AN EARLY-MODERN MATHEMATICIAN Between Raphael and Galileo: Mutio Oddi and the Mathematical Culture of Late Renaissance Italy. Alexander Marr (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 201 1). Pp. 348. $45. ISBN 978-0-226-50628-9.The perhaps unlikely hero of Alexander Marr's well-written and lavishly illustrated book is Mutio Oddi (1569-1639). Hitherto Oddi has been a side-figure for historians of the mathematical culture of the early period. Rose in his classic Italian renaissance of (1975) only mentions him in passing and one might be afraid that such a figure would be crushed between Raphael and Galileo. However, this does not happen. Rather, Marr brilliantly uses Oddi as a microhistorical mirror to show us the material and cultural side of the early mathematical sciences.Oddi was deeply rooted in the Urbino school and culture of mathematics; among his teachers were both the painter Federico Barocci (e. 1535-1612) and the mathematician Guidobaldo del Monte (1545-1607). His veneration for Federico Commandino 's classical style of and his close connections to the Urbino workshop of mathematical instruments are only two facets of his broad spectrum of interests and activities. In 1596 he was appointed court architect for the Duke of Urbino. After his fall from grace in 1605, followed by four years of incarceration, he went to Milan in 1609 where he worked as a tutor and public lecturer. There he also published treatises on dialling and surveying and traded in mathematical instruments before moving to Lucca as chief fortifications engineer to the Republic of Lucca in 1625. In 1636 Oddi was allowed to return to Urbino. His career was of very mixed nature, but not untypical for mathematicians of the time. His interests, too, were, as it may seem to us, very broad: he taught the mathematical sciences and wrote on practical mathematics, he was an architect and fortifications engineer, he served as an instrument broker and was an art collector, he was a courtier and employee of a republic. However, as Marr convincingly argues, it was just this blend that so characterizes the period, when oscillation between the mathematical sciences and material culture was standard. It is the close link between this material culture and the more scholarly aspects of the mathematical sciences that especially interests Marr, an art historian. Thus he sketches an image of as not just a scientific, but also a cultural field, where conflicting epistemologies were omnipresent in Oddi's happy marriage of a conservative Aristotelian attitude with a modern celebration of the material culture of mathematics (p. …