Alessandro Piccolomini and the Background to his Astronomical Treatises

In 1960, Florindo Cerreta published what remains the definitive intellectual biography of Alessandro Piccolomini’s life and works, describing him in the title as a letterato e filosofo senese del cinquecento (‘a sixteenth-century Sienese man of letters and philosopher’). Cerreta introduced his subject by quoting two highly laudatory passages that had appeared in a previous biography, published by Giuseppe Fabiani in 1759. Whereas Cerreta is quick to point out that many modern readers might dismiss such descriptions as ‘excessive rhetorical exaggerations’ (smaccata esagerazione retorica), in the case of Alessandro Piccolomini, such characterisations are not only credible, but possibly modest—given that he was not only the author of over thirty published works, but that the range of his interests was so broad and profound that he could be classified equally as a philosopher, mathematician, orator, poet and playwright. And yet, impressive as this tally of proficiencies might be, Cerreta’s list actually does scant justice to his subject’s accomplishments to which one might also add: translator and expositor of both Greek and Latin texts; a patriot and ardent promoter of the Tuscan language; a facilitator of learning for both men and women who have not had the benefit of a classical, academic education and the author of studies on such various scientific topics as topography, meteors, rainbows, calendar reform and, of course, cosmology and astronomy.