Original scientific paper
Giovanni Battista Riccioli on Marin Getaldić’s Promotus Archimedes
Ivica Martinović
orcid.org/0000-0003-0424-1242
; Dubrovnik, Hrvatska
Abstract
In a fairly short period (1651–1665), the hydrostatic treatise Promotus Archimedes (1603) by Marin Getaldić witnessed notable reception in the works of the three Jesuit polymaths: Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Kaspar Schott, and Athanasius Kircher. Giovanni Battista Riccioli was the first of the mentioned three Jesuit scholars to draw attention to Getaldić’s Promotus Archimedes in his astronomic synthesis Almagestum novum (1651), where in the fifth chapter of the second book »De sphaera elementari et praecipue de globo terraqueo« together he expounded Aristotle’s philosophemes on the motion of elements and Archimedes’s hydrostatics. In his very first mention of Getaldić, the scholar from Ferrara included the Ragusan scholar among the three key interpreters and successors of Archimedes’s pioneering work in hydrostatics – alongside Tartaglia and Galileo. The methodology of determining the weights of different metals and liquids »with the aid of a single body whose weight is previously known« Riccioli ascribed to the three measurers of relative weights, to Tartaglia, Villalpando, and Getaldić, yet described Getaldić’s methodology which significantly departed from those of Tartaglia and Villalpando, moreover, it surpasses them in terms of scientific rigour. In the table enclosed, Riccioli omitted Tartaglia’s data, while Getaldić’s data for the relative weights of seven metals and five liquids he compared to Villalpando’s results published in Apparatus urbis et templi Hierosolymitani (1604). Lastly, Riccioli leans on Getaldić only while referring to the third and fourth table in Promotus Archimedes, in which the Ragusan calculated the relationship between the diameter and the weight of a ball for six metals. In addition, Riccioli has left a valuable testimony on the earliest reception of Getaldić’s length of the ancient Roman foot among the professors of mathematics at the Collegium Romanum: in his treatise, Getaldić printed the length of “one half of the ancient Roman foot” (dimidium pedis Romani antiqui); Getaldić’s length was preserved on a scheda in Grienberger’s legacy, of which Kircher informed Riccioli in a letter. Thus owing to Riccioli’s astronomical master-piece, Getaldić’s printed measure of Roman foot, though in the shadow of Villalpando’s metrological chapters, has become a reference point in the scientific history of the Roman linear unit. This at the same time has disclosed a channel of scientific communication leading from Getaldić through Grienberger and Kircher to Riccioli. The Frankfurt pseudo-edition of Riccioli’s Almagestum novum from 1653 does not differ from the 1651 Bologna edition in terms of the text, but it certainly contributed to the accessibility of Getaldić’s methodology of measuring and the data of relative weights at the Frankfurt Book Fair, in the German lands, and in the north of Europe.
Keywords
Marin Getaldić/Marinus Ghetaldus; Archimedes; Vitruvius; Giovanni Battista Riccioli/Ioannes Baptista Ricciolus; Federico Commandino/Federicus Commandinus; Niccolò Tartaglia/Nicolaus Tartalea; Juan Bautista Villalpando/Ioannes Baptista Villalpandus; 17th-century mathematics; 17th-century hydrostatics; Roman metrology; 17th-century methodology; 17th-century philosophy of science; hydrostatic balance; tables of relative weights; problem of Hiero’s golden votive wreath; determining of gold purity
Hrčak ID:
254218
URI
Publication date:
25.6.2019.
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