Lorenzo Magalotti

Lorenzo Magalotti (24 October 1637 – 2 March 1712) was an Italian philosopher, author, diplomat and poet.

Magalotti was born in Rome into an aristocratic family, the son of Ottavio Magalotti, Prefect of the Pontifical Mail: his uncle Lorenzo Magalotti was a member of the Roman Curia. His cousin Filippo was rector at University of Pisa. The Jesuit Magalotti became the secretary of the Accademia del cimento and a ''gazetteer of the sciences''.

Magalotti started off as one of the most ardent followers of Galileo Galilei but was increasingly distressed by the personal rivalries among the individual members, which constantly undermined the academy's dedication to collective research. Gradually, Magalotti lost interest in science. He became a traveller, an ambassador, and ended up as a poet. He translated ''Paradise Lost'' by John Milton, and ''Cyder'' by John Philips into Italian.

Life

Magalotti received four years of education at the Collegio Romano and three years at the University of Pisa. He studied law and medicine, but changed to mathematics under Vincenzo Viviani. On 19 June 1657 the Cimento was founded by a group of philosophers and amateurs, pupils of Galilei, who saw observation as their task. They studied the works of Plato, Democritus, Aristotle, Heinsius, Robert Boyle and Pierre Gassendi. The astronomers of the Cimento succeeded in providing the first sustained confirmation of Christiaan Huygens's discoveries: Saturn's rings.

On 20 May 1660, Lorenzo Magalotti had replaced Segni, and a few years later he wrote the only publication of the academy, the Saggi di naturali Esperienze ("Essays on Natural Experiments"). Alessandro Marchetti, Marcello Malpighi, an anatomist, and Antonio Vallisneri, a physician, Vincenzo da Filicaja, Benedetto Menzini, both poets, Francesco Redi, a "microbiologist", Viviani, Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, a physicist, and Carlo Renaldini, an astronomer regularly attended its meetings. These were usually held in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. Members performed numerous experiments, in the fields of thermometry, barometry, pneumatics, the velocity of sound and light, phosphorescence, magnetism, amber and other electrical bodies, the freezing of water, etc.

Medicine was, without doubt, the talked-about subject of the day. The young Danish anatomist Niels Stensen, better known as Steno, arrived from Copenhagen by way of Leiden and Paris early in 1666. The Norman astronomer Adrien Auzout, inventor of a device for measuring planetary diameters, arrived in 1668, fresh from a quarrel with Jean-Baptiste Colbert and armed with a letter from Magalotti, who by then had become Leopoldo's main talent scout abroad.Conchrane, E. (1973), p. 248.

Magalotti knew as well as anyone that a scientifically valid explanation of the comet of 1664 could have made an important contribution to an explanation of the whole Solar System. But instead of attempting one, he amused himself with the obviously ridiculous thesis that the tail of the comet was an optical illusion. As soon as he saw Cassini's much more penetrating and much better-informed explanation, he admitted that he ''cared no more for comets than for rainbows.'' As early as 1664 he had been appointed to the commission charged with supervising the decoration of Palazzo Pitti and from then on, until his death he made a point of getting to know all the practising artists of the city. In 1667 Magalotti had made a pilgrimage to the '' blessed bones of the divine poet'' at Ravenna. Magalotti had met Sir John Finch and Henry Neville, he had improved his English and with his boyhood friend Paolo Falconieri, an architect, he made plans to visit Northern Europe.

Travelling to the Netherlands

The two companions left in mid-July, crossed the Alps, and arrived in Augsburg in August. By mid-October they were wandering around in the Hague and visited Heinsius, Isaac Vossius, and Jacob Gronovius. On 12 November 1667 Magalotti arrived in Utrecht to visit Johann Georg Graevius. In the meantime Cosimo III de' Medici went on his grand tour. The Grand Duke travelled in a group of 18 people and 14 carriages, accompanied by six cooks and his secretary Appolonio Bassetti. On 28 October 1667, they had arrived in Tyrol, travelled to Mainz to visit the prince-elector, and set direction down the Rhine. On 19 December they arrived in Amsterdam. On his first day he saw the Admiralty of Amsterdam and the warehouses and wharves of the Dutch East India Company. Cosimo planned to start an East India Company from Livorno. The duke took his lodgings in a house at Keizersgracht, keen on keeping a private life, living with the Tuscan merchant and slave-trader Francisco Ferroni.

While it is difficult to make out who went where with whom, and supposedly, the somewhat shy, pious, and taciturn Cosimo never went somewhere without company, an excerpt of the diary of Cosimo's visits is following here.

A patron of the arts, Cosimo visited fifteen painters over a four-month period: the Leiden painters Gerard Dou and Frans van Mieris the Elder; Ludolf Bakhuizen