Gravitating towards Stability: Guidobaldo's Aristotelian-Archimedean Synthesis

Abstract

Until recently, Guidobaldo del Monte (1545–1607) was treated mainly as a transitional figure in the history of science. His contributions to the revival of the ancient science of mechanics were often praised, whilst his inability to see beyond the ancients was much deplored. Whereas Pierre Duhem’s derisory description of Guidobaldo’s œuvre as “sometimes in error, always mediocre” found its direct echo in the work of the French historians of science Pierre Costabel and Rene Dugas, Anglo-Saxon historians of science tended to be somewhat more positive in their judgement. Yet both Paul Lawrence Rose and Stillman Drake, to name but two of the most prominent, did not truly alter Duhem’s assessment. They admitted that Guidobaldo’s work contributed to the advance of modern science, since he was one of the most influential promoters of a mathematical approach to nature and most importantly an early supporter of Galileo, but they still stressed the many steps he was unable to take which “he would otherwise have been quite capable of making”. It is clear that these negative evaluations of Guidobaldo’s mechanical writings are based on a particular historiographical position that favours the vantage point of ‘classical’ mechanics as a norm by which to judge earlier approaches. Accordingly, it is not surprising that in more recent literature we find important amendments to this picture. By focusing more closely on Guidobaldo’s own interests and predicament, these writers have stressed the social position from which he was working, the philosophical and scientific agendas he was pursuing, and especially the interplay between these elements. As a result, we are beginning to have a more nuanced understanding of the reasons why Guidobaldo’s mechanics has some of the particular characteristics for which he was so severely criticized by earlier writers. Much of the (admittedly not very numerous) writings on Guidobaldo’s mechanics have been organized around the historiographical categories of scientific traditions or schools. Drake influentially but controversially distinguished two sixteenth-century Italian schools of mechanics: a Northern group, “conspicuously interested in practical aspects of mechanics”, and a Central Italian group that “concentrated its interest on works of classical antiquity and on the rigorous application of mathematics to mechanics”. While not questioning the difference in outlook between these groups of mathematicians, Mario Biagioli has tried to “uncover the more complex social dimensions of the interaction of these two ‘schools’ and of their quite different conceptual styles”. Enrico Gamba and Vico Montebelli take a step further in thoroughly investigating the characteristics and context of the Central Italian group, which was