Baldi, Bernardino

(b. Urbino, Irly, 5 June 1553; d. Urbino. 10 October 1617), mechanics.

After a classical education by private tutors at Urbino, Baldi studied mathematics with Guido Ubaldo del Monte, under Federico Commandino, beginning about 1570. At Commandino’s suggestion he translated the Automata of Hero of Alexandria into Italian, but left it unpublished until 1589. He also translated the Phenomena of Aratus of Soli and wrote didactic poems on the invention of artillery and the nautical compass, but did not publish them. In 1573 he enrolled at the University of Padua, and when it was closed shortly afterward because of plague, Baldi returned to Urbino. He was with Commandino during the latter’s final illness in 1575, and obtained from him an account of his life. Baldi’s studies at Padua centered on philology and literature, but he obtained no degree.

In 1580 Baldi went to Mantua in the service of Ferrante II Gonzaga, who in 1585 secured him the post of abbot of Guastalla. He then put in order his biographies of some 200 mathematicians, a work conceived during the writing of Commandino’s biography and completed in 1588–1589. About that time he also wrote his principal contribution to physics, a commentary on the pseudo–Aristotelian Questions of Mechanics posthumously published in 1621. In 1589 he published his translation of Hero’s Automata, prefaced by a history of mechanics.

Baldi visited Urbino in 1601 to compile materials for a life of Federico di Montefeltro, and in 1609 he resigned his abbacy to enter the service of the duke of Urbino as historian and biographer, remaining there until his death. A vast work on geography on which he worked in his later years remains unpublished, although many of his poetic and literary compositions were printed in his lifetime. His final scientific contribution was a translation of Hero’s Belopoeica into Latin, accompanied by the Greek text and by Baldi’s Latin Life of Hero (1616). Brief extracts from his lives of the mathematicians were published in 1707, and about forty of those biographies have since been published in full. Most of the work, however, remains in manuscript.

Except for that of Henri de Monantheuil, with which Baldi was certainly unacquainted, Baldi’s commentary on the Questions of Mechanics was the most important work of its kind to appear up to that time. He was probably influenced in his ideas on the continuance of motion by the earlier commentary of Alessandro Piccolomini. His account of dynamic equilibrium in spinning tops was superior to that of G. B. Benedetti, with whose principal work he appears to have been unfamiliar. The most significant aspect of Baldi’s approach to mechanics lay in the development and application of the concept of centers of gravity, particularly with regard to stable and unstable equilibrium. It was the opinion of Pierre Duhem that Baldi drew his chief ideas from manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci. Duhem accepted the year 1582 for the original composition of Baldi’s commentary, as given by Baldi’s first biographer. That date is, however, inconsistent with passages in Baldi’s own preface and in the text of the work, which imply the year 1589. The latter year is also supported by textual indications that Baldi’s principal inspiration was drawn from Commandino’s translation of Pappus and from Guido Ubaldo’s commentary on the Plane Equilibrium of Archimedes, both of which were published in 1588. The influence of Baldi’s work was doubtless diminished by its delay in publication until after the Archimedean ideal had largely supplanted the Aristotelian among students of mechanics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. An essentially complete bibliography of Baldi’s published works is given in Pierre Duhem, Études sur Léondard de Vinci, 1 (Paris, 1906; repr. 1955), 93–99; those of scientific interest are Di Herone Alessandrino de gli automati... (Venice, 1589; repr. 1601); Scamilli impares Vitruviani... (Augsburg, 1612); De Vitruvianorum verborum significatione... (Augsburg, 1612); Heronis Ctesibii Belopoeeca... et... Heronis vita... (Augsburg, 1616); In machanica Aristotelis problemata exercitationes... (Mainz, 1621); Cronica de’ matematici... (Urbino, 1707); “Vita di Federigo Commandino,” in Gironale di letterati de’Italia, 19 (1714), 140 ff.; “Vite inedite di matematici italiani,” in Bollettino di bibliograia e di storia delle scienze, 19 (1886), 335–640; 20 (1887), 197–308; and L’invenzione del bossolo da navigare, G. Canerazzi, ed. (Leghorn, 1901).

II. Secondary Literature. Principal biographical sources are Fabritio Scharloncini, De vita et scriptis Bernardini Baldi Urhinatis, prefaced to Baldi’s In mechanica Aristotelis...; Ireneo Affö, Vita di Bernardino Baldi (Parma, 1783); and R. Amaturo, “Bernardino Baldi,” in Dizionaio biografrco degli Italiani, V (Rome, 1963), 461–464. For Baldi’s scientific work and its influence, see Duhem, op. cit., pp. 89–156; for his relation to the central Italian mathematicians, see S. Drake and I. E. Drabkin, Mechanics in Sixteenth–Century Italy (Madison, Wis., 1968).

Stillman Drake