2 The Context

Guidobaldo del Monte was a central figure of early modern science, he was pivotal for the history of mechanics in a way that has been obscured by the later glorious achievements of Galileo and Newton.¹ His work on mechanics embodies the High Renaissance of science, preceding the age of the Scientific Revolution. Unlike the history of art, the history of science associates such a chronology with an image of progress according to which one achievement is just a stepping stone towards the next. With such a perspective, one can easily lose sight, however, of the historical constellation that made a particular scientific achievement possible in the first place. In Guidobaldo's case this constellation may indeed be characterized by labelling him a Renaissance scientist. He worked in a time in which the humanistic recovery of the scientific knowledge of classical antiquity had recently culminated in the work of his mentor Federico Commandino. Against this background, Guidobaldo attempted a new synthesis, building on the fragmentary heritage of the ancients. His intention was to continue their endeavor, revitalizing their original spirit while distancing himself from medieval aberrations and from those contemporaries who based their own work on medieval predecessors such Tartaglia², who in turn relied on the work of Jordanus³.

Guidobaldo aimed at more than a mere revival of antiquity focusing on translations, paraphrases and commentaries of the recovered ancient sources. He was not interested in technical accounts that merely described ancient or contemporary engineering feats. Instead he attempted to develop a deductive, explanatory treatment of the technical knowledge of mechanics following the model of Euclid and Archimedes⁴. Yet, in contrast to the generation of scientists following him, for instance Benedetti⁵ and Galileo, he refrained from criticism of the ancient authors, even when they offered mutually contradictory approaches and results. Instead he made every effort to reconcile such conflicting traditions and was ready to sacrifice entire domains of knowledge in this synthetic enterprise if they seemed difficult to incorporate, for example, Aristotelian physics and, in particular, the Aristotelian theory of motion. In contrast to his followers, Guidobaldo excluded, at least in his published work on mechanics, the consideration of challenging objects, that is, of objects emerging from contemporary technology and representing intellectual challenges for contemporary physical theory, such as artillery, the pendulum, air pumps, the stability of matter, the spring, etc.

Yet Guidobaldo lived in a world that would be inconceivable without an emergence of novelty and proliferation of knowledge, which reflects the dynamics of the early modern economy. This was a world in which commercial capital played an ever larger role and shattered the foundations of traditional feudal organization; it was a fragmented world of competing urban centers and feudal courts. In this world, classical antiquity served as an alternative model for shaping individual lives and collective culture in a way that mastered the challenges of society and nature. Thus Renaissance culture, including science, was from its inception burdened with the dilemma of relying, on one hand, on the image of an ideally stable world to be emulated, and on the other, of coping with a rapid expansion of economy, technology and knowledge, without any historical precedent. Accordingly, also Guidobaldo's classicist synthesis of mechanical knowledge could only enjoy transient success and was quickly superseded by the new sciences of the 17th century. Nevertheless, it offered a crucial point of reference for future scholars; until then one could proceed along the tracks laid out by the ancients, but no further. What came after Guidobaldo was no longer Renaissance, it had to be genuinely new, a veritable scientific revolution.

But even Guidobaldo's revival of ancient mechanics was marked by a context significantly different from that of antiquity. Guidobaldo himself was not just an intellectual, he was a military and a practical man, an engineer-scientist⁶ comparable in this respect to Archimedes. But, in the early modern period, the numbers of such engineer-scientists had significantly increased, with possibly more of them around than had ever lived in antiquity. New means of communication such as paper and print had profoundly changed the conditions for the generation and dissemination of knowledge. Barriers between the theoretical knowledge of scholars at the universities and the practical knowledge of artisans were coming down. Large-scale technological endeavors such as the construction of cathedrals and fortresses, ship-building, hydraulics and artillery had become concerns that were closely intertwined with politics and the economy.

This situation is also reflected in the contemporary literature involving mechanical knowledge.⁷ Manuscripts of architects and artists containing drawings of machines illustrate the extent to which contemporary technical knowledge had become a subject of public interest as well as of courtly and urban patronage. Examples of such manuscripts are those by Taccola⁸, by Francesco di Giorgio Martini⁹, and by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger¹⁰. Taccola finished his manuscripts around 1450.¹¹ Francesco di Giorgio Martini worked with Taccola in the Studio in Siena and copied some of his drawings,¹² probably some time after Taccola's death around 1453,¹³ and later composed his own comprehensive work with machine drawings.¹⁴ This was completed around 1490.¹⁵ The manuscripts by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger probably date to the early 16th century.¹⁶ This tradition was continued by printed books on machines such as those by Ceredi¹⁷ published in 1567,¹⁸ and Zonca¹⁹ published in 1607.²⁰

The parallel recovery of ancient knowledge, as mentioned, first took the form of translations, paraphrases and commentaries of ancient sources. Editions and reworkings of the Aristotelian Problemata mechanica²¹, in particular by Fausto²², Tomeo²³, Piccolomini²⁴ and Monantheuil²⁵ played a crucial role. This text served both as a link between the new practical knowledge of the time and ancient theoretical principles, but also as an intermediate between the discursive style of Aristotelian natural philosophy and the deductive style of Euclid and Archimedes. As we have also mentioned, Commandino contributed translations of Euclid, Archimedes and Pappus, while Tartaglia made the works of Jordanus available to his contemporaries. All in all, the transmitted ancient knowledge was diverse and fragmentary in character. Not even Archimedes' book on the balance²⁶ was extant, which would have been of key interest to early modern engineer-scientists, nor Heron's Mechanics which survived as an Arabic version found only in the 19th century.²⁷

Early modern scholars seeking to cope with this diverse heritage were thus confronted with the uncomfortable alternative of being either comprehensive as far as the extension of knowledge was concerned or systematic in its treatment.²⁸ A typical response to this dilemma was to compose a collection of problems, sometimes in the form of dialogue or correspondence with patrons or colleagues. To stress systematicity, many authors chose to arrange at least some of their problems according to the Aristotelian Problemata mechanica, as was done by Tartaglia in Quesiti²⁹, Benedetti in Diversarum speculationum³⁰, Maurolico³¹ in Problemata mechanica³² and Baldi in Exercitationes³³. Other collections of treatments of mechanical problems circulated in manuscript form, as was probably the case with Leonardo's³⁴ manuscripts.

Guidobaldo's book on mechanics pioneered the attempts to give a systematic account of mechanical knowledge following the model of Euclid and Archimedes. In order to achieve this goal he used the classification of simple machines ascribed to Heron and transmitted by Pappus. As no such systematic treatment of mechanics from antiquity was extant, Guidobaldo's book may be considered to represent the autonomous continuation of the Greek tradition. It integrates Archimedian techniques with notions such as the concept of center of gravity – the Aristotelian framework in which weight is always to be referred to the center of the earth, the reduction according to Heron and Pappus of complex to simple machines, as well as the reduction of some machines to balance and lever as in the Aristotelian Problemata mechanica. The model that Guidobaldo established with his treatise on mechanics was later followed by Stelliola³⁵ and Galileo³⁶, while Stevin's³⁷ book on mechanics³⁸ differs considerably from this model and may be considered as an independent achievement.³⁹

Apart from the immediate follow-ups to Guidobaldo's book, among which there was also a German adaptation⁴⁰, Guidobaldo's book inspired a long tradition of textbooks on mechanics that were organized in a similar fashion and written in many European languages for a period that extended into the Scientific Revolution and beyond.

Footnotes