Teofilo Gallaccini. Selected writings and library

This volume offers a selection of inedited writings by the Sienese polymath Teofilo Gallaccini (1564-1641). Author of over forty manuscript works - literary, historical, artistic and architectural, scientific and medical - his oeuvre, located on the cusp between the Renaissance and Baroque or, seen from a different perspective, on the eve of the Scientific Revolution, has remained largely inaccessible in print. The inedited texts included in this volume were therefore selected to illustrate both the variety and interconnectedness of his thought: the Monade celeste, a text on astronomy and a splendid example of learning applied to a contemporary topic of great moment; his commentary on John Dee's Monas hieroglyphica;
his drawn commentary on Sebastiano Serlio's Books III and IV; and finally a selection of his academic lectures covering the full range of topics that attracted him from geology to astronomy, mathematics to fortifications, art theory to architecture and that were delivered during the nearly five decades of his membership in the Accademia dei Filomati in Siena. The volume also contains the reconstruction of Gallaccini's library, his most cherished working 'instrument'.