewhat at odds with a priestly station. Be this as it may, the half decade preceding his resignation was perhaps the most productive of his career, in no small part owing to his determined effort to attract new patrons via his writings. In addition to composing a considerable number of the mathematicians’ Lives, Baldi published in 1589 an Italian translation of Hero of Alexandria’s Automata, which he dedicated to the Venetian Jacomo Contarini — a renowned devotee of practical and theoretical mathematics — in a bid for patronage and support.

The following year Baldi gathered together his more literary efforts and published them as Versi e Prose. The Gnomonices came next. As was his custom, Baldi dated each of the five books upon completion, allowing us to follow his progress: Book I is dated 20 January 1590; Book II was ready on 2 February; Book III on 22 February; and Book IV on 5 October. The fifth book took longer and was completed on 26 April 1592.

The manuscript is dedicated to Francesco Maria della Rovere II, Duke of Urbino (1548-1631), who in 1626 would consign the duchy he had governed for half a century to Pope Urban VIII. Also a student of Commandino, Francesco Maria developed a strong passion for the mathematical sciences, and to practical mathematics in particular, becoming one of the most important patrons of Italian science in the second half of the sixteenth century. Among the books dedicated to him were Commandino’s celebrated translation of Euclid’s Elementorum libri XV (1572), Francisco Maurolico’s Opuscula mathematica (1575), and Guidobaldo del Monte’s Liber mechanicorum (1577). Later, he befriended Galileo. Such interests, along with the mutual ties to Urbino and to Commandino, made the duke a natural recipient of Baldi’s treatise. The gambit paid off, if not immediately. By 1601 Baldi had become historiographer to the duke, a position he held until his death.

The manuscript throws considerable light on Baldi’s mathematical prowess. By 1590 the post-medieval tradition of treatises on dialing was six decades old. Initiated in Germany with Sebastian Münster’s predominantly practical manual Composito Horologiorum (1531) — devoid of any mathematical proofs for the constructions — it gathered strength with the far more considerable Gnomonice of Andreas Schöner (1562). In Italy, the lead was taken by Giovanni Battista Vimercato, whose Dialogo della Descrittione Teorica et Pratica de gli Horologi Solari enjoyed at least nine editions between 1557-1587. Commandino himself enriched the genre with his 1562 edition of a medieval Latin translation of Ptolemy’s Analemma, to which he appended his own Liber de Horologiorum descriptione. Twelve years later, Giovan Battista Benedetti published the far more technical De Gnomonum umbrarumq[ue] solarium usu liber, which attempted to offer a universal method for dialing. Finally, in 1581 there appeared the ultimate word on the subject, Christoph Clavius’s mammoth folio volume Gnomonices libri octo, which offered a comprehensive survey of the construction and use of virtually every known dial, complete with mathematical demonstrations [OU Clavius holdings].

Baldi acknowledged Clavius in his dedication, and aimed to offer a more intelligible — not comprehensive — treatment of the subject. Also flaunted in the dedication was the same purposefulness that had animated much of the scientific work of Commandino and Baldi himself, namely the restitution of the mathematical sciences to their previous glory, and in this case with the science of dialing. The text itself includes a systematic treatment of the theory and practice of dialing, from the determination of meridian lines to the principles of projection onto any plane. Baldi’s treatise provides ample testimony of his full mastery of the principles of construction and demonstration of most sundials. He treats both altitude and direction dials, explicating the mathematical principles underlying construction on flat and curved surfaces, and parades the design (in Book V) of fine equinoctial and universal dials. Baldi exhibits good command of conic sections as well as graphic projection, and the numerous expertly drawn diagrams that accompany the text substantiate contemporary accounts that it was he who supplied the diagrams for all of Commandino’s later works.

Only a detailed study of the Novae Gnomonices, including a close comparison with Clavius’ Gnomonices, will establish the precise contribution of Baldi to dialing. What cannot be doubted is that the manuscript is a significant mathematical treatise by one of the more distinguished practitioners of Italian renaissance mathematics.

 
Sources:

• Paul L. Rose, The Italian Renaissance of Mathematics: Studies of Humanists and Mathematicians from Petrarch to Galileo (Geneva, 1975), esp. 243-79;
• A. J. Turner, “Dialing in the Time of Giovan Battista Benedetti,” in Cultura, scienza e tecniche nella Venezia del cinquecento. Atti del convegno internazionale di studio Giovan Battista Benedetti e il suo tempo (Venice, 1987), 311-20;
• A. J. Turner, “Sun-dials: History and Classifications,” History of Science 27 (1989), 303-18 (both reprinted in A. J. Turner, On Time and Measurement: Studies in the History of Horology and Fine Technology (Aldershot,1993).
• John L. Heilbron, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories (Harvard University Press, 2001).

View the entire manuscript: Bernardino Baldi, Novae Gnomonices, in the Collections’ Online Galleries.