3. Italy Again: Galileo. With Soto, the conceptual
development of medieval mechanics reached its term.
What was needed was an explicit concern with meas-
urement and experimentation to complement the
mathematical reasoning that had been developed along
“calculatory” and Archimedean lines. This final devel-
opment took place in northern Italy, again mainly at
Padua, while Galileo was teaching there. The stage was
set by works of considerable mathematical sophis-
tication, under the inspiration of Archimedes, by six-
teenth-century authors such as Geronimo Cardano,
Nicolo Tartaglia, and Giovanni Battista Benedetti. Also
the technical arts had gradually been perfected, and
materials were at hand from which instruments and
experimental apparatus could be constructed.
The person of Galileo provided the catalyst and the
genius to coordinate these elements and educe from
them a new kind of synthesis that would reach perfec-
tion with Isaac Newton. Galileo received his early
university training at Pisa around 1584, where his
student notebooks (Juvenilia) reveal an acquaintance
with many Schoolmen, including Soto, an edition of
whose Physics appeared at Venice in 1582. Galileo used
their terminology in an early treatise On Motion (De
motu), and only gradually departed from it. His teacher
at Pisa, Francesco Buonamici, himself a classical Aris-
totelian, seemingly gave a muddled account of the
medieval tradition, and it is difficult to know how well
Galileo understood what was presented. Actually this
matters little; what is important is that the ideas that
contributed to the developing science of mechanics
were at hand for himself or another to use. Classical
science did not spring perfect and complete, as Athena
from the head of Zeus, from the mind of Galileo or
any of his contemporaries. When it did arrive, it was
a revolution, and no one can deny this, but it was a
revolution preceded by a strenuous effort of thought.
The genesis of that thought makes an absorbing, if little
known, chapter in the history of ideas.
