On the occasion of the 400 th anniversary of the publication of Galileo Galilei's Saggiatore (The Assayer), the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and Museo Galileo are organizing an international conference at the Accademia dei Lincei from October 23-25, 2023.
One of Galileo's most significant works saw the light in 1623 under the banner of the academic lynx. Dedicated to the vice-prince of the Lincei, Virginio Cesarini, and offered as an augural gift to the newly elected new pope Urban VIII, Il Saggiatore marked the Tuscan scientist's direct intervention in the lively controversy over the interpretation of comets that had ploughed the skies of Europe between 1618 and 1619. The work radically contested the foundations of scholastic philosophy on which the Jesuit's arguments rested, to which Galileo countered his own conception of a nature organized on the basis of rigorous mathematical principles that admit no exceptions.
The conference, which is the result of a collaboration between the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and Museo Galileo, aims to return to those epochal discussions, favouring the context in which they took place and focusing on the role played there by Federico Cesi and the members of the first Lincean Academy at the time of its greatest influence.
-
Useful linksRelated resources