Astronomy. BIANCANI. Sphaera mundi seu Cosmographia.

McColley: “In 1620 there appeared an important treatise on astronomy which consistently and repeatedly used the word telescope. This was the Sphaera mundi of Josephus Blancanus, or Giuseppe Biancani … [He] was the first to employ exclusively and repeatedly the term ‘telescope’ in an extended treatise. More importantly, however, is the fact that his example and influence undoubtedly hastened general acceptance and use of the term”.

Blackwell: “In present-day literature [Biancani] is sometimes depicted as an opponent of Galileo and the new science, but his exchanges in the unpublished sources with several Jesuit censors over his two main books show that quite the opposite was the case. These documents clearly reveal a split within the Jesuits at that time between the philosophers of orthodox Aristotelian persuasion and a group of mathematicians and astronomers, including Biancani, who advocated the autonomy of astronomy and mathematics and a more quantitative and descriptive approach, which resulted in some quite anti-Aristotelian views. Thus although he disputed some of Galileo’s calculations, Biancani agreed that the surface of the Moon was mountainous and not a smooth sphere; he also maintained that the heavens were composed of fluid matter, not solid spheres, another anti-Aristotelian view”. 

La terza appendice del libro, Echometria, è dedicata allo studio dell’acustica. Barbieri: “Giuseppe Biancani can be considered as the founder of geometrical acoustics (1620), a theory that – from the time of Athanasius Kircher until at least the end of the 18thcentury – was traditionally used to explain how speaking- and hearing-trumpets worked”. Infine, le pagine 387-414 contengono un’interessante bibliografia dei libri di matematica, che includono astronomia, fisica, prospettiva, musica, meccanica.